Trollope and the Magazines: Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian Britain

Trollope and the Magazines Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian Britain

Mark W. Turner

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TROLLOPE AND THE MAGAZINES

10.1057/9780230288546 - Trollope and the Magazines, Mark Turner

Also by Mark W. Turner

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FROM AUTHOR TO TEXT: Re-reading George Eliot's Romola (co-editor with Caroline Levine)

10.1057/9780230288546 - Trollope and the Magazines, Mark Turner

Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian Britain Mark W. Turner

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Trollope and the Magazines

PA

First published in Great Britain 2000 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

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First published in the United States of America 2000 by

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ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0-312-22176-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Turner, Mark W. Trollope and the magazines : gendered issues in mid-Victorian Britain / Mark W. Turner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-312-22176-2 1. Trollope, Anthony, 1815-1882 —Political and social views. 2. Periodicals, Publishing of—England—History— 19th century. 3. Trollope, Anthony, 1815-1882—Relations with publishers. 4. Literature and society—England—History— 19th century. 5. Literature publishing—England—History— 19th century. 6. Serial publication of books—History — 19th century. 7. Social problems in literature. 8. Sex role in literature. I. Title. PR5688.P6T87 1999 823\8-dc21 98-55438 CIP

© Mark W. Turner 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 09 08

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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For my parents, and in memory of Joe Walsh

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List of Abbreviations

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

List of Illustrations

xi

1 2 3 4

5

Introduction: Trollope in the 1990s

1

Domestic Ideology and Gendered Space in Cornhill Magazine

7

Uncovering Periodical Identities: Good Words and the Rejection of Rachel Ray

48

Launching a Hybrid: The Belton Estate in the Fortnightly Review

92

Transitions: Phineas Finn and Masculinity in Saint Pauls Magazine

141

The Editor as Predator in Saint Pauls Magazine

183

Conclusion: Towards a Cultural Critique of Victorian Periodicals

227

Appendices

241

Bibliography

243

Index

259

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Contents

A Letters

Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography The Letters of Anthony Trollope, 2 vols, ed. N. John Hall Wellesley Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 5 vols, ed. Walter Houghton Full details of these works appear in the Bibliography. Note that I usually refer to Trollope's fiction in its periodical form (novel chapter, periodical volume, and page number) rather than subsequent book editions.

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Abbreviations

I was introduced to the fiction of Anthony Trollope by Mary Saunders, under whose tutelage I read through the Barchester novels as an undergraduate. Her enthusiasm became my addiction, for which many thanks. I began this project on Trollope and magazines at Birkbeck College, University of London, working with Laurel Brake, whose research into the nineteenth-century press remains a model for my own and whose tremendously sharp critical eye helped to improve my own thinking about nineteenthcentury cultural production and gendered issues. Thanks to her for her example and friendship. The Postgraduate Theory Seminar at Birkbeck College was important in helping me think through some of the theoretical issues with which my study engages. John Sutherland, Joanne Shattock, and Michael Slater made helpful suggestions, and Linda K. Hughes read parts of several chapters and her comments always led to improvements. The Department of English at Roehampton Institute has been a congenial and supportive place in which to finish the manuscript and to discuss ideas offered here. Jane Pringle and Ishtla Singh at Roehampton were invaluable in offering computing advice when producing the final manuscript. I gratefully acknowledge the many conversations (and cups of coffee) in the company of Caterina Albano, Gill Gregory, Julian Sheather, and Caroline Levine. Caroline, in addition to being a model of intellectual liveliness, is a wonderful colleague and collaborator, and an even more wonderful friend. Other friends who have been supportive over a number of years include Ella Bennett, Tim Burton, Neil Constable, Julian Cowley, Carter Foster, Erik Friedly, Michaela Giebelhausen, Chris Goodhart, Elaine Huxley, Nicole Pohl and Rebecca Wilson. Joe Clement was very important personally in the final stages of this project. This study could not have been completed without the loving support of Corin Bennett, whose generosity and understanding (and proofreading) enabled me throughout. My work was only made viable through the support of my parents, who made this project much less a struggle than it might have been, and to whom this book is happily dedicated. To them my debt is greatest. IX

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgemen ts

I wish to acknowledge the support of a number of institutions, which have helped in different ways. For research materials, I wish to thank the following: Birkbeck College Library, Bodleian Library, British Library, Library of Congress, Michigan State University Library, New York Public Library, Reform Club Library and University of London Library. The Department of English at Birkbeck College, the Department of Literary Studies at University of Luton, and the Research Centre and the Department of English at Roehampton Institute London all provided me with funds to deliver conference papers based on my research. The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals conferences provided a stimulating forum to discuss many of the issues presented here, and a congenial way to tap into the network of others working in the field. My thanks to the British Library for permission to reproduce the illustrations in Chapters 2 and 4. Versions of some of the chapters here have appeared previously in different forms, as articles or chapters in books. My thanks to the publications and editors for permission to reprint from the following: 'Gendered Issues: Intertextuality in The Small House at Allington in Cornhill Magazine, Victorian Periodicals Review 26:4 (Winter 1993), 228-34. 'Towards a Cultural Critique of Victorian Periodicals', Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History, 1995 Annual, 111-26. 'Hybrid Journalism: Women and the Progressive Fortnightly, in Reading Journalism and Literature: New Perspectives on Gender, Modernity and Modernism, ed. Kate Campbell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming). 'Saint Pauls Magazine and the Project of Masculinity 7 , in NineteenthCentury Media and the Construction of Identities, ed. Laurel Brake, Bill Bell and David Finkelstein (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, forthcoming).

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X

1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 4.1

'Will His Eyes Open?', Cornhill Magazine (July 1863) 'Manoli', Cornhill Magazine (September 1862) Cover of Good Words (January 1860) Advertisement for Good Words (January 1861) Frontispiece to The Leisure Hour Cover of The Christian Guest (May 1859) Cover of Good Words (February 1860) Cover of Good Words (January 1861) Advertisement for Saint Pauls Magazine

XI

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32 33 60 61 65 69 82 83 143

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Illustrations

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The 1990s in Britain has proved an interesting cultural moment to be studying the work of Anthony Trollope. His novels appear to be more popular now than ever before, and a great deal of interest has been taken in his life. No fewer than four biographies have been published in roughly a decade, each emphasizing various aspects of the popular Victorian's work, each producing a slightly different version of the man. Trollope's entire oeuvre is being republished in a uniform series by Penguin, and other publishers are rushing to print his most popular novels. The large and influential Trollope Society has a project under way to republish all of his novels in hardback form by the year 2000, and their efforts to promote the author have led to a Trollope plaque in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey When the former Prime Minister John Major announced on a popular British radio programme his love of Trollope and especially of Lily Dale (with numerous dutiful ministers following suit), it seemed that Trollope's place as a cultural icon of the establishment was secured. In many ways, Trollope has been taken up for what is loosely termed Victorian values. Just what those values are is difficult to define, as anyone who has seriously studied the period will determine. But it must be acknowledged that, at least popularly, there is a prevalent conservative version of Trollope in the 1990s. Conservative readings of his work fit neatly into a heritage version of Britain which constructs an imaginary past of green hills and rural comfort, an image promulgated in the numerous films and novels in recent years which reconstruct Britain's past in particular ways. It is perhaps not surprising that at a time when rural sporting pastimes such as foxhunting are violently opposed in the Home Counties, Trollope seemingly represents an era when the countryside could manage its own affairs. On the surface, many of Trollope's contemporaries who are still widely read do not offer the same comfortable image of town and country. For example, Dickens's novels do not typically provide the reassurances 1 10.1057/9780230288546 - Trollope and the Magazines, Mark Turner

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Introduction: Trollope in the 1990s

Trollope and the Magazines

of a Trollope text, since Dickens takes pains to articulate the effects of industrialism in cities and in the lower classes. Trollope, for a fin-de-siecle, multi-cultural Britain searching for a coherent national identity, represents a golden age of Victorian optimism. Scholars, however, have not necessarily shared this view of Trollope's conservatism. In 1992, in an article in Literature Interpretation Theory, several authors of important full-length studies of Trollope were asked to consider how they would approach his works now, given 'the newer trends of theory and criticism'. 1 James Kincaid declares that he would 'try to deconstruct the liberal position I took then, the liberal position and its formal extensions into the discussions of the novels' (176). Ruth apRoberts claims she would 'lean on Bakhtin', asserting that 'Trollope is the most Bakhtinian of the Victorians' (178). Robert Polhemus, too, considers that Trollope is 'positively Bakhtinian and even neo-Bakhtinian' (184). Juliet McMaster, recognizing Trollope's nuanced depictions of character, believes 'characters who are so busy constructing themselves almost cry out for deconstruction' (179). Robert Tracy deems Trollope 'a prime candidate for critical attention in terms of the Barthes-Foucault notion of ecriture: writing that attains an impersonal objective existence of its own, ind e p e n d e n t of author or circumstance' (181). John Halperin rejects the usefulness of 'French post-structuralism of the last two decades' but accepts that feminist criticism offers ways of understanding the vexed question of Trollope's position on the single woman. This exercise in returning to the Trollope critics is revealing, not least because they all are eager to engage with contemporary theoretical thinking - deconstruction, feminism, new historicism, Marxism - in re-evaluating an author embraced by a conservative establishment. In the chapters that follow, I engage with a number of theoretical debates while rethinking Trollope's fiction in the context of periodicals. This study is not only (or even primarily) about Trollope; it is not a traditional single author study While Trollope is the figure that in some sense unifies my discussion of middleclass periodicals in the 1860s, I am not concerned to make broad claims about the author's oeuvre. Most full-length studies of Trollope - including those of the critics above - are involved in strictly author-based criticism. Even an estimable study of Trollope's serial fiction, Writing by Numbers by Mary Hamer, narrowly focuses on the author's writing method without considering other ways of

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2

3

discussing fiction in parts. 2 By contrast, I use Trollope as a case study which grounds a theoretical consideration of the periodical as a cultural form within the broadly defined fields of literary and cultural criticism. While Trollope studies and our understanding of his fiction are a focus, my work can equally be seen in other discourses around gender, nineteenth-century print culture, media history and current debates about the nature of English studies broadly. One consequence of studying Trollope's serials in the context of periodicals is that the single author often disappears in chapters. However, my remit is to study not the single author or the single work exclusively, rather the relationship between author, serial, periodical and literary culture generally. This requires a certain amount of juggling; therefore, chapters move from discussions of individual serial parts, articles and single periodical issues to discussions of broader cultural issues in other periodicals and texts. Sometimes this creates tensions and gaps in chapters, but such disruptions are in the spirit of periodical literature, in which seams expose the nature of the work. What links (if not unifies) my study of Cornhill, Good Words, the Fortnightly Review, and Saint Pauls, is Trollope, but I am concerned primarily to explore the cultural discourses with which his serializations are engaged and the ways these discourses circulate within the periodical text. Trollope and the Magazines is not a comprehensive overview of literary periodicals in the 1860s, nor is it an attempt to discuss all of the magazines with which Trollope was associated. One of the approaches in periodical studies in the past has been to try to get hold of a stable archive, to provide an encyclopaedic range of knowledge about Victorian periodicals. The results of such work - for example, the invaluable Wellesley Index - have benefited scholars immeasurably. However, I am not writing a history of magazines and I am not concerned to document all of Trollope's interventions in the magazine marketplace; rather, I focus on a range of different periodicals for which he contributed, in order to show the ways cultural debates in and around the magazines enliven and enlighten our reading of his fiction. I borrow from various theoretical methods - from cultural materialist to recent media theories - to indicate the numerous ways in which periodical literature can be fruitfully considered. My point is to open out the study of periodicals, to argue for the

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Introduction

Trollope and the Magazines

richness of this literature as a site for a range of critical thinking, to suggest to readers of Victorian fiction the need to consider the materiality of the text and context. Chapter 1 introduces two different ways of approaching a periodical text. In the first part of the chapter, I look at The Small House at Allington in Cornhill and consider differing conceptions of the domestic ideology of gendered spheres in a single number of the magazine. How is the single woman constructed differently by Trollope and in Cornhill non-fiction? How does it relate to the magazine's manifesto to present non-controversial family reading, and how does it relate to discussions of single women outside the text? I go on to discuss the way that gendered space within the magazine is constructed by the non-fiction, which is written by a core group of men. Chapter 2 considers a serialization that never was. Rachel Ray was intended to be published in the popular monthly Good Words, a magazine that patterned itself on Cornhill but was cheaper and more religious. However, despite widespread advertising heralding Trollope's upcoming serial, Rachel Ray was rejected. I argue that the novel had to be sacrificed because of the difficulty the magazine was having in establishing its own identity. Good Words was not in a strong enough position to hold off the Evangelical protests which accompanied the thought of a Trollope serial in a religious magazine. In Chapter 3, I continue to consider periodical identity in my discussion of the radical Fortnightly Review. The periodical was a hybrid of Review journalism and popular magazine elements. The tone of the magazine was partly defined by the all-male Positivists who largely guided the magazine's nonfiction. I argue that Trollope's serial The Belton Estate was an (unsuccessful) bid for women readers, engaging in women's reform issues which the non-fiction almost completely ignores. I also discuss the magazine's primary legacy to mid-Victorian periodicals - signed journalism - and show how the question 'to sign, or not to sign' (as one periodical put it) can be seen in the context of the rise of the celebrity author, the star. Chapters 4 and 5 examine Saint Pauls Magazine, edited for three years by Trollope at the end of the 1860s. In a competitive shilling monthly market which appeals to the family reader, Trollope seems largely to target male readers. He wanted to edit a political magazine, and his fiction and non-fiction indicate that his focus was on male subjects and male readers. The inaugural serial, Phineas Finn, was Trollope's first overtly parliamentary novel, and I read

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5

it as a male Bildungsroman; this preoccupation with male subjects continues in the story series, 'An Editor's Tales', and in the supplement, Ralph the Heir. I also consider how Trollope uses the periodical to generate books and how the ambiguous functions of author and editor are negotiated and defined. I have limited my discussion of Trollope and periodicals to the 1860s for a number of reasons. In 1860, Trollope returned to London from Ireland, and his first serialization, Framley Parsonage, launched the Cornhill Magazine. Cornhill essentially defined and opened up a new periodicals market in Britain - the middle-class family market. These readers, together with the circulating-library readers (and the two were not necessarily different), formed the bulk of Trollope's audience. In the 1860s Trollope's position as a market leader continually grew and he perhaps reached his peak of popularity in this decade, publishing in family magazines, political reviews, and religious periodicals. Certainly, in the 1870s, he was earning less money from his serials and was less enthusiastically received by critics. The reasons why Trollope's popularity in the periodicals market declined are worth rethinking, but could form a separate and distinct full-length study At the end of the 1860s, in the context of a saturated shilling monthly market and after numerous years of experience in a variety of periodicals, Trollope edited his own magazine. It was a watershed moment for Trollope, and it was a particularly interesting moment for a new shilling monthly trying to define itself in a glutted market. The 1860s, then, provides a full and varied period in which to consider Trollope's movements in the periodicals market and to explore developments in middle-class periodical culture generally. I pick u p Trollope's story in the network of magazine publishing at a time when he was consolidating his position in the system, and I leave him at the point when his presence in that market (as editor and contributor) was greatest. As I have stressed, Trollope and the Magazines is not simply a study of Trollope. I hope to encourage readers to go back to the periodicals and to consider exactly what it means to read fiction in this specific context. In my conclusion, I pull together a number of the theoretical questions which arise in the study of serial fiction and periodical literature. First, I map out, in a general way, the field of periodical studies, an expanding and exciting interdisciplinary field which borrows from literary criticism, history, media studies and other disciplines. As the title of my conclusion

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Introduction

Trollope and the Magazines

suggests, this book is not presented as the final word on how to study periodical literature. Rather than provide a rigid model for working with Victorian periodicals, I indicate some of the problems I have had to consider and the ways I have sought to address questions around issues such as collective authorship, textual plurality, and cultural production. Part of what makes working with Victorian periodicals so lively and challenging are the difficult questions one must pose - about the nature of reading and production, for example. In my Conclusion, I suggest some of the ways we might consider such questions. One of the joys in writing about Trollope and Victorian magazines in the 1990s has been in watching the field of periodical studies grow into a lively and interdisciplinary field of study. I hope that Trollope and the Magazines complements the interesting work being written on a range of issues in the nineteenth-century press and adds to our understanding of the vast literature of Victorian periodicals.

Notes 1. N. John Hall, James R. Kincaid, Ruth apRoberts, Juliet McMaster, Robert Tracy, Robert M. Polhemus, and John Halperin, 'Trollopians Reduces/ Literature Interpretation Theory 3:3 (1992), 175. Further references to this article are noted parenthetically in the text. 2. Other critics have noted the tendency of Trollope critics to make general claims about the whole of his work. See Walter Kendrick, The NovelMachine: The Theory and Fiction of Anthony Trollope (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), xi: the usual method of criticizing Trollope involves 'surveying the whole of his work a novel at a time, saying a little about every novel and always too little about each/ Note that some subsequent studies have tried to narrow the focus; for example, see Stephen Wall, Trollope and Character (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988), which emphasizes the importance of the two series.

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6

Domestic Ideology and Gendered Space in Cornhill Magazine One of the ways we can begin to appreciate the complexity of serial literature is to focus on the relationship between the serial novel and the periodical. Such an approach poses its own set of questions: what are some of the ways we might read the fiction both as an integral part of the magazine and as only one element of the single magazine issue rubbing up against all of the other contributions? How do the articles and fiction in a magazine intersect with cultural debates outside the magazine? How does the magazine carve out its own identity - create its niche market - from the other literary magazines and texts continually in circulation? I assume that intertextuality is the most useful methodological approach to help us understand the intersections and overlappings which occur within and across magazines. This suggests that periodicals are essentially dialogic literary texts. Serialization, in which only a small part of a larger text is put into play alongside all sorts of different texts, provides the opportunity to see how debates and discourses within a periodical reverberate in the wider cultural world outside the magazine. In this chapter, I want to consider two ways of reading the periodical which point to the importance of intertextuality in reading magazine literature. Firstly, I read closely a single issue of Cornhill Magazine and consider the ways we might read an instalment of Trollope's The Small House at Allington in relation to other contributions in the same issue, and in relation to other cultural material outside the magazine. Secondly, I focus on the non-fiction contributions in Cornhill during the early years of the magazine in the 1860s, when The Small House was being serialized, and I suggest that the non-fiction, written by a core of male writers, 7 10.1057/9780230288546 - Trollope and the Magazines, Mark Turner

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8

Trollope and the Magazines

TROLLOPE IN CORNHILL The Small House at Allington was serialized in Cornhill Magazine between September 1862 and April 1864. Trollope began the manuscript written for the 20-part serial form in May of 1862 and had completed it in February 1863. The serialization appeared six months after his novel The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson, also serialized in Cornhill, and just before the last part-issue of Orley Farm.1 Trollope received £2500 from CornhilVs publisher George Smith, two and a half times what he received for Framley Parsonage only two years before, a mark of both the marketconsecrated a u t h o r ' s popularity and Smith's generosity and business acumen. 2 The Small Llouse continued the mutually beneficial relationship between the author and the periodical begun by Trollope's Framley Parsonage success which inaugurated the magazine in 1860 under Thackeray's editorship. Although not all of Trollope's novels in the early 1860s were equally successful, they remained continually in print. 3 All of Trollope's novels after Framley Parsonage were conceived of and written in serial parts, so his method of writing serials should be integral when considering the publication details of any of his works. His writing habits were first revealed publicly in his posthumously published Autobiography (1883) and have been commented upon extensively ever since. He would write for three hours each morning at a pace of 250 words per quarter-hour, a process which he guessed would produce three full triple-deckers in a year had he not other writing and rereading to slow his pace. As it was, he was able to produce a backlog of at least one novel, sometimes as many as three, awaiting publication (A 272-3). Trollope kept his day job at the Post Office until 1867, but his rapid method of production points to a writer who regarded his art as a full profession open to men, a viewpoint less acceptable for men during the early decades of the century. As Gaye Tuchman argues in Edging Women Out, 'before 1840 at least half of all novelists

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speaks largely to a male readership despite the open intentions of the magazine when it was founded. Overall, I am interested in the ways gender is conceptualized by reading an instalment of a novel in a single issue, and in the ways textual space is demarcated by and in the circulating discourses of the magazine.

9

were women; by 1917 most high-culture novelists were men.' 4 She refers to the period 1840-79 as 'the period of invasion' when the novel was revalued by men as a legitimate form of culture. Increasingly throughout this period, as fiction attracted status, more men became novelists, and with new publishing technology controlled by men, the business of the novel was redefined by men (such as Trollope) as a male profession. 5 Trollope's meticulous writing diaries and method of production attest to how seriously he regarded novel writing as a profession, and it was precisely this very businesslike approach to his fiction that led detractors after the publication of the posthumous Autobiography to devalue his writing as unartistic. Like all good realists, Trollope claimed that 'a vast proportion of the teaching of the day' could be found in the pages of novels, and he insisted that novelists appreciate the 'excellence of their calling' (A 217, 220). A professional attitude and writing method place him at the very centre of a publishing industry whose interests in writing were increasingly associated with mass production and mass sales. After all, the phenomenon of serialization in the nineteenth century was partly conceived of as a marketing plan to sell the expensive three-volume novel in large numbers to the circulating libraries: there is a commercial system, then, which links the serial, the book form, the circulating library and the subscriber-reader. Between the covers of all midcentury novels and periodicals lurk the businessmen of the circulating library and publishing giants: fiction and finance were intricately interwoven at mid-century (not for the first time, of course), and Trollope's Autobiography bears witness to the life of a professional writer within a revolutionizing and increasingly competitive culture industry 6 Trollope began using the serial part to organize the production of his novels at the same time that he became associated with Cornhill late in 1859. He published his last Cornhill serialization beginning in 1866 but never abandoned serialization as a creative and organizing principle. During the first half of the 1860s, he was still learning how to manage the constraints and realize the possibilities inherent in serial writing; this decade found him gradually mastering the serial form and enjoying the period of his greatest popularity. 7 The implications of such a situation are significant: he gained control over and managed subtlety in his multi-plot structures, and he satisfied his personal need for public

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Domestic Ideology and Gendered Space

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acceptance so obvious in the Autobiography. Neither of these would have been possible without the sort of relationship the author enjoyed with Cornhill and its huge readership. The importance of Trollope's association with Cornhill should not be underestimated. He submitted Framley Parsonage at a time when he was planning a move from Ireland back to London, acting on his belief that a novelist 'ought to live within the reach of the publishers, the clubs, and the dinner parties of the metropolis' (A 132). George Smith's jovial, club-like dinners for Cornhill contributors offered an entree into the literary culture which Trollope so coveted. 8 However, Smith had as much reason for thanks as Trollope since it was largely Framley Parsonage which secured the legendary early circulation figures for the magazine. As John Hall recognizes, there was an interdependent relationship between Smith and Trollope in the early years of magazine. 9 In May 1859, three years before the serialization of the Small House, Trollope was regarded as the most popular writer of his day by E.S. Dallas at The Times, who (in something of a backhanded complement) called him 'the most successful author - that is to say, of the circulating library sort.' 10 Orley Farm, Brown, Jones and Robinson, The Small House, North America, Tales of All Countries (second series), Rachel Ray, and Can You Forgive Her? - all of these overlapped either in book or serial form between 1862 and 1864. n Dallas's comment, therefore, might be equally applicable in the autumn of 1862, when the story of Lily Dale was beginning to unfold in Cornhill. Why such a special Trollope-Cornfo'// relationship should appear and the reasons for its popular appeal with the circulating library reader need to be explained. Thackeray's open letter to potential contributors in November 1859 describes what he and Smith had envisioned for the new periodical: . . . fiction of course must form a part, but only a part, of our entertainment. We want, on the other hand, as much reality as possible - discussion and narrative of events interesting to the public, personal adventures and observations, familiar reports of scientific discovery, description of Social Institutions - quicuid agunt homines - a 'Great Eastern/ a battle in China, a RaceCourse, a popular Preacher - there is hardly any subject we don't want to hear about, from lettered and instructed men who are competent to speak on it.12

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Thackeray is keen here to emphasize that his literary magazine would not be dominated by fiction, and in a letter to Trollope a few days earlier, he says 'one of our chief objects in this magazine is the getting out of novel spinning, and back into the real world'. 13 The 'real world' is presumed by Thackeray to be defined through the non-fiction articles which were predominantly written by men. But the editor-novelist modifies what is to be Cornhill's construction of reality later in the open letter: If our friends have good manners, a good education, and write in good English, the company, I am sure, will be all the better pleased; and the guests, whatever their rank, age, sex be, will be glad to be addressed by well-educated gentlemen and women. . . . There are points on which agreement is impossible, and on these we need not touch. At our social table, we shall suppose the ladies and children always present; we shall not set u p rival politicians by the ears; we shall listen to every guest who has an apt word to say; and, I hope, induce clergymen of various denominations to say grace in their turn. 14 And Leonard Huxley, writing in the Cornhill in 1922, affirmed how the magazine 'stood aside from current politics, bookreviewing, ephemeral topics, the clash of controversial opinion and such, along with theology'. 1 5 The discussion of reality Thackeray hopes to induce is intended to be void of controversy - no political or religious partisanship - and caters to particular and unmistakably class- and gender-specific assumptions. And it was Thackeray's own Roundabout Papers which set the magazine's gentlemanly tone. 16 Cornhill's 'real world', as denned by Thackeray's open letter to contributors, was limited and specific, and what is absent in the magazine indicates an editorial policy. Reality, then, was a construct within the periodical's pages, defined and regulated by a type of censorship. When Trollope comments in his Autobiography on the virtues of Framley Parsonage it is the lifelike quality of Mary Robarts that he highlights, and, indeed, it was his true-to-life representations that would continually interest his contemporaries. 17 But even Trollope, along with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and John Ruskin, were censured under Cornhill's code of morally sound reality during Thackeray's two and a half years.18 The editorial outlook largely guided the magazine long after Thackeray's resignation in March 1862, although his shadow was

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longer than declining circulation figures might merit. 19 Preconceptions in Cornhill contributions, like the particular definition of 'reality', need to be kept in mind when examining closely the contents of a particular issue or the periodical as a whole. On becoming editor in 1871, Leslie Stephen wrote in a letter, 'what can one make of a magazine which excludes the only subjects in which reasonable men take any interest; politics and religion'. 20 Stephen was reacting to the Thackeray legacy of noncontroversial contributions, but his comment also demarcates the boundaries of a magazine defined by constructions of gendered reading. The absence of overtly male subjects like politics and religion in effect privileged women readers, and women's reading regulated Cornhill contributions, in so far as anything deemed unsuitable for women would not be published. Thackeray is explicit in his wish that Cornhill be suitable for women and children 'always present', and thereby a family magazine. Cornhill's version of reality constructed female readers and female reading (along with male readers and reading), and the contents of each issue were restricted accordingly. Choosing Cornhill contributions to suit a female audience, the editors were defining the magazine according to gender, and the exclusion of politics and religion was, in a sense, an emasculation. Although many articles published were specifically aimed at men and written within a male discourse, none approached a serious discussion of theological or political ideas controversial to the reader in the way the heavy quarterlies or even a monthly like Blackwood's might. Cornhill, the most successful of the new shilling monthlies, participated in defining a new periodical literature in Britain - the middle-class family shilling monthly - demarcated by gendered boundaries, but family periodicals were also guided by their role in the larger publishing industry. Cornhill fiction like Trollope's, so popular at Mudie's and the other circulating libraries, was destined for the drawing-room for all eyes to see. However, the prerequisite for drawing-room fiction was morality as defined by men like Mr. Mudie. Reacting to the tyranny of the circulating libraries, George Moore writes in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1884 that at the head . . . of English literature, sits a tradesman, who considers himself qualified to decide the most delicate artistic question that may be raised, and who crushes out of sight any artistic aspiration he may deem pernicious. 21

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Men like Mudie could denounce a new novel, as happened to George Moore, and thereby severely limit its readership and sales. For a publisher to realize a profit on a new three-volume novel, it had to sell large numbers to the circulating libraries, and publishers depended on the libraries to buy the expensive triple-deckers before cheap editions of novels were published. Serialization in magazines like Cornhill was advance advertising for new novels; however, serialized novels destined for the libraries had to adhere to Mudie's moral code. Businessmen like Mudie, at least indirectly, influenced the content of serialized novels in middle-class family magazines aimed at the circulating-library audience. Trollope's Cornhill fiction fits comfortably into such a publishing system, but much of Cornhill's domestic fiction was precisely what writers like Moore and others a generation later would react against so strongly. Again in the Pall Mall article, Moore laments that English literature was so limited in its subjects by the moral imposition of the libraries: 'What is nature but religion and morals? and the circulating library forbids discussion on such subjects.' The subtraction of these two important elements of life throws the reading of fiction into the hands of young girls and widows of sedentary habits; for them political questions have no interest, and it is by this final amputation that humanity becomes headless, trunkless, limbless, and is converted into the pulseless, non-vertebrate jelly-fish sort of thing which . . . is sent from the London depot and scattered t h r o u g h the drawing-rooms of the United Kingdom. 22 Moore genders fiction as female. He believes that men have been cut off, disembodied from literature because serious male subjects had been censored in fiction since at least mid-century. A novel like The Small House might have been objected to a generation later, it could be argued, because its appeal was perceived to have been primarily to female readers. The introduction of gender, then, is central when examining circulating-library fiction at mid-century, partly because the g e n d e r i n g of both magazines and novels defined a middle-class, popular literature that would be fervently opposed by the 1880s. Serialized between 1862-64, The Small House appeared in a periodical which followed the principles of Thackeray's editorial legacy: avoid controversy and assume a female reader. During

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this time, George Smith undertook responsibilities as editor, with G.H. Lewes and Frederick Greenwood as sub-editors. 23 The magazine maintained high standards in both fiction and essays, relying on a core of frequent male contributors. Random examinations of Cornhill issues during The Small House serialization show common class and gender positions. For example, the November 1862 issue (which will be discussed at length below) contains instalments of George Eliot's Romola, Trollope's Small House, Anne Ritchie's Story of Elizabeth, in addition to a 'Roundabout Paper', a travel article by Trollope, and non-fiction pieces on the use of tobacco, the life of professional thieves, the supply of Indian cotton, and the sensational case of a female murderer. The fiction is mostly domestic, with courtship and marriage plots; the non-fiction addresses a comfortable middle-class reader, one who would appreciate Trollope's comments about travelling to Holland or Francis Anstie's defence of the male indulgence, tobacco. In the July 1863 issue, we find similar concerns. Both Romola and The Small House continue, and articles range from professional etiquette to stage adaptations of Shakespeare. Another middle-class pleasure, food, is discussed, and we are warned that overeating by the wealthy may be as harmful as undereating among lower classes. There is a description of how amateur music is no longer confined to the upper classes and how performance is becoming part of the middle-class evening routine. The final instalment of The Small House in April 1864, appeared with Thackeray's Denis Duval and Frederick Greenwood's Margaret Denzil's History. One article gossips about royal christenings, another about hunting with the French emperor's hounds. One contributor dismisses biographies which have nothing pleasant to say, while Matthew Arnold distinguishes between pagan and Christian sentiment. The April 1864 issue is less cosy than the earliest Cornhills, but we see Thackeray's non-controversial editorial policy apparent in each issue; a watchful eye is cast to the female reader, and the tone is constructed to please and comfort, almost to pet, the middle classes. The fiction, poetry and non-fiction rarely rebuke the readership, and then only mildly, whereas middle-class ideological assumptions - about leisure, manners, marriage, class - are generally reinforced and perpetuated. Although there is a definite sense of homogeneity of intent in the contents, no periodical (indeed, no literary text) presents a wholly uncomplicated view of society Within the non-fiction and fiction, as we shall see below, there

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READING A SINGLE ISSUE To begin to unpack some of the ideological baggage within the periodical, it is useful first to examine a single periodical issue as text. I am not concerned here to provide a historical reconstruction of the Victorian serial-reading experience, although this method of reading across an issue inevitably raises questions about how contemporary readers would have approached magazines. We cannot presume, for example, that readers started at the beginning and read through an issue, front to back as one would read a book, and some contributions were more likely than others to be read depending upon the reader's gender; simply put, how we understand the larger text changes according to how the issue is read. Considering the arrangement of fiction and non-fiction in the November 1862 issue, we notice how evenly the two are interleaved. Until the turn of the century, and with few exceptions, serial fiction would remain the first entry in all Cornhill issues, even though the magazine was supposedly dominated by nonfiction. The same cannot be said of comparable magazines like Blackwood's and Macmillan's, which led with both fiction and nonfiction. The arrangement of the textual space and the whole physicality of an issue might also influence the reading of it, unlike the book, which generally presents only one way of reading. Although I am less interested in the problems of readers' responses than in the textual possibilities of reading periodicals, it has to be acknowledged that alongside the periodical number is a reader who can alter the text - by choosing what to read and in what order. It is necessary to draw out the implications of reading periodicals to understand how this essentially contextual approach to literature is part of the overall intertextuality within any given periodical issue. 24 Following the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva interprets his conception of the 'literary word' as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue

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was some space for discussion, if not vehement debate, of topical issues. And the role of intertextuality in the scene of periodical reading creates numerous individual readings which challenge any notion of unity in a single issue.

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The interaction between the various components of a given periodical number - whether that interaction creates contradiction, debate, tension, or cohesion - is integral to the way ideology is formed within the periodical press. The function of intertextuality in such a reading also relates to remarks by Michel Foucault pointing to ways we have traditionally delimited our understanding of literature - on approaches to 'the book' and 'the oeuvre'. 26 Using the periodical issue as text decentres traditional literary study, which has focused on reading the novel, for example, in continuum, that is, in book form. Such a tradition has privileged the position that novels are and ought to be read as books. The presumption that to read a novel means to read a book would be, for Foucault, a 'unity of discourse' which needs to be avoided: the frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network. 27 This by now familiar (but still provocative) poststructural assertion of the fallibility of the book becomes more significant if we accept that literature, like so many Victorian novels, is not always in the first instance published as a book. The Small House at Allington was gradually unfolding as a serial for two years before its twovolume publication, and the original serialized text ought to be as valid a form of study as the books which followed. But reading literature in magazine requires a different approach to the text. What changes when we look at literature in periodicals are the 'rules of formation' - the conditions of existence - within a given discourse, 28 in this case the single periodical issue. The issue is subject to other textual influences brought to it by the writer, the reader, and historical context. Within the space of the issue, the text becomes a literary collective of interacting components which depend on how the text is read: novel chapters may move into a travel article, a poem, a short story, a science article, etc. And as Bakhtin notes, within a single individual text (in this case, the novel),

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among several writings: that of the writer, the addressee (or the character) and the contemporary or earlier cultural context.25

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the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, between literature and non-literature and so forth are not laid up in heaven. Every specific situation is historical. And the growth of literature is not merely development and change within the fixed boundaries of any given definition; the boundaries themselves are constantly changing. 29 In the rest of this chapter and in the chapters that follow, I discuss both the individual text (an article, image, chapter, etc.) and the magazine as text (or, the text within a text), so the changing boundaries Bakhtin describes are especially relevant to the examination of periodical literature. In the end, I want to suggest a range of different approaches we might bring to bear on reading magazine literature. CORNHILL MAGAZINE (NOVEMBER 1862)30 Several critics have already demonstrated how the binary opposition of gendered space - woman/man, inner/outer, private/public, domestic/political, etc. - was constructed in literature from late in the eighteenth century through to the mid-nineteenth century. Nancy Armstrong argues that both male and female writers inscribed in domestic fiction a redefinition of sexual, and therefore social, relations to construct a politically powerful gendered space. 31 Mary Poovey discusses how gendered spheres were constructed ideologically within many discourses 'intimately involved in the development of England's characteristic social institutions, the organization of its most basic economic and legal relations, and in the rationalization of its imperial ambitions'. 32 Marriage was increasingly seen as a moral safeguard and the domestic hearth as the centre of stability. John Ruskin, writing in 1865, called the home 'the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt and division'. 33 Furthermore, gendered spheres helped delineate class boundaries and create an identity for the middle classes specifically; in this way, the family ideal was used ideologically as a way of consolidating socio-political power. 34 Although there are a number of different, individual voices in the pages of our Cornhill issue, I would argue there is a common conceptualization of issues in terms of gendered spheres. By way of example, examination of

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an instalment from The Small House and an article by H.W. Holland can demonstrate how each participates in contemporary constructions of the domestic ideal. The contributions work intertextually within the magazine by supporting the ideologically gendered space, but also by introducing outside texts into the discussion, either directly or indirectly. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 of The Small House at Allington continue the courtship plots between the girls at the small house and the men staying at the great house. Lily Dale has become engaged to Adolphus Crosbie, a London man-about-town staying with his friend and Lily's cousin, Bernard Dale. The November instalment contrasts Lily's total dedication to Crosbie with his uncertainty about deciding to marry a country girl with no guaranteed fortune. Lily's doctrine of marriage is that, as a girl should never show any preference for a man till circumstances should have fully entitled him to such manifestation, so also should she make no drawback on her love, but pour it forth for his benefit with all her strength, when such circumstances had come to exist. But she was ever feeling that she was not acting up to her theory, now that the time for such practice had come. (ch. 7, 669) Lily's conventional view of love places all responsibility for declarations on the man, who is meant to be the initiator of love while the woman remains dormant until such desire is awoken in her. But once that passion has been set free, she may show it through fidelity and dedication. Lily's inability to follow her theory arises from her rightful belief that 'her lover was not all that he should be' (ch. 7, 667) in his attentions to her. Rather than acknowledge that the problem is Crosbie's and not hers, she blames herself in a long passage of self-deprecating doubt: 'I didn't behave well to h i m / she said to herself; 'I never do. I forget how much he is giving up for me; and then, when anything annoys him, I make it worse instead of comforting him.' And upon that she made accusation against herself that she did not love him half enough, - that she did not let him see how thoroughly and perfectly she loved him. (ch. 7, 669)

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Lily tortures herself because she thinks she is not acting as an engaged woman ought to do. She accuses herself when her theory of marriage fails, although the reader knows that it is Crosbie who second-guesses the domestic ideal offered by his engagement to Lily. The instalment opens with Bernard Dale, who hopes to wed Lily's sister Bell according to their uncle's wishes, expressing his total indifference to love and marriage, thereby threatening the code of social cohesion familiar to the Cornhill reader. 35 The following scene shows Crosbie doing the very same thing with regard to Lily; he is only willing to undergo the domestication of marriage if a substantial financial arrangement can be negotiated. Marriage is destructive in Crosbie's eyes, the ruin of his fashionable life as a London bachelor: Was he absolutely about to destroy all the good that he had done for himself throughout the past years of his hitherto successful life? . .. But there was the misery very plain. He must give u p clubs, and his fashion, and all that he had hitherto gained, and be content to live a plain, h u m d r u m , domestic life, with eight hundred a year, and a small house, full of babies. It was not the kind of Elysium for which he had tutored himself. (ch. 7, 668) The implied Cornhill reader coming to such an attack on the virtues of home and family would sympathize with Lily Dale. So taken with Lily's plight were contemporary readers that Trollope mentions how they continually wrote to him begging that Lily marry another suitor (A 179). The serialization of the novel over the following year and a half depicts how jilted Lily rejects the idea of ever marrying, and how Crosbie finds unhappiness in an aristocratic match. The comic resolution of marriage is denied to Lily, and apart from Bell's match with Dr. Crofts, the domestic ideal is continually thwarted. By the third instalment in November, we already see 'the beginning of troubles', announced in the title to Chapter 7. The distinction between city and country, so central in all the Barchester novels, helps delineate gendered spheres: Lily-Country/ Crosbie-City, Country-Private/City-Public. James Kincaid sees the overriding pattern in all of the Barchester novels as an invasion

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by the city of the pastoral country, where the family ideal is nowhere stronger in Trollope's fiction.36 Although Trollope did not initially consider The Small House among the Barchester novels, some readers would have connected cameo appearances like Mr Harding's to the earlier texts and to Trollope's moral centre, located in the countryside of Barsetshire. The intertextual relationship between The Small House and its Barchester predecessors, especially the most recent Framley Parsonage, would have comforted the readers who thought they knew exactly what they would be getting. Readers' concern for Lily, who remains unmarried even in The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), illustrates their unease with the denial of the expected Barchester comic resolution. Contemporary readers would have seen Crosbie's rejection of the domestic ideal in terms of the ongoing debate over the position of unmarried women. In April 1862, W.R. Greg published an article entitled 'Why Are Women Redundant?' which describes society as diseased because of the existence of so many unmarried women. 37 Several ideological forces operate in Greg's essay, but of importance here is how Greg not only universalizes the domestic ideal but also elevates marriage as the raison d'etre in mid-century England. Describing the rules of Nature, he writes that by the sentiments which belong to all healthy and unsophisticated organisations even in our own complicated civilisation, marriage, the union of one man with one woman, is unmistakably indicated as the despotic law of life. This is the rule. We need not waste words in justifying the assumption. 38 For Greg, the real tyranny of nature's despotic law is the constraint of male freedom; similarly, in The Small House Crosbie's fear of the domestic is partly due to the impending loss of a bachelor's life. Greg is especially relevant when considering Lily Dale: he says thousands of women are redundant 'because one abortive love in the past has closed their hearts to every other sentiment'. 39 Compare Greg's statement with Trollope's description of Lily in the Autobiography, and we see that the two are addressing a similar concern: Lily 'became first engaged to a snob; and then, though in truth she loved another man who was hardly good enough, she could not extricate herself sufficiently from the collapse of her first great misfortune' (A 179). The end result of

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both Greg's article and Trollope's narrative is to conceptualize gender in relation to the domestic sphere relegated to women. The novel is ambiguous toward the mores of marriage and it approaches a critique of the domestic ideal, but an acceptable alternative within the framework of the novel is never given. In the Greg article, domesticity is the despotic law of life, and in the novel, domesticity is simply thwarted. The question is w h e t h e r Greg's text would have worked intertextually - either brought in consciously or not by the reader or the author - with the fiction as a point of debate in the topical Woman Question. Greg's article appeared in the National Review, a Unitarian-influenced quarterly read by the educated (male) middle and upper classes.40 Like Cornhill it was available at Mudie's and the two periodicals could well have had an overlapping readership; certainly, Trollope would have been familiar with topical debates in a number of periodicals. But Greg was not alone in addressing the question of redundant women at this time. Early in April 1862, The Times published an exchange of letters to the editor addressing the efforts of Emily Faithfull and others to employ women and to initiate female emigration schemes. 41 'To marry, to bear children, to guide the house, to lodge strangers, to wash the saints' feet, to relieve the afflicted' is how a Saturday Review article in April describes the boundaries of women's work. 42 A week earlier in the Spectator, a writer discussing university exams for women insists that 'we cannot have home happiness endangered for any conceivable improvement to the minds or powers of either sex'.43 The conservative feminist Frances Power Cobbe published 'What Shall We Do With Our Old Maids?' in Eraser's Magazine (November 1862), as a direct response to the Greg article. Cobbe assumes her readers' familiarity with the Greg and mentions that his article was 'quoted as of the soundest common sense'. 44 Therefore, the problem of redundant women or old maids was a prominent element of middle-class public discourse at the time The Small House was being written and serialized. Trollope's writing diaries indicate that he began writing the manuscript in May, a month after the Greg article and the Times letters had appeared, and the third instalment was written mostly at the end of June. 45 The Cobbe article appeared in the same month as the third instalment discussed above. Whether or not Greg's article was directly influential, Trollope and his readers

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would have brought to the text pre-understandings about the Woman Question which places the fiction in the wider context of a public, cultural discourse. It is likely that a reader would have connected the detailing of Lily's waste with the public discourse on the Woman Question, which helps explain readers' anxiety in wishing to marry off Lily Dale. Another article in the November Cornhill works similarly by constructing a criminal class in terms of the domestic ideal and with references to outside texts. H.W. Holland's article 'Professional Thieves' 46 is an attempt to consider thieving as an art. He places his piece within a context of at least 30 years of formal study of criminals and their practices, and like so many Victorian sociological studies, his begins with a catalogue of statistics. But Holland's article differs from other studies, notably Henry Mayhew's articles which became London Labour and the London Poor (1862), of which Holland states, 'the nature of its topics excludes it from the family circle' (641). Holland, by writing in Cornhill, has placed the discussion of criminality in the presence of ladies and children, so his report is accordingly ambiguous toward distasteful but significant criminal distinctions. Nancy Armstrong says of Mayhew's well-known and influential study that it 'can be viewed as a blatant attempt by a middle-class intellectual to transform the problem of an impoverished working class by translating this social dilemma into sexual terms'. 47 The Holland article, like Trollope's novel, works by conceptualizing his discussion in terms of the domestic. The thieving population is organized by a familial structure, with actual or pretended parental figures educating children in the art of crime. However, it is the woman who is responsible for the early education of child criminals: Pocket-picking is the boy's first lesson, and he practises on his instructor, and on the woman who may reside with the thief. When he can quickly and quietly pick the pocket of his new friends, the woman takes him out, generally into some crowded shop. . . . The woman has nearly always most to do with the education of the boy. When she has done with him, the man takes him in hand, and they go out together. (644)

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Notice how gendered spheres are constructed: the woman is responsible for the homespun, early initiation before the boy thief is fully accepted in the man's public arena. But the thieving family is a perversion of the domestic ideal because the woman, the moral centre in middle-class homes, is an immoral, unnatural influence in the criminal home. Holland says that the women thieves 'are always connected with male thieves', a way of distinguishing 'between female thieves and another class of vicious women', meaning prostitutes (647). The delicate treatment of prostitution is part of what Jeffrey Weeks has called the Victorian double standard that 'familial ideology was accompanied by, and often relied on, a vast underbelly of prostitution'. 48 Setting up the family model among thieves and perverting the moral influence of woman, the contributor implicitly upholds and reinforces the middle-class domestic ideal by showing the reader a diseased domesticity. The thieving class is, to a large extent, the result of the fallen woman unable morally to safeguard the home. Holland neglects to mention the range of possible economic hardships which encourage a criminal underclass, in the same way that Mayhew concentrates on sexual rather than socio-economic aspects of criminal life.49 By faulting the woman, whose responsibility it is to educate, Holland's article would have resonances with Fitzjames Stephen's piece, 'Circumstantial Evidence - the Case of Jessie M'Lachlan', also in the November Cornhill. Stephen's piece offers a defence of circumstantial evidence, based on the sensational case of a female murderer, and it focuses on the criminal acts and the murderer's deceit. In the Saturday Review of 25 October 1862, a story appeared about Catherine Wilson, the first woman to be executed by the Old Bailey in 14 years. 50 The article describes her 'foulest personal vices', and concludes that 'it was only a woman, with a woman's arts, a woman's insinuating craft, a woman's admittance to sick rooms, and to the sacred confidences of her sister, a woman's womanliness, that could have perpetrated this string of crimes'. 51 The Holland, Stephen, and Saturday Review articles depict the danger of woman when she fails to live up to her position as the moral centre; the articles work intertextually, albeit in varying degrees, to offer a glimpse of the fallen woman. If Trollope's chapters in the third instalment depict the steadfast woman wronged by a man who refuses the family ideal, then the Holland article shows what happens when woman fails

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as the angel in the house. Both in different ways use the ideological positioning of gendered spheres, and the domestic ideal in particular, that Cornhill promotes. Read in a different context, either the Trollope or the Holland might not become ideological in the same way, but because Cornhill endorses a specific value system, the text becomes ideologically, and therefore politically, charged. Terry Eagleton usefully suggests that 'you could not decide whether a statement was ideological or not by inspecting it in isolation from its discursive context, any more than you could decide in this way whether a piece of writing was a work of literary art'. 52 The discursive context includes contemporary texts outside of Cornhill which could have directly influenced the reading of an issue, or generally informed the understanding of public discussions. The Small House read with knowledge of the Greg essay or of the Woman Question debate has political implications. Trollope thwarts the domestic at a time when readers were anxious about and sensitive to single women, as seen in letters to The Times and other periodical literature. Reading how women educated thieves at a time when female crimes were sensationalized in the press again makes the middle-class positioning of women all the more poignant. Intertextual readings show explicitly how implications which move from text to text participate in blurring the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. 53

THE NON-FICTION CLUB: MEMBERS ONLY There is no doubt that on Magazine Day in the early 1860s, the primary attraction of periodicals like Cornhill was the illustrated serial fiction and not the non-fiction articles. It was the next episode in the plight of Lily Dale, and to a far lesser extent that of George Eliot's Romola, which readers eagerly awaited each month, and not articles describing medieval bookselling or the history of sea-fights which were leaved between the novels, stories and poetry. The Economist of 9 March 1861 wrote that Cornhill 'relies for its sale mainly on the fictions it contains', although it adds that the non-fiction articles are 'well-informed and good of their kind'. 54 Although it seems that non-fiction was of secondary importance to readers, the articles did participate in ideological discourses which when examined reveal a complexity within Cornhill that is easy to miss.

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By classifying broadly and comparing the non-fiction contents of a few contemporary magazines, during the serialization of The Small House at Allington, we can gain insight into how Cornhill's interests differed from other periodicals. Unlike Cornhill, Blackwood's is overwhelmingly weighted with articles on foreign affairs which partly give the periodical its imperialist tone. Macmillan's favours foreign-affairs articles but also includes many contributions on science and literature. Cornhill differs from both by publishing many more articles on culture and society, followed by science. There are limits to a crude content classification, but as a preliminary analysis it can indicate the general concerns and ideological presentations of a periodical. For instance, Cornhill's concentration on culture-based articles enforces their overall commitment to non-controversial non-fiction subjects. By avoiding foreign affairs, the American Civil War, political economy 55 and religion and by favouring 'factual' science and middle-class culture, the editors attempted to present an apparently uncomplicated version of the real, non-fiction world of its readers. However, these articles are complex and engaged with ideological discourses both inside and outside the magazine. By limiting the range of acceptable topics, the magazine broadens the range of subjects within culture and society available to be discussed. A glance at the Wellesley Index list of attributions for non-fiction articles indicates the frequency with which Cornhill relied on a core of mostly male contributors. Thackeray's expectation of a diverse number of contributors from the public, as stated in the 1860 announcement of the magazine, only shows how far Cornhill was in 1862 from its initial self-projection. Whereas the fiction is balanced by having serials, stories, and poems by men and women (George Eliot, Anne Ritchie, Elizabeth Gaskell, Trollope, and others), the non-fiction is almost exclusively dominated by middle-class men. But these contributors were not just brilliant amateurs, like the physician and frequent contributor Francis E. Anstie, who earned their livelihoods in other professions. A few of the inner circle of non-fiction contributors are recognizable as professional journalists. Fitzjames Stephen, Cornhill's most frequent occasional non-fiction contributor, wrote 12 articles in this period, mostly about social and moral issues. According to his biographer, Fitzjames Stephen as primary contributor lacked an outlet for more serious non-fiction, and so found himself turning to magazines like Fraser's which would publish articles Cornhill would not. 56

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Before his Cornhill t e n u r e , Stephen wrote for the Saturday Review, and he would become the chief leader writer in the late 1860s for another of Smith's ventures, the innovative evening Pall Mall Gazette, where 'he was able to speak out with perfect freedom u p o n the graver topics of the day'. 5 7 Another Cornhill contributor, and one of Smith's co-editors during this period, was Frederick Greenwood, who would be the first editor of the Pall Mall Gazette from 1865. In 1862, George Smith was 35 years old, Frederick Greenwood was 32, and Fitzjames Stephen 33. Thackeray (who was no longer editor) and Trollope, both of whom wrote some non-fiction but represented the genteel side of the magazine's fiction, were 51 and 47 respectively. What is interesting is that many of the younger key players involved in Cornhill would become pioneers in the Pall Mall Gazette's professionalization of journalism later in the decade and into the 1870s. There is a tension within the contents which belies the fact that there were at least two types of male contributor, the middle-aged, gentleman writer and the up-and-coming young professional. Although Cornhill is often identified as the pre-eminent literary magazine of the middle and upper classes, the contents were no less ideologically complicated because of its policy excluding subjects of potential controversy Some articles written by men seem to address women readers; however, within the male-dominated core of nonfiction, contributors produced articles which more often affirm a male reader. It is as if the male writers were trying to maintain their own gendered space within the Cornhill's new fictiondominated, but still hybrid, type of shilling monthly. Those contributions which can be identified as culture and society subjects in Cornhill range from articles about the royals to prison reform, from a travel piece to a discussion of cosmetics. If the spectrum of articles which form the bulk of the magazine's non-fiction offers limited debate on a number of cultural and social issues, it also confirms the middle-class readers' self-satisfaction with their own education, prosperity, temperance and philanthropy. Fitzjames Stephen, using Victor Hugo's Les Miserables as an illustration, concluded in an article entitled 'Society' that '"society"' has no precise meaning at all' and that the basis of society, if one does exist, is the benevolent relations between men. 58 There is an echo of precisely this debate in late twentieth-century British politics, best illustrated by Margaret Thatcher's assertion as Prime Minister in Woman's Own in 1987 that 'there is

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no such thing as Society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.' 59 The Victorian argument over the collective responsibility of communities remains very much with us, and the debates about socially responsible market economies continue to divide the middle-classes in post-Thatcherite, New Labour Britain. Stephen's article discusses society's responsibility to redress social ills by setting in opposition the individualist and the socialist. The socialist, of course, sees society as a corporate body with collective responsibility, but the writer favours the individualist, paradigmatically represented in the form of the prosperous Englishman, whose individual pursuits somehow naturally lead to a good society There's a whiff of Carlyle's Captains of Industry here - trickle-down social reform, we might now call it. Stephen's article, which at first appears to question social evils, is actually a Whiggish liberal defence 60 of middleclass prosperity, an attempt to reassure readers that the human by-products of industrialization and increasing capitalism described in Les Miserables dire best remedied by maintaining the comfort of the middle class. There is no question about the socioeconomics causes of human suffering, only an attempt to reassure the reader that blame cannot be placed on the diligent middle classes by the socialists. The article, by appearing in a middle-class periodical and by being written at all, belies a class anxiety during a time of burgeoning reform campaigns in a number of social areas. As had been conventional since the founding of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews in the early nineteenth century, non-fiction journalism was linked to book-reviewing, so using fiction as a way into discussing politics, religion, and other serious discourses was common. Les Miserables was widely reviewed in the periodical press, and its subject-matter affords the opportunity to discuss aspects of social reform. 61 Women's education and expatriation, the distress in Lancashire, public-school and university education, the penal system - these were some of the other reform topics which featured prominently in newspapers and periodicals in late 1862. For example, The Times ran 13 leaders from August to December on the treatment of convicts, and throughout 1862 there were no fewer than 51 leaders on the distress and relief efforts in the cotton districts. 62 Elsewhere, as in the reform-minded English Woman's Journal published by Emily Faithfull's Victoria Press, there is an ongoing discussion of the Woman Question. Less well known

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today than Faithfull's magazine is The Rose, the Shamrock, and the Thistle, a Scottish m a g a z i n e p u b l i s h e d by the w o m e n - l e d Caledonian Press, which ran many articles on topics related to the Woman Question including a series called 'Our Six Hundred Thousand' in 1862-63. Stephen's argument in his Cornhill article can be read as a defensive response which seeks to allay some of the self-doubt and anxiety of the middle classes, w h o were increasingly being asked in the periodicals to consider and accommodate substantial social change. 'The Working Man's Restaurant' (February 1863) describes efforts around Britain, but specifically the Great Western Cooking Depot in Glasgow, to provide inexpensive food to the struggling working classes. 63 The article takes as its subject a specific social ill, the hardship of the working class, but like Fitzjames Stephen above, it neglects any consideration of the causes of the social inequality. 'The Working Man's Restaurant' supports the philanthropic experiment in Glasgow because it provides clean, attractive eating-halls 'equivalent to elegance', and tasty, filling food, 'quite as much as it is healthful to take with the prospect of an afternoon's active work before us' (254). But the advantages to the working classes do not stop at the culinary delights. The halls are operated as businesses and so instil pride in the guests, who must pay for their food and not have to receive charity. Such establishments provide competition for the pubs and gin-houses frequented by the working classes; no alcohol is served in the halls, which is 'essential when large numbers from the very poorest districts of the city are assembled together' (258). There are reading-rooms with daily papers and a women-only room 'so that timid girls may not have to run the gauntlet through a room full of strangers' (258). The writer recommends that similar eating-halls be established in other cities, especially in the poorer quarters. A number of topical discourses run through 'The Working Man's Restaurant'. Mentioning the no-alcohol policy would almost certainly have brought to mind the temperance hall movement aimed at working-class improvement. As Lilian Shiman has observed in her book on Victorian temperance movements, the working-class family unit suffered from a lack of space and lack of facilities.64 Temperance halls were founded by temperance societies beginning in the 1830s to provide meeting-places and educational classes for struggling families, since the assumption was that the working classes turned to drink as a way of escaping hardships at

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The best cure for the drunkenness of the lower classes is not a Maine Liquor Law - but soup and sausages, pudding and pies; is not to shut the beershops, but to open the poor man's kitchen.66 The specific subject of the food depots was picked up by other periodicals, notably Good Words (December 1862), which reiterated the benefits of the Glasgow experiment. So 'The Working Man's Restaurant' is part of a wider topical debate on the use and abuse of alcohol, and one Cornhill reader (an individualist of whom Stephen would doubtless approve) is shown to be actively involved in a philanthropic experiment aimed at alleviating one social ill of the day. What the writer finds most admirable in the hall are those attempts to create a semblance of middle-class comfort: a bright, almost elegant establishment with reading-rooms and a separate woman-only space. But the writer is most emphatic in conveying the entrepreneurial aspect of the venture; not merely a charitable soup kitchen, this restaurant is a profit-making venture which in turn nurtures working-class pride. 67 The Cornhill article reaffirms a middle-class model of prosperity, and also shows a point of intersection for different discourses which are at least implicitly addressed: the temperance debate, an acceptance of gendered spaces, and the right-headedness of the capitalist businessman. Criminality has always held a sensational value in newspapers and periodicals, and in the early 1860s, when sensation novels were glutting the market and gaining currency with middle-class readers, Cornhill carried several articles aimed at the reader interested in descriptions of crime and punishment. Many of these articles make references to recent sensational crimes, like the execution of Catherine Wilson in October 1862, a case which received wide periodical attention because the criminal was a woman and because she was convicted purely on circumstantial evidence. 68 While Cornhill was not initially known for serializing highly popular sensation novels (unlike Eraser's, say, which at

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home. In the 1860s, attempts were made by teetotallers to introduce prohibition legislation, and the virtues and vices of alcohol were much discussed in Cornhill and other periodicals. 65 In fact, we are told that the idea for the restaurant described in the article came from a previous Cornhill article of June 1860, which states:

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this time was running Mary Braddon's Aurora Floyd), its links to sensational press reports, generally staples of both the metropolitan and regional newspapers, can be seen in male-dominated non-fiction articles linked to sensational news events. To present itself as a sensational magazine would not have been proper for Cornhill at this time (although Frederick Greenwood's Margaret Denzil's History is pretty sensational), but under the guise of respectable, male non-fiction, sensational events could find their way into Cornhill's discourse. And in such articles, depictions of gender transgression, particularly affronts to conventional femininity, could be more visible than in the fiction. Thus in 'The Medical Evidence of Crime' (March 1863), Francis Anstie begins his discussion by referring to 'the trial of the woman Wilson'.69 Of course nothing as graphic as the Saturday Review's bloodthirsty and misogynistic account of the case (25 October 1863) could ever appear in Cornhill, but a subtle, discreet mention like the one above would be enough to bring the case to the (male) reader's consciousness, and it suggests the reader's familiarity with and interest in the sensational criminal news items of the day. The November 1862 issue carried two articles which approach sensational coverage, those on 'Circumstantial Evidence: The Case of Jessie M'Lachlan' and on 'Professional Thieves'. Jessie M'Lachlan was a woman sentenced to death for murder but who was given a commuted sentence at Her Majesty's pleasure for life by the Home Secretary. The case provided the impetus for the press to discuss judicial reform, capital punishment, and circumstantial evidence, and The Times took particular interest in the case, as shown by the four leaders in October and November devoted to the Home Secretary's decision.70 As discussed in this chapter above, the article on thieves describes the framework of a criminal family as a corrupted domestic ideal. And as in 'The Working Man's Restaurant' we see how different discourses intersect in the nonfiction: we are in the underworld of the professional thief but recognize the language and familial structure associated with the domestic ideal. To an extent, crime is also addressed in Cornhill's fiction, for example through Romola's Tito, who moves between the centre of political power to the margins of treachery. His criminal mind leads him away from the domestic haven offered by Romola to his secret peasant mistress, Tessa. Although his crimes are whitecollar and enmeshed in the volatile political circumstances of

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Renaissance Florence, his deceit and perversion of the domestic ideal are no less poignant than the Victorian professional thief's discussed in the non-fiction. Furthermore, the illustrations to fiction and poetry offered visual images of sensational events. Consider the confrontation between Baldassare and Tito from Romola, illustrated in 'Will His Eyes Open?' in July 1863 (Fig. 1.1), or the drawing accompanying the poem 'Manoli' in September 1862 (Fig. 1.2). Both demonstrate how sensationalism can enter even the most discreet middle-class shilling monthly. In February 1863, Fitzjames Stephen wrote the closest thing to a political reformist article that can be found in Cornhill in the early 1860s. 'The Punishment of Convicts' argues that sentencing reform is necessary to ensure proper punishments for crimes. He asserts that the judicial system spends too long capturing the criminal and pays too little attention to him afterward. Stephen's analogy reveals something about the middle-class men he addresses: A pack of hounds, and a number of men, dogs, and horses will spend hours in hunting a fox, which, when caught, is abandoned to the dogs without an observation. 71 To make his point, he uses a male-bonding analogy that appeals to his reader's sporting sentiments: not punishing convicts properly is like releasing a well-chased fox. And if that fails to hit the mark with some, he appeals a second time to the professional ethics of his reader: failure to sentence convicts consistently would be like a doctor taking the utmost care in diagnosis but ignoring the prescription completely. For Stephen, sentencing reform is a question of responsibility or duty. By making recognizable comparisons to the all-male professional and social lives of the reader, the writer makes his point about reform with greater impact at the same time as he distinguishes the convict as a being separate from the middle-classes. But even in the male space of the nonfiction article, Stephen finds that he must maintain discretion, as when classifying types of crimes. Defining the third type, those odious in nature, he mentions cruelty to animals and 'others on which it is better not to be too explicit',72 which I presume to mean a sexual deviancy or some similar perversity which dare not speak its name, or have its name spoken. Like so many of Cornhill's non-fiction articles, 'The Punishment of Convicts' is part of a wider cultural discourse, in this case the debate over prison

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I

I

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/ / /

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m Jtfy.0- ' # ^ = : \ ^ > '

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Fig. 1.1 'Will His Eyes Open?7, Cornhill Magazine (July 1863) 10.1057/9780230288546 - Trollope and the Magazines, Mark Turner

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to

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Fig. 1.2 'Manoli', Cornhill Magazine (September 1862)

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reform; although the Westminster Review's treatment of the topic in January 1863 provides a more thorough analysis of the subject,73 Cornhill in this instance is contributing directly to the debate about a controversial social reform. Middle-class shared knowledge or experience was another area which contributors took every opportunity to mention. References to those things which 'everyone knows', whether a recent murder trial or a scientific publication, helps create a union of readers with similar backgrounds, tastes, and interests. This projected configuration may not be absolutely accurate, but the impression given is one of a large community of readers with equal access to and interest in a number of events, and, of course, the gentleman's club projected precisely this unanimity of experience. In an article about the 32 volumes of the State Trials, a collection of legal trials in England beginning in the reign of Henry I, Fitzjames Stephen wants to illustrate 'the great general interest' which the trials can excite.74 He assumes the reader's familiarity with the most important historical cases: The case of ship money, the impeachment of Lord Strafford, the trial of Charles I, the trials for the Popish plot, the trials for Monmouth's insurrection on the Western Circuit, and the trial of the seven Bishops, are familiar to those who have even the most popular acquaintance with English history. (353) Whether or not readers were well acquainted with the particulars of these and other historical cases may be questioned, but Stephen's projection of his readership unites them under the banner of shared knowledge. The club-like bonding of the article also works because the writer appeals to the w o r k i n g professionalism of readers. Stephen, a lawyer by training, writes from within the respectable, male preserve of the law, and his discourse would have been intimate and familiar to a legal readership. He prefers the legal case histories to political histories because of their professional quality: Men are never so much themselves as when they are actively engaged in the practice of their professions; for, of all the influences by which character is moulded, the influence of a profession is the widest and the most searching. (354)

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Read carefully, Stephen's assertion makes the case that men are at their best when they are with other men, at work. This definition, which links professionalism and manliness, automatically excludes women, who generally were not professionals. It is another way of appealing to the unity of the Cornhill non-fiction reader. The point here is about gendered spaces within periodicals which are predicated upon exclusions. This is not to say that women did not read non-fiction or that men ignored the fiction, rather that the contributions appear, even generically, to be gendered with an ideal or implied male reader in mind. As I understand it, the exclusion at work in the non-fiction was grounded upon exclusions similar to those which defined the allmale club. Stefan Collini's study of the writers of the higher journalism in the nineteenth century shows how the social network of the intellectual journalists centred around club life and around the Athenaeum in particular. 75 Nigel Cross writes of professional journalists that 'the club was the adhesive of Bohemian life. It was more than simply a haven from family life - or lack of it. It provided writers, who by definition have to work alone, with an opportunity to meet together.' 76 Cross constructs a particular version of the isolated writer which I would question, 77 but his point about male writers and clubs is an important one. The social configuration of the men's club and its links to the cultural formation of periodicals informs my readings of periodicals in later chapters, but here it is enough to understand that Cornhill's non-fiction writers were themselves in a similarly unified, professional, all-male circle. Discussing the 'Effect of Railways on Health' in October 1862, G.H. Lewes also targets a professional male reader. His argument revolves around various truths and fallacies about living in the country and commuting to the city for work. Therefore he has defined his audience as those prosperous middle-class members who increasingly left London for the clean air of country living: But it is not the young and healthy we are specially addressing; it is the men whose health is the chief motive for living out of town, and who are, therefore, called upon to consider this one question of health. 78 That those very same commuters may have been reading this article during their morning or evening trip into town further unites the periodical with its male readership. Whereas serial fiction

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was often read communally, as in the family circle, non-fiction articles were designed to be personal and digested individually, and periodical literature suited the men's daily commute into town, whether that be London, Liverpool, Manchester or another regional urban centre. The sort of literature pioneered by George Smith in the Pall Mall Gazette a few years later is even more directed to the commuter. Temperance and moderation were highly regarded virtues in the non-fiction, as seen in a series of articles by Francis Anstie on overeating and the effects of alcohol and tobacco. In 'Tobacco: Its Use and Abuse', Anstie refers to 'the young lad', 'a boy', 'the boy-smoker', and 'the men at the universities' who use tobacco, and we immediately understand that the implied reader is male. 79 More interestingly, Anstie positions middle-class moderation between the working classes who need tobacco as the lesser of evils and the upper classes who use it because they are idle: On behalf of the ill-fed, ill-clad, and anxious classes, I feel driven to lift up a protest against the mistaken spirit, as I think it, of philanthropic reform which would drive tobacco completely out of use, or limit its use to the rich and the irredeemably lazy sections of society. The result of my own observations has been the production of the conviction in my mind, that the majority of the poor and anxious classes, in London at any rate, after reaching a certain age, begin to indulge in one of three cheap luxuries - alcohol, opium, or tobacco: and, moreover, in the existing state of things, that it is hopeless to expect them to do anything better than choose the best of these three. 80 The working classes are presented as somewhat pitifully tending toward chemical dependencies of one type or another; the upper classes are practically immoral in their sedentary lifestyles; and somewhere between these social polarities are the Cornhill readers who, Anstie hopes, will prove middle-class superiority by moderating their behaviour unlike the poor and the rich. Note that the magazine masks its own self-interest in maintaining comfort because the article is written on behalf of the underprivileged. Comparing Anstie's assertion that philanthropic reform is futile with the reform-minded, entrepreneurial position in 'The Working Man's Restaurant' (discussed above) suggests that, in terms

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of a single, coherent social ideology, the Cornhill contributors were not necessarily of like mind. In another article by Anstie about 'Overeating and Undereating' the poor and the rich are used as extremes of behaviour which the middle classes ought to avoid.81 Child mortality in poor classes results from poorly nourished, overworked mothers who breastfeed, and the overeating in wealthier classes is caused simply by their own ignorance. Again, the middle classes must find their way through moderation between the extremes of squalor and indulgence seen in the lower and upper classes. Women were suspect of overindulgence as well as men. G.H. Lewes, unusually addressing women readers by writing about the use of cosmetics in Aids to Beauty, Real and Artificial' in March 1863, describes how the improving qualities of cosmetics are most often a false way of covering over Nature's defects. He asserts: Fortunes are made by cosmetics. Large sums, we know, are paid to artists who undertake to 'enamel' the skins of ladies bestowing the radiance of health where nature or disease has set a very different sign. Dear madam, it is all a fiction! Cosmetics are impositions. The credulity of vanity, supported by blank ignorance, may induce you to spend time and money on such appliances to create a 'complexion;' but if you knew how your skin was constructed, how it grew, how it breathed, and how it assumed its 'complexion/ you would as soon think of rendering hieroglyphics legible by whitewashing a monument. 82 Like cosmetics, his perception of the woman reader's attention to fashion also comes under attack: Fashion in all its hideousness is despotic, and can only be rebelled against by very exceptional people. There is, however, a rational and aesthetic obedience no less than an irrational and hideous servility. Perhaps in nothing does the feminine intellect more markedly betray its weakness than in this matter of costume. 83 Lewes's remedy for a clear complexion is a healthy overall body, and he advocates that by the clever use of colours and form in dress to aid beauty, 'the tyranny of fashion would be reduced to moderation'. 84 However, this article does not simply offer advice

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to the woman reader; it derides female behaviour and intelligence and promulgates a male critique of femininity. Serial non-fiction is an occasional element in Cornhill, although it appears more frequently in other magazines. In Macmillan's, for example, there are two-part stories on 'Progress in China', 'A Visit to Lutzen in October', and 'Across the Channel', and an article on the American Civil War was practically a monthly feature. Cornhill contained some serial non-fiction - for example, Lewes's 'Notes on Science' and 'Our Survey of Literature and Science' and Thackeray's 'Roundabout Papers' - and such non-fiction unites the reader in a way the serial does, by creating a network of references to other articles which have appeared earlier, a practice which links the magazine's non-fiction and demonstrates the unity of the contributors. The suggestion is not that contributors were consciously and purposefully self-referential (although they may have been), but that by referring back and forth through the issues and volumes, an experience similar to serial reading was produced. Although I have singled out particular contributors, Cornhill's policy of anonymity, as with most periodicals and newspapers at this time, did not privilege the author over the periodical. Anonymity was a genteel tradition which not only put the full weight of a periodical behind an article's ideas but also prevented individual achievement or notoriety. As an article in Blackwood's in 1859 describes it, the 'secresy of its organization' 85 was crucial in the press because it acted as a type of restraint against a total invasion of privacy. The writer defines the recent proliferation of new periodicals by the increase in narrow interests, and 'class' specificity as the character of the English press: To sign or not to sign? - that is the question; but as applied to the English press it is only another form of the question, To be or not to be? The anonymous is the corner-stone of class journalism .. .86 Without anonymity, as the allusion to Hamlet implies, the English press would commit self-slaughter, or at the very least become something rather too resembling American journalism. Cornhill, although formally maintaining a policy of anonymity, was not a completely secret organization. Often, poems were initialled, as were explosive articles such as Ruskin's 'Unto This Last'. Poems

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deserved signature because they were high art, and Ruskin had to be attributed because the magazine needed to distance itself from the ideas he expressed. However, from the start Cornhill was lax about the need for anonymity, and in the very first issue clues to the fiction contributors are given in the editorial note. Also, the trade journal Publishers' Circular often identified both fiction and non-fiction writers in periodicals, and advertisements often named contributors, a point to which I will return in Chapter 4. Cornhill, while not approaching the heterogeneity of, say, the Fortnightly Review a few years later, was not impenetrable in the way the Blackwood's article suggested periodicals needed to be. Still, on balance Cornhill's authority is located in the weight of the magazine and the editor, and not in the individual contributor. I am making two points about the non-fiction articles: first, that they were mostly written by men who carved out a textual space for male readers within the family magazine, and secondly, that they helped promote a unified, continuous reading experience for men. Educated, professional, prosperous, moderate - all of these were ideological constructions in the non-fiction of the middle-class Cornhill reader, and all of these helped gather the reader under one banner. Simply put, non-fiction relied on a core of male writers who wrote with their male peers in mind. The approach reproduces the atmosphere of the gentleman's club, which in many ways galvanized middle-class male aspirations. Laurel Brake has discussed how the network of 'Metaphysical Society' members dominated variously both the Contemporary Review and Nineteenth Century in the 1870s, and how the Nineteenth Century format 'approximates that of the Society'. 87 Mary Ann Clawson, in writing about the development of fraternal organizations in America, observes that fraternalism was offered in opposition to women's domestic sphere. The fraternal organization provided an all-male, morally improving space for men. 88 These observations can be useful in understanding how the Cornhill non-fiction writers were creating their own space and discourse within a domestic, drawing-room magazine. And George Smith's jovial monthly dinners for Cornhill contributors furthered the club-like comradery and network of non-fiction writers. In a Cornhill article in February 1863, on sarcastic, malicious popular journalism, the writer distinguishes this 'other class of writing' by the effeminacy of its practitioners. 89 They are misogynistic because they have no women friends or have been ill-treated

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by them, but the further implication is that the writers are not manly. The writer gives the example of Alphonse Karr in France, who, it is coyly suggested, was unsuccessful with the other sex and who was wildly eccentric in his dress; whether Karr is being described in veiled terms as homosexual is uncertain, but what is obvious is that his offensiveness is a consequence of his unmanliness. Karr (1808-90) was best known for his satiric writings in the periodical Les Guepes (The Wasps); the poison of his ink was his eccentric behaviour and dress, described by a contemporary biographer: Bientot la pose devint chez lui une occupation serieuse, une manie, un systeme, un besoin de chaque jour et de chaque heure. II s'appliqua constamment a mettre son individualite en relief et a faire saillir aux yeux du public ce qu'il y a de particulier dans sa personne et dans son caractere. 90 He is further described as 'un feroce original' who greeted editors wearing elaborate turbans and slippers and whose bedroom was painted black.91 The ideological positioning of journalism in the Cornhill article posits Cornhill-style non-fiction at the centre of manly male discourse, while other forms of lesser, bitchy and gossipy journalism are denigrated as effeminate and 'beneath the dignity of men of sense to meddle'. 92 The same article states: In England, a magazine, a periodical, or a journal must represent either an interest or a principle, and in proportion to the breadth and importance of that interest, or the deepness and indestructibility of that principle, will be the extent of the influence enjoyed. 93 But even the spaces within a periodical are directed at particular readers and interests. An article in Temple Bar in 1862, discussing periodicals, fiction and literature, states that 'the literature of Fiction is the literature of Society', 94 and I would claim, the literature of non-fiction was the literature of politics, religion and other serious discourses; it was the literature of men. On the whole, the non-fiction in Cornhill represented the interests and principles of its male readers. It functioned in balance with the domestic fiction and maintained a gendered ideological framework within

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the magazine. Within the scope of acceptable subjects, nonfiction engaged, however subtly and discreetly, in a number of discourses, some of which actually questioned and challenged the types of gender convention upheld in the textual space of the magazine. Transgressive women and effeminate men, for example, both found their way into the early Cornhills; but both enter largely t h r o u g h the male-dominated non-fiction. What remains to be decided, perhaps in another sort of study, is whether anyone actually read the non-fiction in the same huge numbers as enjoyed the fiction, and if not, why not.

Notes 1. Mary Hamer, Writing By Numbers: Trollope's Serial Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). See her appendix, 'The Initial Publication of Trollope's Novels in England', which lists publication details for all his novels, 182-6. 2. Trollope was actually offered three and a half times more, or £3500, but accepted £2500 in order to retain the copyright. See N. John Hall, Trollope: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 3. For example, in An Autobiography Trollope discusses the lack of success of Brown, Jones, and Robinson: T do not know that I heard any opinion expressed of it, except by the publisher, who kindly remarked that he did not think it was equal to my usual work. Though he had purchased the copyright, he did not republish the story in book form until 1870, and then it passed into the world of letters sub silentio, 161. 4. Gaye Tuchman with Nina E. Fortin, Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers and Social Change (London: Routledge, 1989), 7. 5. Ibid., 7-10. Tuchman makes large claims about the the gendered dimension of novel writing in the nineteenth century, and it should be noted that her conclusions are based on a relatively small archive of material. While more work in this area needs to be undertaken, her conclusions are extremely suggestive about the gendered construction of literature. 6. The best overall discussion of the Victorian publishing system remains J.A. Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Tuchman's Edging Women Out introduces gender differentiation in novel writing. Hamer, Writing by Numbers, offers a good overview of the publishing industry with particular attention to the development of serialization. 7. See Hamer, Writing by Numbers, x-xi. 8. Hall, Trollope, 199. 9. Ibid., 197. 10. [E.S. Dallas,] Anthony Trollope , / The Times (23 May 1859), 12. Also quoted in Hall, Trollope, 189.

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11. In Writing by Numbers, Hamer notes, 'there was no month between January 1860 and July 1867 which did not see the release of a further instalment of at least one current Trollope novel', 88. 12. Gordon N. Ray, ed., The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray IV (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 160. 13. Ibid., 158. 14. Ibid., 161. 15. Leonard Huxley, 'Chronicles of "CornhiH"', Cornhill Magazine 52 n.s. (1922), 370. 16. See Barbara Quinn Schmidt, 'In the Shadow of Thackeray: Leslie Stephen as the Editor of the Cornhill Magazine in Joel Wiener, ed., Innovators and Preachers: The Role of Editor in Victorian England (New York: Greenwood Press, 1985), 78, in which she states that Thackeray 'provided a narrator, a man of the world who was able to merge wisdom with nostalgia and mellowness as he would at a dinner party, telling anecdotes, frankly admitting his prejudices, making moral and social pronouncements, and commenting sympathetically on the contradictions and the caprice of everyday life'. 17. For a comprehensive look at reviewers' responses to Trollope's realism and for an overview of their uses of realism, see David Skilton, Anthony Trollope and His Contemporaries (London: Longman, 1972). 18. Thackeray rejected Browning's poem 'Lord Walter's Wife', Trollope's story 'Mrs. General Talboys' and discontinued Ruskin's Unto This Last. Browning's and Trollope's good-natured responses to these censorings are documented in Ray's Letters and Papers. Cornhill, of course, was not unique among periodicals in its censorship. See David Skilton, 'The Trollope Reader', in Jeremy H a w t h o r n , ed., The Nineteenth-Century British Novel (London: Edward Arnold, 1986): 'most authors, editors and publishers were operating a voluntary moral censorship or self-restraint which accorded happily with much middleclass public opinion, and there seems to have been a temporary, though surprisingly broad consensus - morally suffocating though it would later seem - about what should and should not go into a novel', 143. See also my discussion of the censoring of Trollope's Rachel Ray in Chapter 2. 19. Jenifer Glynn, Prince of Publishers: A Biography of George Smith (London: Allison and Busby, 1986) provides a circulation list for Cornhill during the 1860s. By December 1869, circulation was at 27,000 (143). Still, in the early 1860s Cornhill was among the most popular shilling monthlies, and several newer magazines patterned themselves on Cornhill. 20. Quoted in ibid., 144-5. 21. George Moore, 'A New Censorship of Literature', Pall Mall Gazette 40 (10 December 1884), 1-2. 22. Ibid., 1. 23. Glynn, Prince of Publishers, 137. 24. Andrew Blake, Reading Victorian Fiction: The Cultural Context and Ideological Content of the Nineteenth-Century Novel (London: Macmillan, 1989) takes a similar approach in looking at Framley Parsonage in

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25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

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Cornhill: 'This novel provides an excellent illustration of the intertextuality of fiction in the periodical press: a mutuality of concern with the rest of the magazine's contents runs throughout its pages', 91. Julia Kristeva, 'Word, Dialogue and Novel' (1966), in Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 36. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), A. M. Sheridan Smith, trans. (1972; reprinted London: Routledge, 1991), especially 21-40. Ibid., 30. In his chapter on the 'unities of discourse', Foucault insists on the need to overcome pre-existent notions like tradition, development, spirit, and influence within the theme of continuity, 21-2. This leads us naturally to rethink the ways in which we define, divide, and group discourses like literature, which, in turn, helps elucidate how vital study of the periodical press can be in challenging traditional methods of literary scholarship. See Foucault's discussion in Archaeology: 'The rules of formation are conditions of existence (but also of coexistence, maintenance, modification, and disappearance) in a given discursive division', 39. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans., and Michael Holquist, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 33. All Cornhill references are to vol. vi unless otherwise noted parenthetically in the text with a roman numeral to indicate the volume number. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), especially the Introduction and Chapter 2. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 2. John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (London: Smith, Elder, 1865), 148. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981), 29, comments on Ruskin's statement that 'such an elevated tone was obviously not universal. But in all social discourse a stable home was seen both as a microcosm of stable society and a sanctuary from an unstable and rapidly changing one.' See also Walter E. Houghton on Ruskin's passage in The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 343-4. Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, 28. Ibid., 37. James Kincaid, The Novels of Anthony Trollope (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 92. However, he does call The Small House 'the darkest novel in the series', 96. Raymond Williams's The Country and the City (1973; reprinted London: Hogarth, 1985) compares 'the ease' of Dr. Thome, the third Barchester novel, with 'the disturbance, the unease, the divided construction' of George Eliot's later novels. He says that 'Trollope, in his Barchester novels, is at ease with schemes of inheritance, with the interaction of classes and interests, with the lucky

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37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

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discovery and the successful propertied marriage. His interest is all in how it happens, not how it is done', 174-5. [W.R. Greg,] 'Why Are Women Redundant?' National Review 14 (April 1862), 434-60. Ibid., 438. Ibid., 440. See Alvar Ellegard, The Readership of the Periodical Press in Mid-Victorian Britain (Gothenburg: Goteborg Universitets Arsskrift, 1957), 32. Josef Altholz, The Religious Press in Britain, 1760-1900 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989) says that National Review 'became the most distinguished Unitarian review and something more, fully the equal of the three great quarterlies', 75. Wellesley 3 calls the National Review 'clearly one of the great quarterlies of the Victorian age', 135. 'Sisters, Help Sisters', The Times (3 April 1862), 7, mentions the success of sending women to the colonies, but also stresses the need to find work for women in Britain. See two separate replies by Emily Faithfull and Maria S. Rye, 'The Employment of Women' (7 April 1862), 6, which again call on wealthier ladies to help out and which document efforts to organize emigration procedures for women. A follow-up letter by Maria Rye and Jane E. Lewin, 'Female Middleclass Emigration' (9 April 1862), 12, lists the donors who have contributed to their emigration campaign. However, not all letters were as supportive: Charles Kingsley's response, 'The Emigration of Women' (11 April 1862), 5, doubts Miss Faithfull's employment scheme and women's ability to work in general. He says that woman 'is physically weaker; her health is more uncertain; she is (at least, at present) worse trained at methodical labour; and the power of work ceases at least ten years sooner than the man's, leaving her destitute in old age. But why should she compete with the man? She was not meant to do so. All attempts to employ her in handicraft are but substitutes for that far nobler and more useful work which Nature intends for her - to marry and bear children.' Kingsley does support Rye's emigration fund as a way of marrying off single women. 'The Ladies Sanitary Association', Saturday Review 13 (12 April 1862), 413-14. 'Girl Graduates', The Spectator (5 April 1862), 377. Frances Power Cobbe, 'What Shall We Do With Our Old Maids?' Eraser's Magazine 66 (November 1862), 595. 'The Trollope Papers', Bodleian Library, MSS Don.c.9. [H.W Holland] 'Professional Thieves', Cornhill 6 (November 1862), 640-53, hereafter noted in the text parenthetically by page number. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 180. Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, 30. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 180-2. 'The Gallows', Saturday Review 14 (25 October 1862), 500-1. Ibid., 500. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), 9. The blurring of boundaries between fiction and non-fiction can also

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54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

68.

69. 70.

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be seen more directly in the 1860s in sensation fiction which often used real events of murder or scandal as the basis for the narrative. 'General Literature', The Economist (9 March 1861), 260. See also R.R. Tiemersma, 'Fiction in the Cornhill Magazine January 1860-March 1871' (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1962), 90. Cornhill began publishing Ruskin's series Unto This Last, but discontinued it because of its controversial views on political economy. See note 21 above. Leslie Stephen, The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen 1 (2 vols.; London: Smith, Elder, 1895), 183-4. That Leslie Stephen was Fitzjames's brother, and that he later became editor of Cornhill, further attests to the very tight network. Ibid., 214. [Fitzjames Stephen,] 'Society', Cornhill 7 (January 1863), 31-41. Quoted in Hugo Young, One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher (1989; reprinted London: Pan Books, 1990), 490. Stephen stood for Parliament as a Liberal in 1873 but was defeated. On the links between politics and Reviews, see Joanne Shattock, Politics and Reviewers: The Edinburgh and the Quarterly (London, Leicester, and New York: Leicester University Press, 1989). See the Times Index, 1862. [H. McCroskey,] 'The Working Man's Restaurant', Cornhill 7 (February 1863), 252-8, hereafter noted in the text parenthetically by page number. Lilian Lewis Shiman, Crusade Against Drink in Victorian England (London: Macmillan, 1988). See the chapters on temperance reformation and legal suasion. See [Francis E. Anstie,] 'Is It Food, Medicine, or Poison?' Cornhill 5 (June 1862), 707-16; [Francis E. Anstie,] 'Does Alcohol Act as Food?' Cornhill 5 (September 1862), 319-29; and [William Benjamin Carpenter,] 'Alcohol: What Becomes of It in the Living Body?', Westminster Review 19 n.s. (January 1861), 33-56. [E.S. Dallas,] 'Poor Man's Kitchen', Cornhill 1 (June 1860), 754. Note that 'Cooking Depots for Working People', Good Words 3 (December 1862), 732-5, takes up the issue of whether such enterprises ought to be profit-driven. The proprietor's letter, in which he states that the scheme was 'purely for the public benefit' and not for profit, was published in Good Words 4 (January 1863), 80. See 'Secret Poisoning', Temple Bar 6 (November 1862), 579-84; 'The Gallows', Saturday Review (October 25, 1862), 500-1; 'The Case of Catherine Wilson', London Review 5 (4 October 1862), 296-8; leaders in the Times (29 September and 22 October 1862). [Francis E. Anstie,] 'The Medical Evidence of Crime', Cornhill 7 (March 1863), 338. Leaders in the Times concerning the case of Jessie M'Lachlan can be found on 31 October, and on 4, 10 and 27 November 1862. This type of sensationalism remains very much a part of contemporary media. While there are levels of sensational coverage, from the salacious to the sanguine, subjects such as capital punishment still offer

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71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

Trollope and the Magazines the broadsheets the opportunity to place sensational crimes on the front page under the label of topical, news journalism. In America especially, through tabloid television programmes such as Hard Copy, the links between sensationalism and 'news' are even more pronounced. [Fitzjames Stephen,] 'The Punishment of Convicts', Cornhill 7 (February 1863), 190. Ibid., 196. See [Walter F. Crofton,] 'English Convicts: What Should Be Done With Them', Westminster Review (January 1863), 1-31. [Fitzjames Stephen,] 'The State Trials', Cornhill 6 (September 1862), 351, hereafter noted parenthetically in the text by page number. Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850-1930 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), chapter 1, especially 16 ff. Nigel Cross, The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 107. He notes that the Garrick was founded for writers in 1831. One could look to the collaborative work of John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill and Helen Taylor to refute the romantic notion of the lone writer. See Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, eds., Sexual Equality: Writings by John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill and Helen Taylor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), especially the Introduction. [G.H. Lewes,] 'Effect of Railways on Health', Cornhill 6 (October 1862), 483. [Francis E. Anstie,] 'Tobacco: Its Use and Abuse', Cornhill 6 (November 1862), 605-15. Ibid., 614. [Francis E. Anstie,] 'Overeating and Undereating', Cornhill 8 (July 1863), 391-400. [G.H. Lewes,] 'Aids to Beauty, Real and Artificial', Cornhill 7 (March 1863), 392. Ibid., 399. Ibid., 400. [E.S. Dallas,] 'Popular Literature - The Periodical Press, Part II', Blackwood's Magazine (February 1859), 180. Ibid., 184. Laurel Brake, 'Theories of Formation. The Nineteenth Century: vol. 1, No. 1, March 1877. Monthly. 2/6', Victorian Periodicals Review 25:1 (Spring 1992), 17. Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), especially the first two chapters. [Coke Richardson,] 'The Sharpshooters of the Press: In England, France, and Germany', Cornhill 7 (February 1863), 238-51. Eugene de Mirecourt, Histoire contemporaine, portraits et silhouettes au XlXeme siecle: Alphonse Karr, no. 38 (Paris: Achille Faure, 1867), 30: 'Posing had become a serious business, a mania, a system, a daily

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91. 92.

93. 94.

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and hourly need. He constantly threw into relief his individuality and made his peculiar manner and character a public spectacle' (my translation). Karr is perhaps best known for his witty epigrams, such as 'Plus c,a change plus c'est la meme chose', written in 1849 about the recent revolutions. Ibid., 31 ff. [Richardson,] 'Sharpshooters of the Press', 242. A great deal of work remains to be done on the subject of cross-dressing in journalism, e.g. those men who adopted a female pose in writing articles or in editing magazines. Ibid., 238. [Robert W Buchanan,] 'Society's Looking Glass', Temple Bar 6 (August 1862), 131.

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Uncovering Periodical Identities: Good Words and the Rejection of Rachel Ray Less than a month after finishing writing the final parts to The Small House at Allington, Trollope began his next serial, Rachel Ray, to be published in the religious monthly Good Words beginning July 1863. Although Trollope completed the commissioned novel and the serialization was advertised, Rachel Ray was never serialized in the magazine, but published in two volumes by Chapman and Hall in October 1863. The editor of Good Words, a Scottish Queen's Chaplain, Dr Norman MacLeod, refused Trollope's novel on the grounds that it would be offensive to his readers. Intensive criticism of Good Words and Trollope from the Evangelical extreme led to the rejection of Rachel Ray. This rejection provides not only an interesting case of serial and book publishing history, but also an example of the difficulty for a purportedly religious magazine such as Good Words to serialize a popular secular novelist such as Trollope. By 1864, Good Words had become the most popular monthly magazine, outselling even Cornhill. What, then, was the conflict between an increasingly popular periodical and perhaps the leading novelist of the circulating libraries? What are the apparently conflicting interests between two types of popular literature, religious and secular? Generally, the cheap religious market in the 1850s and 1860s, as with the cheap secular market, consisted mostly of weeklies whose readership included the lower middle and working classes. But in 1861, after only a year as a weekly, Good Words became a monthly and leaned increasingly towards Cornhill's popular secularism rather than strictly the cheap religious market. In Good Words and his previous periodicals, MacLeod was genuinely committed to redefining cheap religious literature in 48 10.1057/9780230288546 - Trollope and the Magazines, Mark Turner

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several ways - by maintaining a non-denominational policy, by extending the range of its quality fiction, and by repositioning Good Words in the monthly market. However, at a particular moment in the process of broadening the scope of cheap religious literature, Rachel Ray was caught in the tension between stasis and change and so did not reach the pages of the periodical press until some years after volume publication.

PURE MORALS Trollope was no stranger to rejection at the time Rachel Ray was refused. A letter to Thackeray in 1860 acknowledges the rejection of the story 'Mrs. General Talboys' for Cornhill: I trust you to believe me when I assure you that I feel no annoyance as against you at the rejection of my story. An impartial Editor must do his duty. Pure morals must be supplied. And the owner of the responsible name must be the index of purity. A writer for a periodical makes himself subject to this judgment by undertaking such a w o r k . . . (Letters 1, 206) Trollope disagreed with Thackeray's judgement, because he maintained the belief that novelists ought to write 'for the best and wisest of English readers; and not mainly for the weakest' (Letters 1, 207). As head of the largest circulating library, Charles Mudie was the overriding figure of importance in considering the morality of a work of fiction. According to Guinivere Griest, 'what Mudie thought good became more and more important as his library flourished and expanded'. 1 However, it is difficult to assess how Mudie's moral code constructed the contents of periodicals, or how Mudie's censorship reflected what many circulating library subscribers wanted to read. Griest believes that, like other institutions of the age, the circulating library extended and emphasized the ideas with which it began, solidifying them until, at the height of its influence, it appeared to be the originator of these ideas, and was so attacked. 2

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Griest's analysis of this great 'institution of the age' tends to unify the library system in a way which Michel Foucault has called total history, the attempt to present an uncomplicated, coherent version of an historical period. 3 By assuming that Mudie's 'reflected the tastes and attitudes of his readers', 4 Griest's study of Mudie's, while invaluable in providing a portrait of one of the most significant players in the cultural field, tends to ignore the possible conflicts which occurred within the cultural politics of the publishing industry. Whether Mudie was a moral guardian of middle-class literary culture or not, the active agency of individuals like the editor in constructing, not reflecting, readership needs to be examined. Even Griest asserts that Thackeray's Cornhill policy (as described in the previous chapter) was 'even more restrictive than that of the libraries'. 5 In Cornhill the editor constructs the reading audience, determined by the presence of women and children. Relative to other shilling monthlies, Cornhill initially published little highly popular sensational material, which the libraries stocked and which was almost assuredly not familycircle material. Furthermore, there were cases when readers reacted against Mudie's moral code, as in the case of Charles Reade's Cream, which Griest discusses. 6 We cannot assume that Mudie's or the periodicals were passively reflecting what they knew readers wanted; such an approach defuses tensions where they almost certainly existed. Although there were cases of repression by periodicals and libraries, most writers exercised self-censorship as well and it was unusual for most novelists to be banned from a circulating library 7 Writing about literary censorship in the nineteenth century, Donald Thomas asserts that the most important form of moral censorship was one with which the law was not directly concerned. It was a censorship exercised ultimately by booksellers and libraries, penultimately by publishers or editors, and in the first place by authors themselves. And when all this was done, there still remained the individual censorship of the buyer or borrower. 8 The Obscene Publications Act of 1857 attempted to pornographic literature, but the more ambiguous area offensive literature was left to the industry and the Reservations about the circulating library network of

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and triple-deckers began to be expressed vigorously as early as the 1860s, focusing on the popularity of sensation novels by writers such as Mary Braddon. 9 However, Trollope was not a literary rebel, and his fiction was found acceptable by the mass of circulating library readers. The network of moral safeguards described by Thomas above - author, bookseller, publisher, editor, library, consumer - was what George Moore would react against so strongly in Literature at Nurse (1885). Moore protested that 'the librarian rules the roost; he crows, and every chanticleer pitches his note in the same key. He, not the ladies and gentlemen who place their names on the title-pages, is the author of modern English fiction.'10 What, then, happened to Rachel Ray? In fact, the novel is a simple comedy of rural love. Rachel, a young girl who lives with her mother and sister, falls in love with an ambitious young man new to town. A series of obstacles prevents the two from being together. The young man leaves town; the obstacles are overcome; the young man returns and marries Rachel. End of story. There are familiar Trollopian themes woven into the main narrative and thin subplots, such as the pastoral myth of the country, the tension between progress and tradition, and the difficult position for young women whose fate is often determined by others. But none of these things caused Rachel Ray to be rejected by Good Words. It was Trollope's often caustic attacks on the clergy's role as society's moral guardians which forced the magazine's editor to refuse the novel. In fairness to the editor of a religious magazine, it would have been difficult to accept a novel which targets the Low Church and Evangelicals. 11 Robert Polhemus believes that 'Trollope hated Evangelicalism as much as it was in him to hate anything human, and he saw love as a potential influence to counteract its lifedespising mentality'. 12 Rachel's sister, Mrs. Dorothea Prime, is a strictly Low Church widow approaching the important threshold of 30, and a committed member of the local Dorcas Society. Rachel says of the Dorcas women, 'they talk nothing but scandal all the time they are there, and speak any ill they can of the poor young girls whom they talk about'. 13 Trollope's attacks on the Dorcas Society continue throughout the novel, and Miss Pucker the Dorcas hostess is depicted as bitter and spiteful, revelling in Rachel's troubles. The assault on charitable Dorcas women alone would not have been enough to censor the novel, but it is

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interesting to note that other contemporary religious magazines were discussing Dorcas Societies in far more exalting tones. The Family Treasury of Sunday Reading, for example, ran a series of occasional articles (from February 1860 to June 1861) entitled 'Our Dorcas Society', 1 4 in which topics include dress, p e r s o n a l appearance, and home duties - the very points which Trollope derides in Baslehurst's Dorcas women. Founded a year before Good Words, the Family Treasury was also edited by a Scotsman, the Reverend Andrew Cameron, and the two periodicals shared some contributors such as Thomas Guthrie. MacLeod could not really have serialized a novel so scathing about Dorcas Societies when religious contemporaries were so clearly sober about them, unless he was prepared to signal that Good Words was definitely refiguring itself within another, less sober magazine market. Mrs Prime is criticized not merely for being a Dorcas woman, but also because 'she had taught herself to believe that cheerfulness was a sin' (4). An opponent of young love (who is considering her own marriage proposal for most of the novel), she moves out of the cottage when her mother condones Rachel's relationship with the young man, Luke, and so shields herself from worldiness. Mrs Prime's zealously Evangelical Reverend and suitor, Mr Prong, fares the worst in the novel because of his Evangelical intolerance: Mr. Prong was an energetic, severe, hardworking, and, I fear, intolerant young man, who bestowed very much laudable care upon his sermons. The care and industry were laudable, but not so the pride with which he thought of them and their results. He spoke much of preaching the Gospel, and was sincere beyond all doubt in his desire to do so; but he allowed himself to be led away into a belief that his brethren in the ministry did not preach the Gospel, - that they were careless shepherds, or shepherds' dogs indifferent to the wolf. . . (51) PD. Edwards believes Trollope's harsh treatment of the Evangelicals is related to class prejudices, and that Trollope and 'his characters patently compound, and confuse, sectarian prejudice'. 15 Much is made of Mr. Prong not being educated at one of the Oxford colleges, and we are reminded 'that sometimes he forgot his "h's"'

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(52). Like Mrs Tappitt at the brewery, who sometimes speaks coarsely and becomes 'a little forgetful of niceties learned somewhat late in life' (224), Mr Prong tries to present himself as someone he is not. These social pretensions in the religious and secular realms form the basis of Trollope's satire. He never really attacks the doctrines of clergymen and refrains from discussing the finer points of dogma. His approach, seen throughout the Barchester novels especially, is to parody what he perceives as the overearnestness and superficial hypocrisy of the clergy. Mr Comfort, Mrs Ray's Low Church Reverend, is more kindly than Prong but he covets worldly things: When he endeavoured to teach his flock that they should despise money, he thought that he despised it himself. When he told the little children that this world should be as nothing to them, he did not remember that he himself enjoyed keenly the good things of this world. If he had a fault it was perhaps this, that he was a hard man at a bargain. He liked to have all his temporalities, and make them go as far as they could be stretched. (62) He condones dancing in private but condemns worldiness from the pulpit on Sundays. As his name implies, Mr. Comfort fails to live up to the standard he vehemently preaches. The High Churchman Dr. Harford, whose appearance is relatively brief, suffers from an inability to change and tolerate new ideas: But, now in his old age, he was discontented and disgusted by the changes which had come upon him; and though some bodily strength for further service remained to him, he no longer had any aptitude for useful work. A man cannot change as men change. (234) The difficulty for MacLeod was not simply in accepting Trollope's severe treatment of the strict Evangelicals, but in finding any redeemable clergyman in the novel at all. Trollope, of course, did not hold his clergymen to the same standard that the editor of a

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religious periodical would. A few years later, in Clergymen of the Church of England, Trollope writes that 'it almost seems that something approaching to hypocrisy were a necessary component part of the character of the English parish parson, and yet he is a man always on the alert to be honest'. 16 The rural parish priest must preach sternly but remain mild, walk loudly but carry a soft stick. Dr Harford, Mr Comfort and even Mr Prong mean no harm, however much disturbance they inadvertently cause. Whether MacLeod misjudged his author - especially considering the treatment of the Low Church in, say, Barchester Towers (1857) - or was pressured by external forces is another matter. Implicit in Trollope's criticisms of the clergy in Rachel Ray is the opinion that individuals ought to be able to take responsibility for their own lives, and this is presented in gendered terms. Rachel Ray is partly a novel about female duty, Mrs Prime's fixation, and the tensions arising from the conflict between personal and external forms of authority. This is explicit in the first sentence of the novel which introduces the t h e m e of female dependence: There are women who cannot grow alone as standard trees; for whom the support and warmth of some wall, some paling, some post, is absolutely necessary; - who, in their growth, will bend and incline themselves towards some such prop for their life, creeping with their tendrils along the ground till they reach it when the circumstances of life have brought no such prop within their natural and immediate reach. (i) Mrs Ray's inability to make her own decisions, and her need to be guided by a surrogate husband and master, are immediate causes of disruption and anxiety in the novel. Jane Nardin is correct to argue that Mrs Ray is the 'prototype of the angel in the house', but 'her inability to think and act for herself makes her atypical in the novel and undermines this Victorian ideal of womanhood. 1 7 Had Mrs Ray been confident enough in her own moral strength, she need not have sought advice from Mr Comfort, to 'be guided altogether by his counsel' (61). The narrator states, 'I do not know that a widow, circumstanced as was Mrs Ray, could do better than go to her clergyman for advice' (61), but

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the rest of the novel demonstrates that the need to be guided so exclusively by others is a weakness which potentially threatens the comic resolution. Duty to others, then, entails personal integrity and confidence in one's own moral strength. Even after obtaining Mr Comfort's blessing that Rachel should encourage Luke's advances, Mrs Ray was 'not altogether at ease in her mind as to the question, - what line of moral conduct might best befit a devout Christian' (63). Her confusion betrays a belief that her clergyman's advice is contradictory or misguided. Mrs Ray's indecisiveness and perpetual clinging to others are shown alongside her clergyman's failure to provide sound counsel consistent with his preaching. Even the autocrat Mrs Prime turns to Mr Prong because 'he would tell her in what way she had better live' (113), but such advice as he offers appears uncharitable and rigid. Part of Rachel's attractiveness is her insistence that she will not be guided by anyone other than her mother and eventually Luke, and she absolutely refuses to accept her domineering sister's judgements of her behaviour. There are other gendered issues which intersect in the novel which could have made the first volume an uncomfortable read for MacLeod. For example, Mrs Prime's engagement to Mr Prong raises questions about women's property and marriage, and the solution here is that it is better for a woman to keep her property than relinquish her economic power in marriage. As Mrs Ray indicates to her clergyman, money is more important than marriage for Mrs Prime: 'Do let her look sharp after her money', said Mr Comfort. 'Well, that's just it. She's not a bit inclined to give it up to him, I can tell you.' (243) Independence, finally, outweighs duty for Mrs Prime. Ownership of property as it relates to gender is a perennial concern in Trollope's fiction, as we will see in the following chapter in my discussion of The Belton Estate. Here, it is enough simply to realize that Mrs Prime's worries about her independence echo those being articulated in debates in periodicals about single women generally.

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We might also consider that Rachel is described in ways that invoke discourses about the fallen woman. Her sister calls her a 'castaway' (47), a word for fallen women in the mid-nineteenth century. In his Preface to The Vicar of Bullhampton (1870), Trollope calls the fallen woman Carry Brattle a castaway, and in the same year Augusta Webster published her dramatic monologue entitled A Castaway', about an upper-class prostitute. 18 The cultural currency of the word signals Mrs Prime's severity and Rachel's sexual awakening. At the Tappitts' ball, when the joys of physical (sexual) expression are available to her through dancing, Rachel feels 'that her head was sinking beneath the waters' (84), a reference to the drowning woman image implicitly linked to the fallen woman. 19 Later in the novel, Mrs Butler Cornbury links Rachel to mermaids, again connecting water imagery to sexuality (348). That Rachel should be described as a sexualized woman is significant, since, as we shall see later in this chapter, it was sensationalism which formed the basis of objections to Trollope's fiction by strict Evangelicals. The drowning, submerging images serve another purpose, however: to rewrite the symbols of baptism in terms of worldly pleasure. The secularizing of religious imagery also occurs in the figure of the inviting arm in the clouds that Luke shows Rachel in C h a p t e r 3; it is not a religious symbol, as in Michelangelo's God and Adam or in depictions of Christ's outstretched arms, but a sign of earthly love and passion. Discourses about intemperance surround Mr Tappitt, who often finds himself 'detained, by business, in the bar of the Dragon Inn' (296). Mrs Tappitt mixes a strong gin and water to obtain her husband's consent for her extravagances at the ball (70), and his drunkenness after an evening in the Dragon increases her leverage in arguing for his early retirement. His recklessness is linked to his drinking, and there is at least the suggestion that fewer evenings in the Dragon would lead to clearer judgement. After the Tappitts have moved to Torquay, we learn that Tappitt, too, could never again stray away from home with mysterious hints that matters connected with malt and hops must be discussed at places in which beer was consumed. He had no longer left to him any excuse for deviating from the regular course of his life even by a hair's breadth . . .20 (396)

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Tappitt's drinking, which takes him away from the home, weakens his power overall because it demeans his stature as a husband (Mrs Tappitt ultimately ensures the family's security) and blurs his business judgement (Mr Tappitt is shown simply to be wrong). It is at least plausible that a number of discourses which enter the novel - women's property, sexual women, intemperate men - made Rachel Ray uncomfortable for MacLeod at a time of exceptionally intense pressure from Evangelicals. Such cultural discourses, together with the representation of a lax clergy, would have posed a significant problem for the clergyman-editor MacLeod. But at least as meaningful is the indirect assumption that individuals ought to accept responsibility for their own actions, to become their own counsellors, which reduces the position of the clergy as moral guardians in the community. Furthermore, the novel demonstrates that women's reliance on m e n ' s advice and aspirations is m o r e often t h a n not wrongheaded. Recurrently, women are disappointed by men, although in the end Rachel is not. 21 Mr Tappitt is self-deluded in his single-mindedness about Luke, and as in so much Victorian fiction, it is up to the wife, bully though she is, to prevent the ruin of her family. Such subversions of accepted Christian gender roles appearing in a purportedly Evangelical periodical would have been, at the very least, unusual. If we accept that Trollope believed in the educative nature of fiction as he states in the Autobiography (220), then we should also accept that 'the novelist, if he have a conscience, must preach his sermons with the same purpose as the clergyman, and must have his own systems of ethics' (A 222). The novelist becomes the preacher, replacing the clergyman in an increasingly secular society. Rachel Ray demonstrates Trollope's own ethical system in which the need for individuals, and women particularly, to become their own moral guardians is more important than following the strict advice of the pastoral adviser who is probably somewhat hypocritical anyway. Unless he was prepared to promote a value system which undermined the eminence and influence of the clergy, MacLeod had to reject Rachel Ray.

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Trollope and the Magazines THE PROBLEM OF VISIBLE UNITY

'Good Words' will contain instructive and original Articles on various topics of interest to the Christian Family: such as Expositions of Scripture for Sabbath-evening reading; Devotional Papers; Biographical Sketches of the great and good; Illustrations of the glory of God as displayed in His material works: Papers on Social Duties; Travels in Palestine, illustrative of the Bible, &c, &c. It is unnecessary to add, that 'Good Words' will have no denominational connexion, but is intended to be a medium of communication between writers and readers of every portion of the Church of Christ. . .22 The editor stresses the broad acceptance of Christian faiths, and fiction is conspicuously absent from the list of contents. In December 1860 MacLeod published another editor's note reasserting the exact mission of his Good Words: When I accepted the editorship of this Magazine, my principal motive was the desire to provide a Periodical for all the week, whose articles would be wholly original, and which should not only be written in a Christian spirit, or merely blend 'the religious' with 'the secular', but should also yoke them together without compromise.. . . The tens of thousands who buy the Magazine confirm me in the opinion, that I have not misinterpreted the wishes or the wants of the great mass of our Christian community . . . . .. The faithful exhibition of Evangelical truth shall go handin-hand with every department of a healthy literature. 23 While MacLeod may claim to be interpreting his readers correctly, the need for such a statement of purpose at all, 12 months after the first issue and original mission statement had appeared, indicates that the Good Words message was not being conveyed and needed reinforcing. The statement reads more like a justification for editing a magazine which seeks to blend the secular with the religious, and this identity crisis is one that would remain prob-

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On the inside front cover of the first issue in January 1860, MacLeod stated the magazine's original intentions as a religious weekly:

59

lematic for the periodical and its editor, and one which its publisher, Alexander Strahan, was already recognizing. 24 A month later, in January 1861, the magazine changed format. Hitherto, they had relied on the format of the traditional cheap weekly magazine published at a penny or two but also issued in monthly numbers costing usually between five and seven pence. The contents of these magazines were often divided into four sections to indicate the weekly bias, as seen on the January 1860 cover of Good Words (Fig. 2.1). In the changed format, Good Words was bidding for the popular secular monthly market, which did not make distinctions in weekly, let alone Sunday reading. 25 MacLeod may be slightly defensive in the December 1860 issue before he enters the monthly market to compete with mostly non-religious, middle-class, more expensive magazines like Cornhill, and it is interesting to note that he mentions the change in publication, together with a commitment to signature at the end of his editorial note, almost in passing. However, these modifications were momentous and pivotal, especially since an emphasis on individual contributors lessens MacLeod's responsibility for the religious contents, and opens up a space for several denominations to speak independently. An advertisement in January 1861 (Fig. 2.2) confirms the emphasis on named contributors. The move away from the cheap weekly market and the publicizing of individual contributors indicate that Good Words was seeking to combine two 'mass' readerships, the religious and the secular. Eventually seizing on Good Words's unstable identity, and with the prospect of a Trollope serial looming, extreme Evangelical critics would respond harshly in condemning MacLeod's project in 1863. Discussing the culture industry in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer describe the 'unity of opposites' which are the marketplace and independence. 2 6 Although their term is part of a critique of mid-twentieth-century mass culture, it bears considering in relation to Victorian popular literature, and it may be helpful to think of Good Words as trying to negotiate its way between these competing forces. In the case of Good Words there is tension between an essentially commercial publisher (albeit one who believed in the educative power of literature) and his clergyman-editor whose name adorns each page of the magazine: 27 how to negotiate between creating and expanding a 'mass' market while maintaining a theological dedication and broad-mindedness. The earliest years of Good Words

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Trollope and the Magazines

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Uncovering Periodical Identities

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Trollope and the Magazines

demonstrate precisely the conflict between the secular 'mass' and the 'Christian community' which MacLeod hopes to transform. Without relying too heavily on speculation, it is worth noting that MacLeod's second editorial note appears on the very last page of the December 1860 issue, perhaps indicating a reluctance and unease at having to explain the magazine's approach; a bolder, more confident and more common alternative would have been to place the editorial message first in the number and confront any d i s p a r a g i n g r e a d e r s h e a d on. The m a g a z i n e announces the change casually, without addressing either the significance of concentrating on the monthly market or the augmented presence of named contributors. In January 1861, however, Good Words became fully a monthly periodical, and the shift from a cheap religious weekly to a wholesome monthly magazine was signified. Norman MacLeod had previous experience editing both a weekly and monthly religious magazine before he agreed to oversee Good Words for Strahan. In 1849 he became editor of the Edinburgh Christian Magazine, a cheap religious monthly (priced at between two and four pence) at a time when the Church of Scotland had few of its own periodicals. WJ. Couper in Scottish Notes and Queries (1902) called the Christian Magazine 'a kind of understudy . . . of the better known Good Words'}* In a number of editorial notes throughout his ten-year editorship, MacLeod shifted the emphasis of his magazine from one merely reinforcing Church of Scotland views to one more outward-looking. In Volume 3, he writes: But the Editor hopes never to forget, that there are other branches of Christ's Church in Scotland and out of it, in whose well-doing in God's sight we should, as Christians, rejoice, and whose ill-doing we should, as Christians, deplore. 29 The other 'branches' of the Scottish Church are, of course, the Evangelicals to whom MacLeod was both sympathetic and on good terms. Responding to complaints by readers that the magazine was not religious enough for Sabbath-day reading, MacLeod writes in 1856: The Editor takes this opportunity of replying, once [and] for all, to one or two anonymous correspondents, by protesting that he never announced or intended the Magazine 'solely for

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Sunday reading', and will not involve himself in so nice a question, as to what this or that reader may deem suited for the holy day. Each must select articles out of the Magazine for himself, as he does books out of the library, or subjects out of his own mind, and such as he deems most suitable for Sabbath. Those who 'cannot stand the temptation'(l) may fly from it.30 Religious periodicals at this time were still largely sectarian and exclusive, rather than catholic in their tolerances, and were often intended for Sunday reading; MacLeod's attempt to shift the religious emphasis of the Edinburgh Christian Magazine was therefore significant. As MacLeod acknowledges at the time of the attacks on Good Words some years later, I had tried the very same experiment in the old Edinburgh Christian Magazine for ten years.. .. But while I met with constant opposition from the weaker brethren, I held on with the hope of emancipating cheap religious literature from the narrowness and weakness to which it had come. 31 Responding to an Edinburgh professor's objections to Good Words, MacLeod accepts 'the bold experiment of revolutionizing to some extent popular religious literature, by placing it on a wider, truer, and therefore more lasting basis than it had before occupied'. 32 The project dared to redefine what constituted religious reading. MacLeod's dedication to a freer religious literature is rooted in his personal belief that Christians may be united in purpose but differ in particular worship. At the time of the Church of Scotland Disruption in 1843, when the Free Church split from the established Church over the question of patronage, MacLeod remained aloof from the controversy until positioning himself as one of 'The Forty' hovering between the radical Evangelicals and the moderates. He was very close to Thomas Chalmers, an Evangelical leader under whom he studied at Edinburgh, but MacLeod believed that schism was misguided. Referring to the Disruption three years later, he writes, 'I detest Church controversy; it is rarely profitable to writer or reader; it is apt to darken our mind and injure our best affections.' 33 Similarly in 1846, he replies to a colleague:

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Trollope and the Magazines I think there may be all the one-ness which Christ ever intended to exist in the Church, without that kind of visible unity which you seem to contend for. The grand problem is how to obtain the greatest amount of one-ness in essential doctrine - in affection - in work - with the greatest amount of personal and congregational freedom as to government and worship. 34

In the same year, MacLeod attended the Evangelical Alliance and also travelled to America, two experiences of which he records, 'I have mingled more with other minds - got hold of more than during my whole lifetime.' 35 MacLeod was also influenced by the example of Thomas Arnold, who ran his own short-lived cheap religious periodical in 1831. Arnold's weekly Englishman's Register was intended to be a 'real Poor Man's Magazine', but his venture lasted only a few months. 3 6 As noted by his brother, MacLeod 'had long cherished the conviction that a periodical was greatly required of the type sketched by Dr Arnold, which should embrace as great a variety of articles as those which give deserved popularity to publications professedly secular, but having in spirit and aim distinctively Christian'. 37 MacLeod, rather like Arnold, was a Churchman more interested in the broadness of Christian thought than in the particulars of Ecclesiastical government; he brought this attitude and Arnold's example with him to the Edinburgh Christian Magazine in 1849, and later to Good Words. The Edinburgh Christian Magazine, of which the circulation was never more than 5000, was not the only periodical attempting to renegotiate the borders of healthy religious reading. Throughout the 1850s, a number of cheap religious periodicals were established in an attempt to capitalize on the growing family-reading market for weeklies. 38 The Religious Tract Society, for example, began publishing two weeklies priced one penny in the early 1850s, The Eeisure Hour (1852-1908) and Sunday at Home (18541940). Like many weeklies, as noted above, the magazines were also issued in monthly parts for five pence. That the Tract Society was targeting the family circle is best indicated in their magazine's subtitles: The Eeisure Hour was A Family Journal of Sabbath Reading'. The frontispiece to The Eeisure Hour included an illustration of paterfamilias reading to his family (Fig. 2.3). Both magazines, as cheap weeklies, sought to include working-class readers among their circulation. In 'A Word With Our Readers' in the first issue of The Eeisure Hour, the magazine states,

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m -m

Fig. 2.3 Frontispiece to The Eeisure Hour (1852)

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Trollope and the Magazines

The periodical often led with fiction, and included at least one large illustration in each issue. As a Sabbath magazine, Sunday at Home was more sober in its presentation and contents than the weekly Eeisure Hour. There are very few illustrations, and advertisements are strictly religious in nature. However, Sunday at Home was intended to be non-denominational, believing that 'to read only one's own Church Magazine is apt, and almost sure indeed, to foster a narrow spirit'. 40 This statement could be read as a theological justification for a commercial change in periodical literature seeking a larger readership. With these two publications, the Religious Tract Society began to push cheap religious periodicals toward the popular, family weekly market, although a distinction between weekday and Sunday reading is maintained. There was a spectrum of so-called family papers in the decades preceding Good Words, many of which were not intended as religious reading. For example, the Family Magazine of 1830 was 'a work peculiarly adapted to the FAMILY CIRCLE'41 but was not a religious magazine. The Family Friend which began in 1849 (the same year as MacLeod's Edinburgh Christian Magazine) tried to find a middle ground between religious and secular periodical literature: Twelve months ago it occurred to the writer that a Serial was needed, differing in character from its predecessors - in its tone, more chaste than some, but less austere than others. A medium between two extremes was to be struck out, without the sacrifice of a principle, or the omission of a duty. For years pernicious emanations from Salisbury Square and Holywell Street had poured out their baneful influences upon the rising and inquiring mind of the nation, mingling poison with sufficient sweetness to partially disguise it; an evil which Paternoster Row had done too little (though, indeed, it had done much) to counteract. The religious publications - being exclusive in their character - were unaccepted by miscellaneous society, and hence they were like seed scattered upon soil already teeming with pro-

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we dedicate our pen to the thoughtful of every class. We aspire to catch the attention of peer and peasant, of master and man. From the highest to the lowest, there is no circle from which we desire to exclude ourselves; and none, we would hope, which will be desposed [sic] to exclude us. 39

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67

This monthly magazine quickly became fortnightly and by the end of 1850 announced a circulation of 80,000. In 1853, John Cassell began his highly successful Cassell's Illustrated Family Paper, published weekly for one penny or in monthly parts at five or six pence. Cassell's was heavily illustrated, more than most cheap weeklies, and led with serial fiction. There were miscellaneous essays, a weekly chess game, and personal classifieds to broaden appeal. Cassell's was not strictly religious, but it was intended as family reading, and its circulation reached a staggering 250,000. However, other periodicals used the 'family magazine' rubric to endorse firmly Sunday reading, as in the case of the twopenny weekly Family Sunday Book, 'Designed to supply interesting and suitable Reading for the Leisure Hours of Sunday' (1851), the Family Treasury of Sunday Reading (1859-79), and the British Evangelist and Christian Magazine for the Home Circle (1861). There was no single doctrinal ideology conveyed in the notion of family papers, which were not necessarily religious at all. At the time Good Words went monthly in 1861, Cassell founded the Quiver, a more religious penny weekly (also issued monthly) which was not illustrated although it carried fiction. As announced in the subtitle, its goal was 'the advancement of religion in the homes of the people'. It was this cheap, hybridized, popular, family market with weekly and monthly issues toward which religious periodicals in the 1850s were moving, 43 and MacLeod recognized the potential for a religious weekly while editing the Edinburgh Christian Magazine. The final issue of the Christian Magazine appeared in March 1859, and by May, MacLeod was associated with the Christian Guest, which became Good Words in 1860. The Guest was launched in February 1859, priced one halfpenny weekly and three pence monthly, published by Strahan, and subtitled A Family Magazine for Leisure Hours and Sundays'. Note how this title combines the titles from magazines such as Eeisure Hour (a phrase also used in the subtitle to The Family Friend), the 'Sunday' periodicals and the 'Family' periodicals. Such hybridity indicates that magazine identities were in flux, not fixed definitively within either the religious or secular markets, that these two markets overlapped and shared certain qualities. 44 Upon MacLeod's arrival in May, the Guest cover changes and the periodical is now subtitled A

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ductiveness: they did not sufficiently fertilize the barren waste. These opinions gave birth to The Family Friend}2

Trollope and the Magazines

Family Magazine for Sunday Reading' 'Revised by the Rev. Norman M'Leod, D.D., Glasgow' (Fig. 2.4). Interestingly, MacLeod emphasized 'Sunday Reading' when that is precisely what he argued against in the Edinburgh Christian Magazine; such an emphasis changes the target market. Strahan was also courting MacLeod to be editor of the envisioned Good Words. Few magazines displayed the editor's name on the cover as the Guest did with MacLeod; most, in fact, remain anonymous and do not mention the editor at all. The Guest's 'revised by' is reminiscent of an altogether different weekly, Household Words, A Weekly Journal Conducted by Charles Dickens,' 45 which ceased publication at the end of May 1859, the month MacLeod began at the Guest. In the final issue of the Guest in December 1859, when it is announced that the magazine would become Good Words, MacLeod's prospectus for Good Words states: It may seem unwarrantable in the minister of a large and populous city parish to u n d e r t a k e the labours and accept the responsibility of conducting a weekly magazine. I have been induced, however, to engage heartily and hopefully in this new and catholic enterprise by the cordial promises of literary aid which I have received from many well known and tried writers connected with almost every branch of the Church of Christ, whose 'Good Words' have become as 'household words' in our Christian homes. 46 MacLeod echoes Dickens by using both the unique term for Dickens's editing and the title of the periodical itself. In a direct way, this indicates a bid for the popular, secular, weekly Household Words market which Dickens's journal was just vacating. Having tried unsuccessfully to popularize a cheap religious monthly during the 1850s, MacLeod moved into the cheap weekly market, hoping to synthesize his Arnoldian ideas of an inclusive, cheap, popular, religious periodical.

THE 'MINGLE-MANGLE' OF SECULAR AND SACRED Good Words, as a weekly, and Cornhill, a monthly, both started up in the magazine boom year of 1860 and published their first issues on the same day. While Thackeray's magazine broke

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Uncovering Periodical Identities

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W E & Y NUMBERS, PRICE ONE HALFPENNY.

Trollope and the Magazines

circulation records with its huge initial sales, Good Words, although outselling Cornhill in Scotland, built up its circulation gradually, often looking and learning from the Cornhill lead. 47 Patricia Srebrnik, Strahan's biographer, sees the early years of Good Words as a competition to outsell Cornhill. In 1862 Strahan stepped up the competition against Cornhill, since the circulation of Good Words was within 'striking distance' of the more popular monthly. 48 According to Srebrnik, 'the next step in Strahan's campaign to make Good Words the most popular monthly magazine of the day must have seemed obvious', 49 so in April MacLeod approached Trollope 'seeking crumbs from a rich man's table' (Fetters 1, 177). Good Words's circulation was about 70,000, compared to Cornhill's 72,500 in December of 1862. The religious periodical lacked a widely popular serial novelist of Trollope's standing, and by approaching him for a serial, the men behind Good Words sought to redress that omission. In 1862, there were fiction serials by Sarah Tytler (the pen name of Henrietta Keddie) and Dinah Mulock (author of the popular 1856 novel ]ohn Halifax, Gentleman), w h o was marginalized as a 'women's novelist' by most reviewers. 50 That MacLeod may have had his reservations about courting an author like Trollope is best indicated later in the same letter: 'I think you could let out the best side of your soul in Good Words better far than even in Cornhill' (Fetters 1, 178). Presumably, for MacLeod and Good Words, Trollope's best side would be his least worldly and least religiously antagonistic side. The details of the arrangement between Trollope and the periodical were negotiated by Strahan and the author. It was agreed in December 1862 that Trollope would write a serial of two-volume length to begin in July 1863, for which he would receive £1000. Strahan must have been pleased to have a circulating-library author of the most popular order commissioned for his periodical, especially since Trollope's The Small House at Allington had begun in September 1862 in Cornhill, with favourable indicators from the press and public. Meanwhile, Trollope contributed a short story, 'The Widow's Mite', to the January 1863 Good Words which seems ideally suited to the magazine. The title of the story refers to a parable from the Bible (Mark 12:43) in which a widow offers a pittance, though a significant amount for her, to the poor. The plot describes a young woman's decision to wear ordinary Sunday clothes, rather than a new wedding outfit, to her own wedding in order to give the money saved to cotton famine relief. Perhaps

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a gentle story such as this, but extended over several months, was what MacLeod hoped Trollope would produce. Rachel Ray, however, was not such a story. The next mention of the publishing of Rachel Ray in Trollope's surviving letters is in June 1863. Writing to the intended illustrator, Millais, Trollope rails playfully: X. (a Sunday magazine) has thrown me over. They write me word that I am too wicked. I tell you at once because of the projected, and now not-to-be-accomplished, drawings. They have tried to serve God and the devil together, and finding that goodness pays best, have thrown over me and the d e v i l . . . . I am unfit for the regenerated, and trust I may remain so, wishing to preserve a character for honest intentions. (Fetters 1, 220) Trollope, no doubt with tongue in cheek, states here that Good Words is a Sunday magazine, although that is too strict a definition for the periodical by this time. In a letter to Strahan of 10 June, he defends himself in a more businesslike fashion: I am sorry that you and Dr MacLeod have been forced to the conclusion at which you have arrived with reference to my story I claim for myself however to say that the fault in the matter is yours, & not mine. I have written for you such a story as you had a right to expect from me, - judging as you of course did judge by my former works. If that does not now suit your publication I can only be sorry that you should have been driven to change your views. (Fetters 1, 221) Trollope believed he was 'thrown over' because of vehement attacks on MacLeod and Good Words by strict Evangelicals. Owen Chadwick describes Evangelicals as 'men of the Reformation, who preached the cross, the depravity of man, and justification by faith alone'. 51 In the strictest sense this is true, although by the 1860s distinctions between, for example, Evangelicals and Low Churchmen were blurred and the terms used interchangeably. Elisabeth Jay describes Anglican Evangelicalism somewhat more loosely as a

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Trollope and the Magazines

movement in which 'an emphasis on a personal relationship with God, its rejection of the corporate authority of the church, and the premium it placed upon the individual's judgement assured a man of a significance frequently denied him in secular society'. 52 But there was divergence within the Evangelical movement; Jay distinguishes, for example, between the Evangelicalism represented by the Record and the more moderate Christian Observer.53 It was the most extreme faction which attacked Good Words and Trollope particularly. We need to keep in mind the events leading u p to the rejection of Rachel Ray: Good Words changed format from a weekly to a monthly in January 1861; the agreement for Rachel Ray was finalized in December 1862; Trollope's story 'The Widow's Mite' was published in January 1863; and adverts for the Rachel Ray serial appeared in January 1863. Most importantly, in the first few weeks of April 1863, the Evangelical paper the Record published a series of articles questioning the soundness of MacLeod's theology and that of several contributors such as Principal Tulloch, Dr John Caird, and Dr Stanley.54 The Record was a tri-weekly Anglican Evangelical newspaper with a circulation of between 3000 and 4000. It denounced all Catholicism, Anglo or otherwise, preached sternly for the observance of the Sabbath, and campaigned strongly against Essays and Reviews in the 1860s.55 The Record states unequivocally that 'Good Words is doing about as dangerous a work as any journal of the present day', especially in the 'mingle-mangle' of the secular with the sacred (2). The zealous Evangelical publication rejects the 'liberalism of the day which permits such a free mix of opinion together', meaning the appearance of Low Church side by side with other groups in Good Words (3). The magazine's popularity is also a cause of great concern: 'We do not wonder that the magazine is popular. Give us our times for God, and our times without God, and the mammon; and no man can serve two masters' (26). And the Record singles out Trollope, along with the Christian Socialist Charles Kingsley and others, as those to whom Good Words offers its 'services to carry the deadly dose to the lips of our sons and daughters' (7). Adelaide Proctor is called 'a relatively recent convert to Popery', while the illustration to Dora Greenwell's poem in April 1863 is also Popish (55). Remarkably, the Record manages to discover sensation novels in Good Words, in which 'the most ungodly sentiments are uttered, and left to work their evil effects on the young mind',

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and it names Anthony Trollope, this year's chief sensation-writer for Good Words' (57). Because these articles were also circulated in pamphlet form, their visibility was increased and longevity assured. Although Trollope's letter to MacLeod about the rejection does not survive, MacLeod's response does, and is worth quoting at length: What I tried to explain and wished you to see when we met here, was the peculiar place which Good Words aimed at occupying in the field of cheap Christian literature. I have always endeavoured to avoid on the one hand the exclusively narrow religious ground - narrow in its choice of subjects & in its manner of treating them - hitherto occupied by our 'Religious' Periodicals; and on the other hand to avoid altogether whatever was either antagonistic to the truths or spirit of Christianity, and also as much as possible whatever was calculated to offend the prejudices, far more the sincere convictions and feelings of fair & reasonable Evangelical man. Within these extremes it seemed to me that a sufficiently extensive field in which any novelist might roam & find an endless variety of life & manners to describe with profit to all & without giving offence to a n y . . . . . . . . You do me wrong however in thinking .. . merely because of your Name I have sacrificed you to the vile Record & to the cry it & its followers have raised against you, as well as against me. . . . my only pain is that the Record will suppose that its attack has bullied me into the rejection of your story! (Fetters 1, 222-5) It certainly seems that MacLeod was bullied, although, again, we see the difficulty MacLeod and Strahan have in publishing a magazine for all the week, broadly Christian with Evangelical truth, together with a popular serial novelist. The Eiterary Times would not have made the situation easier for MacLeod when in the middle of the controversy it asserted that Good Words was 'as highly interesting and amusing as the most secular reader could desire'. 56 MacLeod recognizes in the letter to Trollope that the market he wishes the periodical to occupy is an anxious one, and his earnest defence of his editorial policy is appealing. But it is hard not to see a link between the Record attacks and the

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rejection of Trollope's serial, which was heavily advertised well in advance of its projected commencement in July 1863. Furthermore, Strahan had approved of the early chapters of Rachel Ray already set in type by the time MacLeod intervened and subsequently rejected the novel. 57 Reviewing what they saw as a dull July 1863 issue of Good Words, the Illustrated Eondon News judged that it 'seems to have been more affected by the rebukes of the Record than its directors will allow'. 58 The Record's assertion that Trollope was chiefly a sensation writer for Good Words appears based on little evidence. With its guilty secret at the centre, Orley Farm, published in part issue by Chapman and Hall in 1861-62, approaches some of the conventions of the sensation novel, but it was not sensational in the style of Mary Braddon's or Wilkie Collins's novels. Appearing in the same month as the Record attacks was an article in the Quarterly Review on sensation novels, 59 which discusses the three chief reasons why sensation novels flourish: periodicals, circulating libraries, and railway bookstalls. It is worth remembering that Trollope, by 1863, only wrote in serial form (although not all novels were published periodically), and he was among the most popular circulatinglibrary authors. In the article, divisions are made between types of sensation novel - the bigamy novels, the newspaper novels, and the theological novels, to name but a few. The theological sensation novel is defined as describing particular religious doctrines offensively, so that a novel might be anti-Dissenter or anti-Low Church. Rachel Ray could have been seen in these terms when it was eventually published several months after this article, and, in fact, MacLeod may have rejected Rachel Ray with the idea of Trollope as theologically sensational in mind. Certainly, Trollope's treatment of clergymen is inflexible and uncharitable, especially when it comes to the Evangelical Mr Prong. However, Trollope attacks manner rather than doctrines, and the Quarterly Review does not single out Trollope as a sensation writer as the Record does. Perhaps picking u p the debate over Trollope's place in popular literature, a Scottish periodical, The Rose, the Shamrock, and the Thistle, published an article in June 1863 which defends contemporary novels and states that Trollope among others is not sensational, rather one of those writers who when 'we read them we rise with a better appreciation of them than before'. 60 The magazine defends the morality of popular serials because of the intense examination novels must tolerate:

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75

In April 1863, Trollope was at the mercy of Good Words' Tittle world'. 'The principal organ of the Anglican evangelicals', 62 the Christian Observer, also entered the debate about Good Words. With a circulation of about 1000, and occupying the moderate Evangelical middle ground, however, the Observer did not cause the stir that the more extreme Record repeatedly did. Acknowledging 'the recent ferment that has lately been caused about [Good Words]', an Observer article goes on to praise the magazine's contributions. 63 They approve of the fiction and most of the secular, occasional pieces, and although they are anxious about the rigour of MacLeod's editorial eye, they are hopeful for the future. In November 1865 an article on sensation novels appeared in the Christian Observer which, perhaps surprisingly for an Evangelical publication, states that neither fiction nor sensationalism are necessarily evil.64 With a sensible understanding of public tastes, the article recognizes strategically that the way to guide fiction is to accept it but keep an eye on it, rather than oppose it outright. The Observer, at least, is resigned to the fact that 'it is a magazine age: there can be no doubt about that'. 65 The Record attacks on Good Words did not go unanswered. A nonconformist, Congregational paper, the Patriot, rallied around Good Words and its editor.66 The Patriot articles warn of the danger of overzealous Evangelicals and point out inconsistencies in the Record attacks. However, the Patriot articles (also circulating in pamphlet form) are rather more concerned to attack the Record than to defend Good Words. MacLeod, for example, is not vindicated unreservedly, as the Patriot also believes that Good Words would be better off without the services of Trollope: We regret the employment of Mr. Trollope and others of his class, believing that in thus entering into competition with the 'sensation' magazine, Good Words is abandoning its own proper position, and departing, in some measure, from its original design. 67

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Having passed the editorial scrutiny and been deemed worthy of insertion they have next to undergo the criticism of the little world among whom the periodical circulates, and the press, when everything of an injurious nature is certain to be most mercilessly exposed and denounced. 61

Trollope and the Magazines

A few lines later, the article asserts that Good Words' 'extraordinary success' is leading the magazine down. Strahan was hoping to imitate to an extent the Cornhill, a secular magazine par excellence. Although Cornhill was not a sensational magazine in the broad shilling monthly market, in 1863 it was serializing a sensational bigamy novel, Frederick Greenwood's Margaret Denzil's History, and Evangelical Record readers would certainly have disapproved. Even MacLeod's defenders feel that to publish Trollope (whose serialization of The Small House at Allington was being widely praised in many periodicals) is to take too significant a step in the wrong direction. Furthermore, and perhaps more telling, the Patriot, like the Record, worries that the very popularity of Good Words is a sign of degradation. At a time when Strahan is chasing Cornhill for sales, and has sought to employ Trollope as one means to that end, the outcry against Good Words is underlined by a fear that a mass readership is incompatible with religious dedication. Publicly, circulation leaders such as Good Words and Cornhill were associated, as the Eiterary Times made clear in April 1863: 'Good Words' continues to take the lead in the circulation of our magazines. This is not surprising, considering that it contains, for half price of the 'Cornhill', as much entertaining and instructive reading as that renowned periodical. 68 The huge popularity of the magazines is further connected to the institution of the libraries, as the article on sensation novels in the Quarterly Review asserts: 'the circulating library has been the chief hot-bed for forcing a crop of writers without talent and readers without discrimination.' 69 The writer of this article proposes that circulating libraries be formed which only make available books over 20 years old.70 And in that suggestion we have the crux of the argument against Trollope and others: contemporary popular culture is seen to be not only valueless but also, for the Record and the Patriot, dangerous. 71

GOOD BRACING AIR Trollope was doubtless aware that his position as a leader in circulating-library novels made him open to attack from those

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77

You know that my novels are not sensational. In Rachel Ray I have attempted to confine myself absolutely to the commonest details of commonplace life among the most ordinary people, allowing myself no incident that would be even remarkable in every day life. I have shorn my fiction of all romance. (Fetters 1, 238) Trollope was not alone in thinking his fiction, especially Rachel Ray, unsensational. George Eliot, writing to Trollope thanking him for his gift, responds: But there is something else I care yet more about, which has impressed me very happily in all those writings of yours that I know - it is that people are breathing good bracing air in reading them - it is that they, the books are filled with belief in goodness without the slightest touch of maudlin. They are like pleasant public gardens, where people go for amusement, & whether they think of it or not, get health as well. (Fetters 1, 238) As one writer complimenting another, Eliot may simply be overgenerous in her enjoyment of Rachel Ray, however, her belief in Trollope's hearty, healthy realism is probably genuine. Reviews of Rachel Ray tended to support Eliot in her appreciation. Many reviewers agreed on the simplicity of the novel and its lack of sensationalism. The Athenaeum review is typical: In these days of mysterious romances it is remarkable for absence of mystery; from first to last it has neither riddle nor surprise, - no point of harrowing anxiety, no trick for stimulating the curiosity of readers greedy for strange stories. 72 The Illustrated London News declared that there was 'not a single sensational incident' 73 in the novel. Whether the reviewers actually thought highly of the novel or not, none found anything

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who denigrated popular literature. In a note to George Eliot which he included with the two volumes of Rachel Ray in October 1863, Trollope writes:

Trollope and the Magazines

shocking or extraordinary in Rachel Ray. As if to put an end to any further rumours that Good Words lacked religious conviction, in July 1863, the month when Rachel Ray was to have begun serialization, the magazine published an article entitled A Word of Remonstrance with Some Novelists', attacking the vogue for sexualized heroines and arguing that 'falseness, dishonesty, murder even, are rapidly claiming our most intense sympathies'. 74 The void left by the sacrificed novel was in a sense filled by the proclamations against wicked literature. In fact, the Saturday Review found Rachel Ray too realistic and too unsensational. Trollope is described as writing for a particular market and supplying 'the article in demand'. 75 The reviewer enjoys Trollope but feels there is a 'satiety' in any author of realism, and he hopes the next fashion in fiction will be 'more exciting and poetical'. 76 Here, Trollope fails to please because he is not sensational enough, rather than too suggestive. It should be noted, however, that the Saturday Review was no fan of fiction, and that although its reviewers generally approved of Trollope, his brand of photographic realism would eventually be slated by the periodical in the mid-1860s.77 In the Rachel Ray review, Trollope's fiction has become, like realism generally, too similar. In this argument, the Saturday Review's reservations about mass culture looks forward to Adorno and Horkheimer. In their critique of reproduced mass culture 80 years later, they suggest that sameness in cultural products is one result of mass culture. For them, popular culture has become 'rubbish', a value judgement I wish to avoid. But their belief that the culture industry is 'a constant reproduction of the same thing' 7 8 is relevant to the Victorian publishing industry, especially the network between serializations and circulating libraries in which self-censorship and imposed morals demarcated boundaries of popular fiction. It is true that Trollope and others were supplying a market hungry not simply for novels in general but for domestic fiction and realism in particular, and the effect on the mass market was undoubtedly an element of sameness.

GOLD AND SILVER The difficulty for Strahan as publisher was in exploiting the popular, secular monthly market to the full, while retaining the theologi-

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cal soundness Good Words professed to have. Again, the conflict is the same as that outlined in MacLeod's editorial in 1860: how to blend the secular, which is to say the popular, with the religious in a seamless way. In an 1861 letter, MacLeod describes his difficult task: 'The spirit and teaching of the Magazine form a constant subject of anxiety. I want to intone all its services more with the direct Christian spirit, and shall do so, or give it up.' 79 Strahan's commercial commitment to Good Words, obvious in his race with Cornhill, is apparent in his response to the Record attacks. According to Srebrnik, Strahan welcomed the additional sales which the negative attention brought the magazine, whereas MacLeod became increasingly sensitive to criticism and insisted that all contributions be cleared through him before printing: I beseech you to let me see every MS. or proof before being printed off. I, as a minister, am more conversant than you can be with religious topics and the pulse of the religious world. Besides, as you know, my chief delight in Good Words is its power of doing good. God knows this is more precious to me than all the gold and silver on earth could be.80 Of course, Strahan as publisher was responsible for the gold and silver side of Good Words. Perhaps not surprisingly, by June 1862 Strahan had moved his firm from Edinburgh to Ludgate Hill, London, just round the corner from Paternoster Row and the centre of the publishing industry. MacLeod remained in his Glasgow parish. It seems Strahan believed 'that the magazine might benefit from a bit of remodelling, or at least a new public image', 81 especially after some recent criticisms which made Good Words appear bland and static. It was at this time that Trollope was approached for 'The Widow's Mite', the belief being that by enlisting a popular writer, the changing of the image could begin. As noted, Trollope's intended serialization was heavily advertised, as was Millais's expected contribution as illustrator. The team which had proven so successful for Cornhill had been poached by Strahan in an attempt to revamp and commercialize Good Words. Strahan's bid to overtake Cornhill did not come cheaply, and the move to London only added to the firm's substantial debts. In 1863 Strahan and Company borrowed £4000, and a year later an additional £6000, from their stationers, Spalding and Hodge. In an 1866 financial agreement, Strahan used the copyrights to

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Uncovering Periodical Identities

Trollope and the Magazines

Good Words, the Sunday Magazine, the Contemporary Review, and the Argosy to secure an additional sum from Spalding and Hodge and from J.S. Virtue and Company. Although he was frequently embarking on new periodical v e n t u r e s , Strahan was never without the looming shadow of large debts, and by 1872 he had lost the copyright to Good Words and other magazines. In a much-publicized battle for the Contemporary Review in 1876-77, Strahan maintained links with strict Evangelicals which forced his editor, James Knowles, to separate and found his own freethinking periodical, The Nineteenth Century.82 In the early history of Good Words we see the characteristics which would mark Strahan's publishing career - lavish expenditure and controversy around his religious commitments. On 28 January 1863, a full-page advertisement appeared in The Times providing excerpts from many of the articles from the January issue of Good Words.83 The advertisement is 'disguised' as copy from the paper; there are no distinct variations in type as in other advertisements, and the same number of columns are retained. It has the look of news, and one could flip though the pages of the paper and never notice that the whole of page 5 is an advertisement for Good Words. In fact, as the Publishers' Circular recognized, Strahan's advertisement was a novelty in Victorian publishing: The advertisement of Good Words in the Times on Thursday last constitutes a new feature in the advertising of our popular periodicals - copious specimens being given of each paper, extending in some cases to almost an entire article; the advertisement, which occupies an entire page in small type, costing about one hundred and thirty pounds. The January number of this publication is stated to have reached a circulation of 110,000 copies. 84 If this circulation figure is true, or even close to true, Good Words had outsold Cornhill by several tens of thousands. The tremendous cost of the advertisement, more than Trollope was paid for 'The Widow's Mite', is further evidence of Strahan's commitment to popularizing Good Words. The magazine's identity problem and the gradual move towards commercialization can also be seen by looking at Good Words covers in the early 1860s. The original January 1860 cover (Fig. 2.1)

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de-emphasizes the religious nature of the magazine; apart from the list of contents and MacLeod's 'D.D.', there is no striking visual indication that the magazine is dedicated to religion broadly, although there is a discreet cross motif in the border. A month later, there is a different illustration on the cover, the typeface is bolder and the prominence of the illustrations highlighted (Fig. 2.5). Strahan firmly believed that illustrations ought to be an integral part of the magazine's educative purpose. 85 In March, 'one of Her Majesty's Chaplains for Scotland' is placed under MacLeod's name to emphasize his religious authority. As noted above, unlike in almost all comparable periodicals, the editor's name also appeared across the top of the pages inside, augmenting his authoritative presence. Although the March inside cover and several subsequent inside covers list the range of contributors who have published in the magazine to date, contributions remain unattributed on the front cover. The identity of the magazine, then, is based on the authority of the editor, but his authority is qualified by the discreet attribution of some contributors. Laurel Brake has argued, in discussing the Nineteenth Century's formation from Strahan's Contemporary Review, that 'signature underlines the diversity for the reader'. 86 In the case of Good Words, evidence shows a dual approach to signature: to promote a homogeneous image under the editor's banner waved on each page, yet to allow some distance from particular contributors at the same time. In 1861 the cover changes dramatically, with a new illustration emphasizing the familial, religious, and educative nature of the periodical (Fig. 2.6). In bold type beneath 'Good Words' is written A Magazine for all the Week'. The subtitle reminds us of the original mission statements, to provide a periodical with contents suitable for Sabbath reading and also entertaining weekday reading. Interestingly, the cover change occurs a month after MacLeod's editorial defence of the periodical in December 1860, discussed earlier in this chapter. 'Edited by Norman MacLeod, D.D'. appears beneath the subtitle, maintaining the authority figure of the editorclergyman. MacLeod's name continues to appear at the top of every single page in the issue. Also in 1861, the contents section begins listing contributors, a way of distancing each contribution from the individual theology and authority of MacLeod. The July 1862 cover notes the move to London, and a month later we notice several more changes. Beneath MacLeod's name is written 'one of Her Majesty's Chaplains for Scotland', reiterating

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Uncovering Periodical Identities

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Trollope and the Magazines

the religious authority particularly of the editor. Beneath MacLeod's name and title is written, 'And illustrated under the superintendence of Dalziel Brothers'. The brothers Dalziel were among the great woodcut printers of the 1860s, and they, along with Swain, did most of Cornhill's highly regarded illustrations. The prominence of the woodcut printers on the cover was also a way to advertise the illustrations, an extremely popular feature in the weeklies but also, after Cornhill, in some monthlies. 'The right of Translating Articles from Good Words is reserved by the Authors' appears at the bottom of the cover, under the price of sixpence (half the price of Cornhill), to indicate the internationalism of the Good Words readership. The price difference between the two leading monthlies indicates the different readerships which each periodical was creating. Cornhill aimed at a more affluent reader, while Good Words maintained its roots in cheap literature and probably had a broader socio-economic range of reader. Since both were family magazines, the readerships would have had a large proportion of women readers, as is partly demonstrated by the prominence of domestic fiction. By 1863, less advertising space on the inside front and the back covers is taken up by Strahan, who hitherto advertised past Good Words volumes or book publications. More precisely, the last regular advertisement for Good Words appearing in the magazine itself is in August 1862, and the last Strahan publishing advertisement two months later. Either Strahan was now attracting more and diverse advertisers and no longer felt the need to promote his own business or, more probably, he needed money. For whatever reason, by 1863 there are advertisements for rollerskates, medical products, stationers, clocks, starch, and, perhaps surprisingly for a religious periodical, whisky. By the end of the year there are also advertisements for wines, sherry, port and champagne, which continue throughout the 1860s. Other religious periodicals, such as Strahan's own Sunday Magazine and the Christian Observer, have very similar advertisements, but none for alcohol. Generally, advertisements in the front and back covers in other religious periodicals promote other religious publications, and the advertisements are less illustrated and more sober than in Good Words. According to a Victorian advertising agent, Henry Sell, the editorial policy of a newspaper or periodical influences how the advertisements are read, and 'Sell finds proof of this in the "extraordinary success" of advertising in the much respected

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religious papers'. 87 Therefore, by virtue of their inclusion in a publication like Good Words, the alcohol advertisements were validated, even consecrated, as acceptable commodities. Like Mr Comfort in Rachel Ray, Good Words was positioned on the fine line between religion and worldliness, but the magazine's advertising base, a large portion of revenue for periodicals even in the 1860s, relied mostly on secular products. By 1864, however, even the emphasis on Good Words as suitable for Sunday reading is removed. The subtitle for the periodical is now An Illustrated Monthly Magazine', and the link between the Dalziel name and MacLeod's name, so close before, has been weakened; the original intention of blending Sabbath and weekday reading has been consumed by the more commercial and unreligious 'illustrated monthly magazine'. It is precisely during this period of identity crisis in the first few volumes - of changing covers, shifting emphasis, and expansion - that MacLeod rejects Rachel Ray for Good Words. It is true that Trollope's novel is critical of the clergy, but the Evangelicals particularly are singled out only slightly more than the other Churchmen. Did the attacks in the Record merely incite Trollope to greater parody rather than temper his teasing irreverence? That he was able to write a wholesome story for Good Words is shown in 'The Widow's Mite'; why he chose not to write about religion in a similar vein in Rachel Ray is another question entirely. Trollope held no grudge against MacLeod or Good Words, and a second tame story, 'The Two Generals', appeared in December 1863. What is more telling of the peculiar position of Good Words is the appearance in 1864 of Mrs Henry Wood's Oswald Cray, the most sensational novel serialized in the periodical in the early 1860s.88 It was advertised as 'by the author of "East Lynne"', Wood's hugely successful sensation novel of 1861, without any anxiety that the wrath of the Recordites would be brought down upon the magazine. If Trollope caused so much trouble, surely Mrs Henry Wood would be seen as equally, if not more, harmful? The central plot in Oswald Cray is a mystery to discover whether a rich old heiress was murdered with chloroform by her heir, a respectable doctor. The novel was universally slated, and the Athenaeum wondered whether the story was so tedious because it 'appeared in the pages of Good Words, a periodical in which a writer of fiction is placed under some limitations'. 89 Compared to Oswald Cray (and almost any other novel), Rachel Ray is gentle domestic

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Trollope and the Magazines

fiction and its rejection appears somewhat unjustified; but, as Srebrnik believes, 'MacLeod seems to have slipped back into the habit of allowing Strahan a free hand'. 90 He was revising rather than editing. By 1864, the transformation of Good Words had been complete, from 'magazine for all the week' to 'an illustrated monthly magazine', and circulation nearly tripled that of Cornhill. Pierre Bourdieu argues of the field of cultural production that, choosing the right place of publication, the right publisher, journal, gallery or magazine is vitally important because for each author, each form of production and product, there is a corresponding natural site in the field of production, and producers or products that are not in their right place are more or less bound to fail. All the homologies which guarantee a receptive audience and sympathetic audience and sympathetic critics for producers who have found their place in the structure work in the opposite way for those who have strayed from their natural site.91 One could have supposed, as Strahan and MacLeod initially did, that Good Words was a 'natural site' for Rachel Ray. But, Trollope was caught in an unenviable position at a particular cultural moment in 1863. As the most popular serial writer of the day, he was asked to contribute to a magazine in the throes of identity crisis. Being attacked by the extreme elements of his readership, as debates about sensationalism raged in the pages of the periodical press, MacLeod had to defend what he maintained was a workable mission for his periodical: the fusion of the religious with the secular. He sacrificed Trollope in the doing. Meanwhile, Strahan was attempting to remodel his periodical and emulate Cornhill, and as the covers show, the position of the magazine was gradually shifting away from its roots as a religious weekly and more towards the secularism so heavily criticised by the Evangelical extreme. Strahan came to realize the difficulty in amalgamating two distinct popular audiences. In such a configuration, the tension in attempting to unite two opposites becomes too strong and one of the competing elements must yield. However, Strahan did not give up his belief that there ought to be a quality Sabbath magazine, and in 1864, as Good Words was becoming more sensational than ever before, he started up the Sunday Magazine.

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M a c L e o d r e m a i n e d c o m m i t t e d to his conviction t h a t a b l e n d of t h e secular w i t h t h e religious w a s possible, a n d Trollope s u p p o r t e d his friend's beliefs. Writing in t h e Fortnightly Review in J a n u a r y 1866, Trollope d e f e n d e d a recent speech given by MacLeod w h i c h a s s e r t e d t h a t t h e r i g o u r s of S a b b a t h - d a y practices as dict a t e d b y t h e F o u r t h C o m m a n d m e n t w e r e u n f o u n d e d . By t h e n , however, there was a strong Anti-Sabbatarian m o v e m e n t advocating t h a t a m u s e m e n t o n a S u n d a y w a s n o t i n h e r e n t l y sinful. H a d M a c L e o d b e e n g i v e n Rachel Ray to j u d g e t h e n , p e r h a p s it w o u l d h a v e b e c o m e a Good Words serial, as it w a s originally written a n d i n t e n d e d to b e .

Notes 1. Guinivere Griest, Mudie's Circulating Eibrary and the Victorian Novel (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1970), 35. For a discussion of Mudie's and censorship in the late nineteenth century, see Nicholas Hiley, '"Can't You Find Me Something Nasty?": Circulating Libraries and Literary Censorship in Britain from the 1890s to the 1910s', in Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds, Censorship and the Control of Print in England and France 1600-1910 (Winchester, UK: St. Paul's Bibliographies, 1992), 123-47. 2. Griest, Mudie's, 37. 3. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), A.M. Sheridan Smith, trans. (1972; reprinted London: Routledge, 1991), 9. 4. Griest, Mudie's, 46. 5. Ibid., 140. 6. Ibid., 141-2. 7. Donald Thomas, A Fong Time Burning: The History of Fiterary Censorship in England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 239. 8. Ibid., 239. 9. See Publishers' Circular 26 (1 and 15 May 1863), which responds to the Quarterly Reviews assessment that the circulating library system forces the public to buy what they do not want, specifically sensation literature. 10. George Moore, Fiterature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals (London: Vizetelly and Co., 1885), 20. This pamphlet is a slightly revised form of an article which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette. 11. The terms 'Low Church' and 'Evangelical' overlap somewhat when discussing the mid-nineteenth century. Generally, I contend that the Evangelicals were more extreme than other Low Church Anglicans, but neither wished to follow the Dissenters in leaving the Church outright. 12. Robert M. Polhemus, The Changing World of Anthony Trollope (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 99.

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13. Anthony Trollope, Rachel Ray (1863), ed. P.D. Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, World's Classics, 1990), 21. All subsequent references are from this edition and are noted parenthetically in the text. 14. The Family Treasury (1859-79) was monthly, priced 6d., and not illustrated. It was strictly religious and intended for Sabbath reading. The eight articles which constitute 'Our Dorcas Meetings' (signed 'C.C'.) run from Family Treasury 3:2 (February 1860) to 5:6 (June 1861). 15. Edwards, 'Introduction' to Rachel Ray, xv. 16. Anthony Trollope, Clergymen of the Church of England (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866), 63. The articles which make up this volume first appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1865. 17. Jane Nardin, 'Comic Convention in Trollope's Rachel Ray', Papers on Fanguage and Fiterature 22:1 (Winter 1986), 45. Her argument is that the novel is subversive because it undermines the comic plot through the unsatisfactory negotiation of power relations. 18. See Augusta Webster, Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1870), 35-62. My thanks to Gill Gregory for suggesting Webster's poem to me. 19. See Lynda Nead, Myths Of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (1988; reprinted Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 131. 20. Note that the narrator denies that Mr Tappitt is intemperate (364), but this smokescreen is necessary because he so clearly is a drinker. 21. Nardin, 'Comic Convention', does not believe that the Rachel/Luke match will be a happy one, although I'm not wholly convinced by her argument. 22. Prospectus, Good Words 1 (January 1860), inside front cover. 23. [Norman MacLeod,] 'Note by the Editor', Good Words 1 (December 1860), 796. 24. Patricia Thomas Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan: Victorian Publisher (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986), 39. There is no full-length study of Good Words, and there are few scholarly articles dedicated to Good Words. Srebrnik's study provides an excellent account of the founding of the magazine, and the relationship between editor and publisher. 25. Even the Family Treasury mentioned above which only published monthly (6d.) makes explicit that the monthly numbers should be read weekly, on Sundays. On the inside front cover, the pages are divided in various weeks, indicating a religious weekly format. Yet another hybrid form. 26. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), John Cumming, trans. (1972; reprinted London: Verso, 1992), 157. 27. This practice changes in June 1865, when across the top of the pages appears 'Good Words' and the date. 28. W.J. Couper, 'A Bibliography of Edinburgh Periodical Literature', Scottish Notes and Queries 3, second series (May 1902), 164. 29. [Norman MacLeod,] 'Note by the Editor', Edinburgh Christian Magazine 3 (March 1852), 380. 30. [Norman MacLeod,] 'Note by the Editor', Edinburgh Christian Magazine 7 (March 1856), 380.

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31. Revd Donald MacLeod, Memoir of Norman MacFeod. D.D. (2 vols.; London: Dalby, Isbister & Co., 1876), hereafter cited as Memoir. See MacLeod's journal entry in the spring of 1863, Memoir 2, 185. 32. Quoted in Alexander Strahan, 'Norman MacLeod', Contemporary Review 20 (July 1872), 295. 33. Memoir 1, 254. 34. Letter to Principal Tulloch of Aberdeen, Memoir 1, 262. 35. Journal entry for September 1846, Memoir 1, 261. 36. See Arnold to Revd Augustus Hare (24 December 1830) (letter 18) in Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, The Fife and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D. 1 (2 vols.; London: B. Fellows, 1844), 262. 37. Memoir 2, 97. 38. Josef Altholz, The Religious Press in Britain, 1760-1900 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 39. 39. 'A Word with Our Readers', Eeisure Hour 1:1 (1 January 1852), 9. 40. 'Address by the Editor', Sunday at Home 1:1 (October 1864), inside front cover. 41. 'Preface', Family Magazine 1 (1830), iii. 42. 'Preface', Family Friend 1 (1849-50), iii. 43. Not all religious periodicals followed the weekly, family-magazine trend. The British Evangelist, for example, was founded in 1858 as a cheap monthly (three pence). The subtitle indicates that the magazine was in no way attempting to attract the more secular market: 'The British Evangelist for promoting Unity, Zeal, and Activity in the Christian Churches, and Advancing the Knowledge and Love of Christ In the World'. 44. Note that the Reader 4 (13 February 1864), 198, reviewed Good Words, Leisure Hour, and Sunday at Home together under the title 'Popular Serials'. 45. Like MacLeod's 'revised by' to indicate his editorial role, Dickens's 'conducted by' was also unusual; however, other magazines, not surprisingly, followed Dickens's lead: the short-lived Robin Goodfellow, inaugurated with Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret in 1861, was 'conducted by Charles MacKay'. 46. Good Words prospectus in the Christian Guest (December 1859), 546, my emphasis. The prospectus also appeared on the inside front cover of the first issue of Good Words, January 1860. 47. Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, 39. 48. Ibid., 46. 49. Ibid., 46-7. 50. Sally Mitchell, Dinah Mulock Craik (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983), 59, states that after 1860 (and after John Halifax, Gentleman), Mulock was generally regarded as a women's novelist and was reviewed less seriously than before. Mulock's Mistress and Maid was serialized in Good Words in 1862. 51. Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church 1 (2 vols.; London: Adam & Charles Black, 1966), 440-1. 52. Elisabeth Jay, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 7.

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53. Ibid., 23. MacLeod recognized the differences within the Evangelical movement; see a letter from MacLeod to Mrs MacLeod, 27 June 1863 in Memoir 2, 154. 54. The Record articles were published as a pamphlet entitled Good Words': The Theology of Its Editor, and of Some of Its Contributors (London: The Record, 1863). Subsequent references to these articles are taken from this Record pamphlet and noted parenthetically in the text. 55. Altholz, Religious Press, 17-19. 56. 'Short Notices', Literary Times, no. 6 (18 April 1863), 74. 57. Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, 59. 58. 'The Magazines', Illustrated London News 43 (11 July 1863), 43. 59. [H.L. Mansel,] 'Sensation Novels', Quarterly Review 113 (April 1863), 481-514. 60. Herbert Graham, 'Periodical Literature and Its Influences', The Rose, the Shamrock, and the Thistle 3 (June 1863), 137. 61. Ibid., 133. 62. Altholz, Religious Press, 16-17. 63. 'Good Words', Christian Observer 63 (July 1863), 502-3. 64. 'Sensational Literature', Christian Observer 65 (November 1865), 809-13. 65. Ibid., 812. 66. The Patriot articles responding to the Record were also published as a pamphlet, to which all subsequent notes refer: An Exposure of The 'Record' Newspaper in Its Treatment of 'Good Words' (London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., 1863). 67. Ibid., 4. 68. 'Short Notices', 74. 69. [Mansel,] 'Sensation Novels', 484. 70. Ibid., 513. 71. Although I focus on the debate about Trollope as a sensationalist, the Record attacks were taken up by other periodicals and discussed in other ways. Specifically, the fact that the Record was also edited by a Presbyterian Scotsman helped to lessen the damage against Good Words. See Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, 62-3. 72. Review of Rachel Ray review, Athenaeum 1863 II (17 October 1863), 492. See other reviews: Westminster Review 25 n.s. (February 1864), 291-3; Spectator (24 October 1863), 2660-1; Reader (17 October 1863), 437-8; London Review (31 October 1863), 467-8; Times (25 December 1863), 4. 73. Review of Rachel Ray, Illustrated London News 43 (14 November 1863), 502. 74. H.K., 'A Word of Remonstrance with some Novelists', Good Words 4 (July 1863), 525. 75. Review of Rachel Ray, Saturday Review 16 (24 October 1863), 556. 76. Ibid., 555. 77. Merle Mowbray Bevington, The Saturday Review 1855-1868: Representative Educated Opinion in Victorian England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 154. 78. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic, 134. 79. MacLeod to Revd W.F. Stevenson (14 August 1861), Memoir 2, 114.

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80. Quoted in Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, 59. 81. Ibid., 52. See the details of Strahan's remodelling efforts, 52-3. 82. See Srebrnik on Strahan's business troubles, and Laurel Brake, 'Theories of Formation: The Nineteenth Century: Vol. 1, No. 1, March 1877. Monthly, 2/6', Victorian Periodical Review 25:1 (Spring 1992), 16-20. 83. Good Words advertisement, The Times (28 January 1863), 5. 84. Publishers' Circular 26 (2 February 1863), 56. 85. Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, 3 and 33. 86. Brake, 'Theories of Formation', 16. 87. Quoted in Diana and Geoffrey Hindley, Advertising in Victorian England 1837-1901 (London: Wayland, 1972), 35. 88. Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, 64. 89. Review of Oswald Cray, Athenaeum 1864 II (24 December 1864), 859. 90. Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, 64. 91. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, Randal Johnson, ed. (Oxford: Polity Press, 1993), 95-6.

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Launching a Hybrid: The Belton Estate in the Fortnightly Review In May 1865, Trollope's The Belton Estate launched the Fortnightly Review. In the first part of this chapter, I explore the cultural formation of the Fortnightly and consider the nature of the magazine's liberalism in relation to the network of male writers which defined it. I believe that, for all its radical policies, there is an absence of the female voice in its contents because of what might be termed its Positivist political stance. The Belton Estate (serialized between May 1865 and January 1866) was the second Trollope novel to launch a periodical, but rather than defining the magazine in the way Framley Parsonage seemed to do in the Cornhill, it sits oddly in the Fortnightly under its first editor, G.H. Lewes. The tensions which I think The Belton Estate generates as a bid for women readers are directly related to its context in a hybrid periodical - not quite a traditional review, not quite a popular monthly. In the second part of the chapter, I discuss the question of signature in the context of anxiety over creating what has been called a star system of criticism. Although star journalism had not yet been fully introduced in the mid-1860s, it can be argued that the rise of individual personalities within a burgeoning mass culture had already begun. The Fortnightly was part of the foundation for a middle-class culture which, as the century moved on, became hooked on personality and celebrity. The anonymity debate, then, can be examined not simply for its effect on honesty in writing but also for its contribution to a culture of celebrity.

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Founded by a collective of proprietors including Trollope, the Fortnightly was avowed in the prospectus to be an experiment. Frequency, signature, non-partisanship, and fiction signalled that the Fortnightly, modelled on the French Revue des Deux Mondes, hoped to break with traditions in English periodical culture. The experimental elements, however, were only variously successful. Twenty months after the Fortnightly began, difficulties with the publishing trade forced the magazine to change its format to the more conventional monthly. Either consumers would not alter their reading habits or distributors would not accommodate the unusual fortnightly pattern. 1 In addition to frequency, signature was revealed implicitly in the prospectus: .. . we propose to remove all those restrictions of party and of editorial 'consistency' which in other journals hamper the full and free expression of opinion; and we shall ask each writer to express his own views and sentiments with all the force of sincerity. He will never be required to express the views of an Editor or of a Party. He will not be asked to repress opinions or sentiments because they are distasteful to an Editor, or inconsistent with what may have formerly appeared in the Review. He will be asked to say what he really thinks and really feels; to say it in his own responsibility, and to leave its appreciation to the public. 2 Discussion concerning anonymous journalism was not new. In the 1830s Edward Lytton Bulwer argued for signed journalism in England and the English, whilst the New and Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal asserted that the mysteriousness of anonymity was its particular appeal. 3 By the 1890s, as the so-called New Journalism was altering the face of the press, signature had become widespread, although anonymous articles still appeared. The Fortnightly's decision to include signature was just one moment, however significant, in a century of debate about the question of anonymous journalism. 4 In addition to signature and fortnightly production, the magazine's prospectus proclaimed, 'the Review will be liberal, and its liberalism so thorough as to include great diversity of individual opinion within its catholic unity of purpose'. Unlike the great quarterlies or even weeklies such as the Saturday

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THE MALE CONFIGURATION

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Review, the Fortnightly espoused a move away from party politics, 'to further the cause of Progress by illumination from many minds'. While the editor, G.H. Lewes, did wish 'to seek its public amid all parties', one suspects that the continued use of the word 'liberal' in the prospectus ought really to be spelled with a capital L.5 The experiment of a non-partisan open forum style was never realized in full, partly because, as Trollope wryly observed, liberalism, free-thinking, and open inquiry will never object to appear in company with their opposites, because they have the conceit to think that they can quell those opposites; but the opposites will not appear in conjunction with liberalism, free-thinking, and open inquiry. As a natural consequence, our new publication became an organ of liberalism, free-thinking, and open inquiry. (A 190) Trollope drifted away from the Fortnightly and its progressive politics after November 1866, when Lewes resigned owing to poor health. Trollope, James Cotter Morison, Frederic and Edward Chapman, Frederic Flarrison, and E.S. Beesly were among the original allmale company of nine which invested £9000 in founding the Fortnightly with Lewes as editor. The connections between the men are noteworthy: the Chapmans were cousins and Frederic had recently taken over Chapman and Hall after Edward's retirement; Chapman and Hall had already published seven Trollope novels; Morison was a member of the Positivist Society, wellknown as a Saturday Review contributor, and a friend of fellow Positivists and writers including George Meredith (who also became a Fortnightly writer); Lewes, too, was a Positivist and a well-known journalist who had been friends with Trollope at the Cornhill; Harrison and Beesly were both committed Positivists. Such connections impress the fact that middle-class publishing then (as now) was an intricately networked and cosy business, and for the most part a male domain. The social configuration around a range of magazines in the mid-nineteenth century shows similarities in the male network of editors, publishers, and contributors which generally ran the publications. For example, the weekly Punch dinners initiated in

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Here let us sport, Boys, as we sit; Laughter and wit Flashing so free. Life is but short When we are gone, Let them sing on, Round the old tree. 6 Describing the Punch club, one of the original founders of the magazine recalled that 'its object was to form a little society amongst ourselves to talk over and settle upon subjects for the paper of the coming week'. 7 Macmillan's (founded in 1859) originated in Thursday evening gatherings at the firm's Covent Garden branch. Established men such as Tennyson, Huxley, and Kingsley gathered with young up-and-comers such as Edward Dicey and Alfred Ainger to smoke, drink, and talk at what came to be called the 'Tobacco Parliament', 8 a name which resonates with class, leisure, and politics. The Cornhill began a month after Macmillan's and was the brainchild of publisher George Smith and his author Thackeray. At its centre were a half-dozen male contributors who formed the core of the magazine's non-fiction and who gathered with other contributors at Smith's jovial monthly dinners. Many firms involved in publishing periodicals were located at Paternoster Row or more generally in the area running from Fleet Street to Bank, and until the 1980s migration to Wapping this area remained the centre of the newspaper industry in London. The press industry had grown up in an environment of court, church, and crown, especially dominated by male professions around the fields of law and commerce. Publishing offices were places where men might drop in, talk business, drink some tea and perhaps meet others in passing. The area was a focus for men. Punch, Cornhill, Macmillan's, and, as we shall see, the Fortnightly all share a similar social formation: it was in the spirit of the men's club that many periodicals were conceived. The founding of the Fortnightly presents a familiar pattern. A group of well-off men most of whom were friends with social

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1841 were well known and immortalized by Thackeray in his playful rhyme, 'Mahogany Tree', so named for the table around which the Punch diners sat:

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and business connections, at the very least acquaintances, decided to found a periodical. They had a few meetings and chose an experienced journalist friend to edit, who in turn rounded up an impressive list of friends and acquaintances as contributors to make an impact with the first issue: Walter Bagehot, George Eliot, and Frederic Harrison. The first issue came off smoothly and the periodical was generally well received, its eminent contributors duly remarked. Noticeably innovatory in this periodical's roots is the absence of a publishing house; there is no Smith, no Bentley, no Macmillan, no Blackwood and subsequently no house style. But the all-male, club-like configuration of house journals is replicated in what is avowed in the prospectus to be a radical departure in periodical literature.

COMTE, POSITIVISM AND THE FORTNIGHTEY Although the Fortnightly hoped to achieve an open forum for a number of debates, by the time Lewes left in 1866 it was already known as partisan and Liberal, and Lewes's successor, John Morley, extended the radical base. Lewes had been editor at the Leader in the early 1850s, where he earned his reputation as a liberal and even a radical. In those pages he heralded the virtues of Auguste Comte's Positivism, to which he had been enthusiastically attached since the 1840s. Lewes's recent biographer Rosemary Ashton suggests that during his Leader years, 'Lewes was a Comtist, and Comte placed women squarely in the centre of the home and family'.9 She believes that by 1859, Lewes was 'an emphatic ex-Comtist',10 and Ashton generally follows Gordon Haight's biography of George Eliot in playing down the attachment of Lewes to Comte. However, we must be careful not to read Lewes through Eliot. Whether or not Lewes's attachment to Comte declined, in public discourse he was unequivocally linked to Positivism, as an 1868 Edinburgh Review article on the philosophy suggests: Than Mr. Lewes Positivism has no more earnest, intrepid, or persevering advocate in England. Some are more fanatical in their devotion, and have resigned their reason and judgment more entirely to the thoughts of the great master; others, like Mr. John S. Mill, less affiliated to the system, have expounded it, in our view, with a higher, or at least a more discriminating

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success; but there is no one who has been more faithful to it in his whole mode of thought, or who has more frequently recurred to its characteristic ideas, and explained them with more clearness, comprehension, and force. It has been Mr. Lewes's mission to develope [sic] and spread these ideas in opposition to the old modes of thought, as the destined means of regenerating human knowledge and society.11 The anonymous writer of the article was John Tulloch, a High Anglican Scotsman who would have been opposed to Lewes's devotion to science. Lewes was not the missionary zealot Tulloch suggests, but he had advocated early Comtism in the Fortnightly in its first 18 months. Lewes's connection to Positivist philosophy, if not to Comtist religion, is important to establish here, because it suggests one reason 12 for the near-absence of women contributors and women's issues in the Fortnightly in its first 18 months. Comte was first translated by Harriet Martineau, whose Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte was published by John Chapman in 1852. Her two-volume work was a condensed version of Comte's Cours de la philosophic positive, published in Paris in six volumes from 1830 to 1842. In volume II Martineau discusses the intellectual inferiority and the moral superiority of women and the importance of the family, which were central in Comte's social reorganization. Richard Congreve's translation of Comte's Catechisme, in which a 'submissive woman asks a confident priest to explain' Positivism, appeared in 1858; it was Comte's way of spreading the word to women who would be so necessary for social regeneration. In 1865, Comte's Discours was published in English as A General View of Positivism, translated by J.H. Bridges, himself a dedicated Positivist. Late in the 1870s four more volumes of Comte's work were translated by Bridges, Frederic Harrison, Richard Congreve, and Edward Spencer Beesly. Three of those four men were Fortnightly contributors recruited by Lewes (Bridges came in under Morley), and were friends of Eliot and Lewes and regulars at their Sunday salon. Lewes became familiar with Comtism in the original French and did not need the assistance of later English translations before becoming a follower. He was an acquaintance of Comte and visited him in Paris. A letter from Comte to Lewes in October 1848 acknowledges the Englishman's appreciation of Comte's Positivism:

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Lewes had written a letter to Comte in which he said how much he thought of the Discours, especially the 'chapter on women'. 14 This chapter was translated by Bridges in 1865 as 'The Influence of Positivism on Women'. In Comte's social reorganization, philosophers, women, and the working classes were an important triumvirate who would unite to regenerate society. He advocates the chivalric spirit of medievalism, when women were properly honoured, and finds a model for the treatment of women in the cult of the Virgin. The role of woman is to modify the actions of men through affection and superior morality: Morally, therefore, and apart from all material considerations, she merits always our living veneration, as the purest and simplest impersonation of Humanity, who can never be adequately represented in any masculine form. But these qualities do not involve the possession of political power, which some visionaries have claimed for women, though without their own consent. In that which is the great object of human life, they are superior to him; but in the various means of attaining that object they are undoubtedly inferior. In all kinds of force, whether physical, intellectual, or practical, it is certain that Man surpasses Woman, in accordance with a general law which prevails throughout the animal kingdom.. . . Hence we find it the case in every phase of human society that women's life is essentially domestic, public life being confined to men. 15 Women, whose dedication to the cause is essential to Positivism, are responsible for the early education of children, and their influence on public life is exerted through the institution of the salon. Apart from the salon, the family remains the 'distinctive sphere of work' for women. 16 Theology will be replaced, in a practical way, by the worship of women. Men will kneel down and pray to Woman rather than to God (as Comte himself did in worshipping his dead beloved, Clotilde de Vaux), and the object of Positivist prayer will be Humanity. 1 7 These are the primary points from the chapter on women which Lewes said he found

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Je suis charme que mon recent Discours vous ait tant satisfait. C'est d ' u n bon augure p o u r le succes moral et social du positivisme qui, dans votre pays, est encore loin de correspondre a son succes intellectuel. 13

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especially rewarding in his reading of Comte in the late 1840s. T.R. Wright, evaluating the influence of Comte's Positivism in Victorian Britain, asserts that Lewes's 'exposition and dissemination of Comte's ideas were his chief contribution to philosophy and that Positivism imparted clarity, structure and a sense of certainty to his criticism while providing him with what amounted to a religious faith'. 18 There was more to Comte than his views on women, and the reliance of Positivism on science and rationalism as a principle for faith would seem to have been the primary appeal to Lewes. But Lewes did not always champion Comte's cause uncritically, and in the late 1850s his position on Comte was far less enthusiastic than when he wrote for the Eeader several years earlier. However, by the mid-1860s Comte was again on the public agenda, partly because of Bridges's translation and partly because J.S. Mill had written a critique of Comte also published in 1865. Mill essentially accepted the early Comte but diverged from his later speculations. Bridges in 1866 wrote a response to Mill called The Unity of Comte's Life and Doctrine which supported Comte's later writings. These books were taken up by most periodicals of higher journalism, 19 and Lewes responded with two articles in the Fortnightly. In 'Comte and Mill', Lewes criticizes the dogma of later Comte while maintaining a deep respect for his earlier ideas (much like Mill), and he is careful not to detract from the general notion of Comte as a great mind. 20 Lewes's position on Comte is difficult to ascertain. At first he was an enthusiastic Comtist who did much to popularize the philosophy in England. He broke with Comte for reasons that are uncertain, but renewed his interest at the time he began editing the Fortnightly. In his 1857 edition of the Biographical History of Philosophy, Lewes writes of Comte's Cours that it is 'the grandest, because on the whole the truest system which Philosophy has yet produced'. 21 Wright claims that Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind (1874-79) is permeated with Comtism. 22 He also notes that Lewes gave to the Sacerdotal Fund, and he asserts that much Positivism can be seen in George Eliot's works, such as The Spanish Gypsy (which Eliot herself called a 'mass of Positivism'23), Daniel Deronda, Romola and some of the poems. Richard Congreve, who founded the Church of Humanity, and his wife were intimate friends of Eliot and Lewes, whose support of the Congreves comes through in George Eliot's letters. 24 But one cannot be labelled a Comtist because one's friends are. 25 To a greater or lesser degree

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Lewes respected and adhered to the rationalism of some Positivist principles, which can be distinguished from Comtism in its later, more religious formulation. If by the mid-1860s he and George Eliot were not dedicated to Comtism, they certainly moved in Positivist circles and there is support of Positivist views in both of their writings. Discussing the press reaction to Comte and Positivism, Wright believes that 'the Fortnightly Review was the nearest thing to a Positivist periodical before the foundation of the Positivist Review' by Beesly in 1893.26 Christopher Kent has established how the higher journalism was largely the means by which Positivism was disseminated in Britain. 27 Of the several serious journals which reviewed Bridges's translation and Mill's critique, most were negative about the value of Positivism generally. The Fortnightly was the most sympathetic, but others like the Contemporary Review treated the subject with due seriousness. Under Morley, the Fortnightly became increasingly identified as Comtist, so much so that he tried to deny that reputation in public in an article in 1870.28 Whether or not the Fortnightly was Comtist or Positivist, there seems to have been a distinct public feeling, at least among the serious journals, that the magazine identified itself as such. Lewes as the first editor had a great deal to do with the progressive tendency the Fortnightly projected. And it is my contention that his liberalism was informed by a deep respect for and acceptance of Positivism. The cultural formation of the Fortnightly focused around the male-dominated Positivist circle. Richard Congreve, recording a history of Positivists in a private notebook, remembers how he first came upon Positivist thinking: By the publication of Mill's Logic attention had been called to [Comte's] high importance as a thinker, and I can remember in the society in which I then mixed at Oxford [and?] Rugby, that from time to time discussion arose as to the value of his thought. My more intimate personal friends had many of them read parts of his writings, and consequently we talked over his conclusions. 29 Congreve and his friends discussed the intellectual possibilities of Positivism, in much the same way as the Apostles at Cambridge might have gathered earlier in the nineteenth century. Richard Dellamora has considered the gender construction of the Apostles

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and discussed how the homosexual desires shared between the men can be seen in, for example, Tennyson's In Memoriam.30 Similarly, the works of English Positivists were affected by their roots in an all-male intellectual forum, albeit one less formalized than the Apostles, or than a later group such as the Metaphysical Society which dominated the discourse of the Nineteenth Century. As I understand it, the configuration of these male intellectual discussion groups is analogous to that of the gentlemen's clubs venues where men of like minds and the same class meet to talk and to (homo)socialize. Christopher Kent has argued persuasively that the professional network of the class of men who were Positivists (Oxford g r a d u a t e s , often with i n d e p e n d e n t means) strengthened a unified, club mentality. 'Even the profession to which so many of the Comtists belonged', Kent observes, 'was organized like a club: one became a barrister, after all, by eating dinners at one of the Inns of Court.' 31 Of course, many of the Positivists were also club members; Beesly, for example, wrote several letters to Congreve from the Reform Club,32 where several Fortnightly contributors were also members. 33 This is not to say, however, that because the intellectual milieu of the Positivists functioned as an all-male club their thinking was necessarily linked to the Establishment. Quite the contrary: the political mission of Positivism was distinctly anti-Establishment. The political aspect of Positivism was an important part of the project. In his annual lecture-sermon to the Church of Humanity in 1859, Congreve concentrates on China, Italy, and the relation of the labourer to the capitalist. He admits that such political issues are not usually discussed from the pulpit, but the nature of Positivism was to stand 'in lively contrast to' Christian tradition. 34 In 1866 a collection of foreign-relations essays, International Policy, was published by Chapman and Hall (reviewed in the Fortnightly, 15 July 1866). The title-page epigraph is from Comte ('The fundamental doctrine of modern social life is the subordination of Politics to Morals') and the Preface states that 'certain principles are adopted equally by all the contributors, and they are adopted from the political and social system known as Positivism'. 35 Contributors included the usual suspects - Congreve, Harrison, Beesly, and Bridges. At the time of the Franco-Prussian War, Congreve, Beesly, and Bridges published the pamphlet Religion of Humanity, Republic of the West36 which declared the Positivists anti-war stance (although they supported France) and called

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for a united, perhaps federal, Republic comprising France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and England. In the days of Empire, this call for a European Community was indeed radical in its political implications. The Positivists, whose interests in foreign affairs aligned them with the Fortnightly'^ internationalism, had a significant political element in their objective. The group which functioned like other all-male intellectual forums replicated their structures in the Fortnightly.

THE ABSENCE OF WOMEN The cultural and social formation of the contributors - the closeness, shared beliefs, sense of mission, and similar backgrounds around the Fortnightly may go some way to explain the absence of the female voice in the periodical in 1865-66. Of 131 different contributors under Lewes, only four are identified by the Wellesley Index as women. These four women wrote seven contributions in total. Two were critical notices, and five were full-length articles. One article and one notice were by George Eliot and appeared signed in the very first number, to lend prominence to the journal. Catherine Helen Spence helped write an article but was not actually given credit in the magazine, so her contribution is, in effect, silenced, 37 which leaves just three articles after the first number. Two on music were written by Leonora Schmitz and one on housing for the poor was by the reformer Octavia Hill. The articles signed by women (if we include Eliot's in the first issue) account for 1.6 per cent of all the articles written under Lewes's editorship; 38 by comparison, the conservative Edinburgh Review in 1865-66 had three women reviewers accounting for 3.8 per cent of the articles. As would be expected, more miscellaneous magazines published a greater number of articles by and about women. During 1865-66, Macmillan's carried serial fiction by Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Yonge, and Caroline Norton, in addition to a range of non-fiction by Frances Power Cobbe, Frances Verney, Lucy Duff-Gordon, and others. In Blackwood's, Margaret Oliphant, Anne Mozley, and Elizabeth J. Hassell wrote more than a dozen articles between them, many of which addresses women's issues directly. By comparison, the experimentalism of the Fortnightly did not extend to redressing the gender imbalance in non-fiction.

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Perhaps even more noteworthy than its lack of women contributors is the Fortnightly s poor showing of articles devoted to women. In 1865-66 the quarterly Westminster Review carried one article largely about Frances Power Cobbe and there was one woman contributor, and the Edinburgh's three women contributors included Harriet Martineau. A more popular magazine, Macmillan's, carried fiction by several women, devoted space to women and the arts and to individual women, and included several women contributors. Macmillan's would have had a large number of women readers, and its target audience was presumably different from the Fortnightly, but it shows how other magazines which discussed serious topics included women as target readers and contributors of non-fiction. What we see broadly is that other magazines are at least addressing in some form the woman reader and women's issues directly. Lewes's magazine was comparatively silent about women, considering the amount of space its frequency permitted relative to other magazines. This is directly connected to the Fortnightly's target market, for, as Lewes observes, 'the REVIEW has its special objects, and has to cater for a special public', rather like all magazines. 39 The 'special public' is gendered male, as Lewes make explicit when discussing the periodical's contributors: A glance at the list of our contributors will show that men of high reputation in Letters, Philosophy, and Science - men of position in the world, men of professional and official character, no less than men quite unknown beyond their own immediate circles - have given their countenance to the plan and availed themselves of the opportunity of addressing a cultivated public without thereby incurring the disagreeable and almost inevitable penalty attached to writing anonymously, that of having attributed to them articles which they have not written, and which they would indignantly repudiate. 40 This passage is part of an explanation of the magazine's signature policy, but by emphasizing the gender of the writers, we also see the importance of men as contributors and implicitly as readers within the periodical's own identity. 41 In the first two years of John Morley's editorship (1867-68) of the Fortnightly, articles by and about women were more numerous than under Lewes. Frances Power Cobbe wrote on progress, 42

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Millicent Fawcett on women's education, and R.M. Pankhurst on women's right to vote. There were a couple of critical notices by women as well. With Morley we see a shift in policy, for the absence of women under Lewes may not have been a conscious and articulated policy, so much as the result of a personal bias which excluded women from a public forum.43 Considering Lewes's unconventional 'marriage' to George Eliot and the precarious position in which the relationship put them socially, he perhaps shied away from advocating women's issues too strongly in order not to attract unnecessary attention to his own position. It is speculative, but at least plausible, that as editor he toed the conventional, hegemonic line with regard to women (unlike, for example, the Westminster) for personal reasons. The absence of both women and any official declaration on women's issues can be registered, perhaps, as an outcome of Comtist attitudes alongside more personal considerations. While no full-length articles address women or women's issues directly, other non-fiction such as the reviews do to an extent. For example, John Dennis's review of John Malcolm Ludlow's Woman's Work in the Church asserts that 'it is the mere reiteration of a truism to affirm that a woman's best place is home, that her highest duties are those of a wife and mother', granting, however, that there are numerous single women to whom 'official duties' could be assigned. 44 Not surprisingly, Mary Braddon's sensation novel Only a Clod was reviewed unfavourably by Dennis in July 1865. Volumes II (August-November 1865) and V (MayAugust 1866) of the Fortnightly under Lewes reviewed no books by women, and generally books by women which were reviewed in the first six volumes were not enthusiastically recommended. 45 Certainly the political climate in 1865-66, in the run-up to the Reform Bill debates in 1867, provided ample opportunity to discuss women's issues. Progressive women's periodicals such as the Englishwoman's Review of Social and Industrial Questions and Victoria Magazine kept women's issues in the public domain, and private groups such as Emily Davies's Kensington Society discussed questions such as women's franchise.46 Both were part of the discourse of burgeoning middle-class feminism and were responding to the absence of women's discussion of political issues within the clubland formation of the higher journalism particularly. In June 1866, J.S. Mill presented a petition to Parliament for women's suffrage which went unmentioned in both the 'Public Affairs'

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and 'Causeries' sections. 47 A whole range of women's issues was being discussed elsewhere in public and in private. Morley does enlist well-known women's reformers like Cobbe and Fawcett to discuss women's reform whereas women under Lewes are not given a similar space. The gendering of the Fortnightly is related to its attempt to be both a review and a magazine. The title signals hybridity a Review which appears fortnightly rather than quarterly - and the combination of forms can be seen in in the contents. The 'Public Affairs' section provides news summaries similar to weeklies like the Saturday Review and the fortnightly frequency creates a sense of topicality and news value which the quarterly Reviews clearly did not wish to project. A number of articles in the Fortnightly were based on recent book publications and so were review-like, but the books were not foregrounded at the beginning of the article as they were in the quarterlies. Furthermore, a single book was often reviewed rather than a clutch of books on a single topic, as in the traditional quarterlies. Alongside these review articles were individual pieces on socio-political topics (especially about reform and the franchise) and also pieces more closely resembling magazine articles, for example personal reminiscences. Lewes's 'Causerie' section opened up an informal space for the editor to address readers within a serious journal, and it is possible that the causeries were intended to include women readers. Such hybridity, blending elements of the quarterly, monthly, and weekly periodicals, was part of the Fortnightly's attempt to create a new market, distinct from the market of the other radical magazine of higher journalism, the Westminster Review. Both magazines covered similar topics, although the Westminster dealt more with home politics and the Fortnightly projects internationalism. The Fortnightly's hybrid form was one way to distinguish itself from the radical Westminster, but its hybridity can also be seen as part of its Positivist philosophical position. In Lewes's article on 'Comte and Mill', the editor notes that one primary tenet of Comte's early formulation of Positivism was its emphasis on the relations between phenomena: In the Philosophic Positive. . . [Comte] laid down the rule that no function could be studied except in relation to its organ or its acts; he pointed out the error of separating psychological

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Here, Lewes is discussing the debate about Subjective and Objective Method which Comte's philosophy addresses. But w h a t is noticeable in Lewes's reading of Comte is that hybridity is at the centre of Positivism - an attempt to merge the discourses of philosophy with science and religion. This is what Lewes calls Comte's 'gigantic scheme,' 49 and this totalizing hybrid scheme embracing a range of intellectual discourses - is equally at the centre of the Fortnightly's project. The periodical's Positivism and its hybrid form make it distinctly modern, and the one can be seen as an intellectual basis for the other. Generic distinctions between periodicals would have been significant for readers who consumed shilling monthly magazines, for example, as family entertainment with something for everyone. Reviews, however, were weighty, serious, party political to a large degree and booklike. The Fortnightly - by blending the discourses of 'high' and Tow' culture, by placing a philosophical review article alongside an instalment of a serial novel - would have sent conflicting signals to the periodical reading public: two shillings fortnightly instead of one shilling monthly; fiction alongside serious reviewlike articles. Where was the Fortnightly to be read: in the club, the drawing-room, or the study? The proprietors, in aiming to create a new reading market with a new hybrid journal, blending elements of the popular with high seriousness, were indeed innovative, if not financially successful.

THE BELTON ESTATE: SERIALIZING WOMEN'S ISSUES The serial fiction was one space friendly to women readers, and it further suggests a popular magazine element in the Fortnightly Review. However, the decision to include fiction was not unanimously welcomed by the proprietors. In the Autobiography, Trollope records his doubts about including fiction in the Fortnightly: It had been decided by the Board of Management, somewhat in opposition to my own ideas on the subject, that the Fortnightly Review should always contain a novel. It was of course

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phenomena from their connections with other phenomena, and declared that the anatomical p o i n t of view o u g h t to predominate. 48

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natural that I should write the first novel, and I wrote The Belton Estate.

Trollope's opposition probably stems from the belief that the inclusion of fiction implies a particular type of magazine and that it would detract from the journal's more intellectual Review status. Responding to Lewes's suggestion that The Belton Estate ought to be the first entry in an issue, Trollope advises: As to putting Belton E. first in No. 3, do just as you please. I have a strong opinion against putting the novel always first as it indicates an idea that it is our staple; - which indicates the further idea that the remainder is padding. Were I Editor I think I should always give the novel a distinctive place just before the Chronique. But that is a matter of small, or no, moment. (Letters 1, 304) The inclusion of fiction at all was no doubt perceived as a financial necessity by the mid-1860s. Lewes's 'Criticism in Relation to Novels' in the Fortnightly in December 1865 appears to argue against the very sort of fiction his magazine was publishing: Instead of compensating for the inevitable evils of periodical criticism by doing our utmost to keep the standard of public taste, too many of us help to debase it by taking a standard from the Circulating Library, and by a half-contemptuous, halflanguid patronage of what we do not seriously admire. 50 His article argues that higher standards ought to be maintained by reviewers because 'the critic demands a closer adherence to truth and experience' 51 than popular novels often contain. He has in mind sensation novels which can be strong in plot but weak in realism. Ironically, however, in attacking circulating libraries, Lewes attacks Trollope, circulating-library author extraordinaire. While Trollope's fiction is on the whole unsensational (although The Belton Estate's Mrs Askerton has sensational

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coat-and-waistcoat realism, a creeping timidity of invention, moving almost exclusively amid scenes of drawing-room existence, with all the reticences and pettinesses of drawing-room conventions. 52 About the article, Trollope wrote to Lewes: 'It is beautiful, but, oh, so cruel' (Letters 1, 304). Reading an instalment of The Belton Estate in the same issue as Lewes's criticisms of circulating libraries or of drawing-room realism shows explicitly the fissures in the hybrid Fortnightly. Of course, new shilling monthlies were continually cropping up since the success of Cornhill and its imitators, and the power of the quarterlies was on the wane. It could be argued that combining fiction, and circulating-library fiction at that, with serious review articles was a way of attracting readers, especially women in an expanding market. In making such an attempt in Britain, the Fortnightly was indeed innovatory (if not commercially successful), but it was following the lead of the Revue des Deux Mondes. The Fortnightly closely resembles its French model in a number of ways: fortnightly publication; an outward-looking, international emphasis; the promotion of the author; the absence of women's voices; the presence of fiction and poetry. 53 At the time the Fortnightly was launched with The Belton Estate, the Revue des Deux Mondes was serializing George Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard Feverel; Meredith's Vittoria followed Trollope in the British periodical. A successful foreign model was not enough to ensure financial success in England, and the Fortnightly's circulation had not reached above 1500 by the time the proprietors sold it to Chapman and Hall. The hybrid periodical did have its own followers, but the Contemporary Review, founded in 1866 and modelled to an extent on the Fortnightly's open forum, noticeably does not include fiction. The Fortnightly's inaugural novel covers familiar territory for those even slightly acquainted with Trollope's fiction. The author recognized that The Belton Estate is 'similar in its attributes' (^4 196) to Rachel Ray and Miss Mackenzie, which appeared in volume

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aspects) and true to Lewes's realist principles, it was largely consumed by the kind of reader Lewes dismisses. Trollope also felt the sting of Lewes's attack on domestic realism, articulated in the second article of the 'Principles and Success of Literature' series, in which Lewes deplores

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form in 1863 and 1865, respectively. We might also notice its affinities with The Small House at Allington (1864) and Can You Forgive Her? (1865). As the Eondon Review put it in a review of the novel, 'it is time . . . that Mr. Trollope should forbear from leading us through the same familiar scenes'. 54 Such scenes depict a spirited, often fortune-less heroine who experiences complicated relations with a lover or two. Even Trollope estimated a decade later that 'it has no particular merits, and will add nothing to my reputation as a novelist', and T seem to remember almost less of it than of any book that I have written' (A 196). The novel did not bring in the intended readers, and the Athenaeum endorsed its own view by asserting that 'the verdict of periodical readers was, we believe, unfavourable'. 55 Allow me to disagree. What is interesting about Trollope's novel is its relation to the rest of a magazine which is otherwise so obviously silent about women's issues. The heroine, Clara Amedroz, without a fortune because of her brother's reckless gambling, is stoically serious in her approach to life. Left with a helpless and self-pitying father after her brother's suicide (all of which is revealed in the opening chapter), Clara perceives that it was her duty to repress both the feeling of shame and the sorrow, as far as they were capable of repression. Her brother had been weak, and in his weakness had sought a coward's escape from the ills of the work around him. She must not also be a coward! Bad as life might be to her henceforth, she must endure it with such fortitude as she could muster. (ch. 1, I, 29) Such a strong-willed woman compensating for the weaknesses of men around her was not new to Trollope readers or fiction readers generally. But such a passage which shows the moral superiority of woman does fit comfortably within the ideal Positivist construction of society. Clara is less endearing when she says, 'I think it would be well if all single women were strangled by the time they are thirty 7 (ch. 8, I, 415). She is reacting to the Woman Question, which sought some solution to the increasing number of unmarried women. 'Having neither father, mother, nor brother; without a home, without a shilling that she could call her own; - with no hope as to her future life' (ch. 21, II,

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513), Clara struggles to accept her attraction to her lovers while resenting her need for a husband to maintain her position. She tries repeatedly to preserve a sense of self-worth by rejecting attempts by her cousin and lover, Will, to give her the Belton Estate, which has fallen to him after her brother's suicide. By rejecting property specifically, she rejects the system upon which male wealth is based. Trollope continually writes of the 'Beltons of Belton' and of the pleasures of ownership to establish the inexorability of the patrilineal discourse. At one point Clara calls Will's plan to give up Belton 'a romantic notion' (ch. 24, II, 665) because it flies in the face of respectable behaviour. But Will links the property with Clara whom he loves, and if he cannot have her, he does not want the estate: . . . he did not wish, in his present mood, to be recognized as the heir. He did not want the property. He would have preferred to rid himself altogether of any of the obligations which the ownership of the estate entailed upon him. It was not permitted to him to have the custody of the old squire's daughter, and therefore he was unwilling to meddle with any of the old squire's concerns. 56 (ch. 20, II, 415) Clara is part of the property, and Will wants all of it or nothing. It is not an accident that Chapter 31, in which Clara finally agrees to marry Will, is called 'Taking Possession'. Raymond Williams has commented on Trollope's ease in dealing with issues of inheritance and property, as opposed to a writer like George Eliot who deals with disturbance. 57 It is true that matters of inheritance are almost always neatly resolved in Trollope, and The Belton Estate is no exception. So often in his fiction, Trollope approaches a critique of patriarchal structures without ever overturning them outright. For him, social change is only ever incremental, never revolutionary, which was (and still is) part of the comfort of his fiction. The discourse around women in the novel is in fact related to discourses on property and law which were circulating in the Fortnightly and elsewhere during the serialization. Reviewing Mill on political economy in June 1865, Frederic Harrison writes

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there is a question which underlies the whole problem [of the cultivation of land], which is the social ground of property and the appropriation of land. No one does, no one can treat this fundamental political principle as a purely economic question. The first thing a rational philosophy has to do is to establish the basis of property; the rights, the duties, the relations of proprietors; the political, social, and moral functions which ownership in land implies. 58 For Harrison, population and property are the two great elements of all economic systems. Property was one subject treated in exchanges about Positivism generally,59 and such discussions of political economy as Harrison's coincided with the debates which led to the 1867 Reform Act. Also in the Fortnightly, Richard Ellerton proposed universal (male) suffrage a m o n t h later, and Thomas Hare put forward his suggestions for electoral reform in October. Significantly, the whole of the second Reform Bill debates centred on questions of land since property was the basis of one's right to vote. Property equalled political power. Discussions about land, population, and suffrage intersect with discourses in the novel and in the broader periodical culture which make more explicit the links between women's rights and property. Accordingly, an anonymous writer reviewing Bessie Rayner Parkes, Anna Swanwick and F.P. Cobbe in the Westminster Review in October 1865, asserts that when the United Kingdom has perhaps 200,000 more women than men, what a stupid as well as unmanly insult it is, to tell women that they must not seek to maintain themselves, but must set their caps to get husbands who will maintain them! 60 This statement affirms the need for women's employment and self-determination, and Clara speaks to the discourse of women's work in her proud response to her aunt's plan to provide for her through Captain Aylmer: '. .. How can I help it that I am not a man and able to work for my bread? But I am not above being a housemaid, and so Captain Aylmer shall find. I'd sooner be a housemaid, with nothing but my wages than take the money which you say he is to give me.' (ch. 8, I, 415)

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The contract of matrimony gives rise to legal consequences so important (especially with regard to the possession and transmission of property), that it is but right that society should establish certain constituted methods of entering into it.61 Part of the discourse in The Belton Estate addresses precisely the connections between land, marriage, and women's independence. Such legal and political economy issues, then, were an element of both the fiction and the non-fiction. It is vital in the novel that Clara challenges assumptions about marriage, property, and inheritance, even if she is not so challenging that she refuses marriage altogether. 'I'm not prepared to alter the ways of the world,' Clara maintains, 'but I feel myself entitled to grumble at them sometimes' (ch. 7, I, 408). Like Trollope's heroine, many women in the 1860s were questioning a whole range of legal issues. In 1865, for example, a group of Manchester feminists were organizing campaigns for property reform and for a mother's custody rights, 62 and I mentioned earlier in this chapter the efforts of women to petition Parliament for suffrage in 1866. The petition's argument was carefully focused upon a single woman's right to own property. If the vote depended on ownership of land, and if women could legally own land, why, then, could they not vote? 63 As Helen Taylor indicates in the Westminster Review in 1867, the petitioners point out that in this country the franchise is d e p e n d e n t u p o n property, and that the acknowledgement of women as sovereigns among us shows that women are not considered disqualified for g o v e r n m e n t . From these two principles, both of which are undoubted parts of the British Constitution as it stands at this day - the representation of property, and government by female sovereigns - the petitioners d r a w the evident inference, that where the female sex is no bar to the higher, it cannot reasonably be to the lower privileges of political life, when those privileges are dependent upon conditions (such as the possession of property) which women actually fulfil.64

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A Westminster article in 1864 about marriage laws discusses marriage and property:

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The petition's argument was a clever one, based as it was on a political argument, and it shows how property was a contested site of meaning in the late 1860s. So, Will's insistence that he not accept his inheritance and that he offer Clara the Belton Estate indicates how both men and women could challenge legal precedent and social convention. 65 At the time The Belton Estate was being serialized, these were some of the legal and political debates in circulation. The novel addresses contemporary reform movements which concurrent Fortnightly non-fiction almost never confronts directly, and the discourse of property and marriage which surrounds Clara, Will, and Captain Aylmer highlights the fragility of the gendered issues of political economy and law. The discourse of the sexual woman is also addressed in the fiction. The relationship between Clara and her neighbour on the Belton Estate, Mrs Askerton, is especially significant because it shows two women supporting one another despite the murmurs of society. There is some secret about Mrs Askerton from the beginning of the novel, and Clara knows that 'there had been rumours afloat, and that there might be a mystery' (ch. 5, I, 285). In the middle of the 1860s, with the popularity of sensation novels causing controversy in numerous periodicals, early in the novel such a thinly veiled reference to a woman who is talked about would almost certainly have signalled transgressive sexuality. In the chapter entitled 'Mrs Askerton's Story', this becomes clear when the courageous woman admits to Clara that 'for three years I was a man's mistress, and not his wife' (ch. 18, II, 365-66). Clara's decision at this point is whether to support her friend or damn her as Lady Aylmer, her future mother-in-law, demands: Clara's mind was the more active at the moment, for she was resolving that in this episode of her life she would accept no lesson whatever from Lady Aylmer's teaching; - no, nor any lesson whatever from the teaching of any Aylmer in existence. And as for the world's rules, she would fit herself to them as best she could; but no such fitting should drive her to the unwomanly cruelty of deserting this woman whom she had known and loved, - and whom she now loved with a fervour which she had never before felt towards her. (ch. 18, II, 366)

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Relationships between women in The Belton Estate and in much of Trollope's fiction revolve around how women are judged socially and how women judge each other. We saw this in Rachel Ray, and it is a theme which appears in other of Trollope's novels at this time, including Miss Mackenzie and Can You Forgive Her? Indeed, the friendship with Mrs. Askerton becomes a testingground for Clara's independence, since Captain Aylmer's mother will not permit him to marry unless Clara is willing to forsake and shun her only friend. Mrs. Askerton, who accepts her lot in life, writes to Clara, T do not blame him for demanding that his future wife shall not be intimate with a woman who is supposed to have lost her fitness for the society of women' (ch. 21, II, 520). But Clara refuses to obey society's dictates, represented at their most severe by Lady Aylmer's inflexibility. In accepting the friendship of a fallen woman, Clara does more than grumble about the ways of the world - she absolutely rejects them. Trollope, in portraying a fallen woman sympathetically, challenges the convention in novels that fallen women must either die (as in Gaskell's Ruth) or be mad (as in Braddon's Eady Audley's Secret). He had previously defended the treatment of fallen women in fiction when responding to a clergyman's complaint about Lady Glencora in Can You Forgive Her? (published in monthly parts in 1864-65): The subject of adultery is one very difficult of discussion. You have probably found it so in preaching. It is a sin against which you are called on to inveigh, ( - and I also as I think of my own work,) - but as to which it is difficult to speak because of the incidents to adultery which are not only sinful, but immodest & in some degrees indecent. Of theft, lying, & murder you can speak openly to young & old, but against adultery or fornication you must caution those who are most in danger with baited [sic] breath. That I think is the cause of your letter to me. . .. The education of our daughters is a subject on which at present many of us Englishmen differ greatly. Thinking as I do that ignorance is not innocence I do not avoid, as you would wish me to do, the mention of things which are to me more shocking in their facts than in their names. I do not think that any girl can be injured by reading the character whose thought I have endeavoured to describe in the novel to which you have alluded. (Fetters 1, 316)

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Indeed, the fallen woman was a topic to which Trollope returned sympathetically after The Belton Estate, as in The Vicar of Bullhampton (1870). It may be that the Fortnightly - as a male-dominated, serious magazine - provided an opportunity for Trollope to consider such transgressive sexual behaviour more openly than in popular, shilling monthlies.

THE PLIGHT OF THE MARRIED MAN There is another gendered discourse in The Belton Estate over the status of the bachelor which we have also seen in The Small House at Allington with Adolphus Crosbie.66 Although neither of the lovers remains a bachelor in The Belton Estate, bachelordom is presented as an acceptable option for both men, if not for the novel itself. Captain Aylmer's father, Sir Anthony, takes more than one opportunity to express his view that his son simply does not need to marry. Consider the following passage of advice from Sir Anthony which occurs midway through the serial: 'My dear boy, [your mother has] been nagging at me, as you call it, for forty years. That's her way. The best woman in the world, as we were saying; - but that's her way. And it's the way with most of them. They can do anything if they keep it up; - anything. The best thing is to bear it if you've got it to bear. But why on earth you should go and marry, seeing that you're not the eldest son, and that you've got everything on earth that you want as a bachelor, I can't understand. I can't indeed, Fred. By heaven, I can't!' Then Sir Anthony gave a long sigh, and sat musing awhile, thinking of the club in London to which he belonged, but which he never entered; - of the old days in which he had been master of a bedroom near St. James's Street, - of his old friends whom he never saw now, and of whom he never heard, except as one and another, year after year, shuffled away from their wives to that world in which there is no marrying or giving in marriage. (ch. 17, II, 359) Trollope enters into a real male discourse here; why marry if you don't have to? Marriage is useful only to first sons who must carry on the male line and inherit property. Sir Anthony yearns

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for all-male surroundings - his club and his friends around St James - but such boy's own desires coexist with a pining for sexual freedom. The phrase 'master of a bedroom' is charged with sexual tension and frustration because Sir Anthony makes explicit his loss of power, of mastery over women. Toward the end of the novel, Sir Anthony again repeats his warning: '. . . An eldest son ought to marry, so that the property may have an heir. And poor men should marry, I suppose, as they want wives to do for them. And sometimes, no doubt, a man must marry - when he has got to be very fond of a girl, and has compromised himself, and all that kind of thing. I would never advise any man to sully his honour.' As Sir Anthony said this he raised himself a little with the two sticks and spoke out in a bolder voice. The voice however, sank again as he descended from the realms of honour to those of prudence.. . . Of course marriage is all very well. I married rather early in life, and have always found your mother to be a most excellent woman. A better woman doesn't breathe. I'm as sure of that as I am of anything. But God bless me, - of course you can see. I can't call anything my own. I'm tied down here and I can't move. I've never got a shilling to spend, while all these lazy hounds about the place are eating me up. There isn't a clerk with a hundred a year in London that isn't better off than I am as regards ready money. And what comfort have I in a big house, and no end of gardens, and a place like this? What pleasures do I get out of it? That comes of marrying and keeping one's name in the county respectably! What do I care for the county? D the county! I often wish that I'd been a younger son, - as you are.' (ch. 27, III, 145-6) Sir Anthony's emotive speech, full of questions and exclamations, again describes his own sense of disempowerment and it goes deep into the male psyche. The language - of sadism, of immobility, of victimization, of dispossession - expresses his views on the state of marriage for men. The 'comfort' and 'pleasures' to which he alludes are those of the all-male world in the previous passage. He has had no choice in life because of the cross he carries as eldest son; but he pleads with his son not to relinquish

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a bachelor's life unless absolutely necessary, unless he has 'compromised' himself. A sense of propriety would have prevented Trollope from being any more explicit about the pleasures a man gives up by marrying, but such open proclamations were unnecessary as the discourse of the bachelor circulated in magazines and pamphlets around the time of the serialization of the Belton Estate. Bachelors' Buttons was a monthly periodical of light miscellaneous reading which ran for five numbers from June 1860, before being discontinued. Each issue contained only around 30 pages, so at a price of 6d. it was expensive. But the editor did not have high ambitions ('ours is a whim' he states in an introductory note), and probably the readership came from London's barristers since the editorial offices were at Lincoln's Inn Fields and several contributors indicate a legal readership. A poem in the June issue describes in part the plight of the married man: Oh! what, may Compared to You're bother'd And pestered

I ask, are the pleasures of marriage, what science or literature lend? for money, and dress, and a carriage, to death by your wife's 'dearest friend.'

Your cigar is extinguished, your books you can't read 'em, With dancing attendance upon Mrs. Blank, You must show when you're wanted, a married man's freedom! And for all this enjoyment yourself you've to thank. When the bottle's once broken, the liquor is spilt, When married, to madness or ruin you're driven; And worse still, you are bound till she dies or you're kilt. Young men, take warning: I'm single, thank heaven! 67 Marriage is not value for money and it prevents male pleasures like tobacco (reminding us of the pleasures of the Macmillan's 'Tobacco Parliament'). The husband is 'bound' in the same way that Sir Anthony is 'tied down'. Men are restricted by many things, but one woman, one sexual partner, may be the most severe of regulations. In a later issue, an article entitled 'Spinsters and Bachelors' uses a great-men-of-history argument to assert that men and women are productive in other than familial ways. Through good deeds and labour, a bachelor may be 'alone yet

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not alone, for the good he may do dwells as voices in his home, singing the harmony of angels'.68 However, most discourses around the bachelor do not attempt to justify the single life by good deeds. A similar periodical to Bachelors' Buttons appeared a decade later in 1870. Bachelors' Papers was a Liverpool monthly sold in London in Lombard Street, near to Bank in the City. The editor freely admits that the periodical 'was not instituted as a commercial speculation. Our object was to afford our friends and our friends' friends an opportunity of expressing in print their opinions on various subjects.' 69 Like Bachelors' Buttons, Bachelors' Papers was slim and short-lived but its contents are more serious in tone. In the February issue, in 'A Spinster's Musings', the gauntlet was thrown down: 'Bachelors' Papers! What Next! It really seems as if the ordinary course of things were to be reversed altogether.' 70 Referring to 'these degenerate times', her article attacks bachelors for their narcissism and monetary selfishness, but note how her language resembles both Sir Anthony's and the discourse in Bachelor's Buttons: The young men now must have rooms of their own to pursue their studies (?); they have even formed their plans for amusement so that women are necessarily excluded; and it is well known, that to marry on less than three or four hundred a year is held (in society), to be a sign of something little short of lunacy. The consequence is, that Bachelors and Spinsters are very much on the increase; and I take it that the appearance of this periodical is only the natural consequence of the fact I have just stated. 71 The writer's parenthetical remarks are telling: by the strategic use of a question mark, she deflates the male argument that rooms need to be taken for study, and she connects the folly of bachelors to class and to middle-class society particularly. The study-room she mocks is the bedroom of which Sir Anthony wishes he were still master. But let's be perfectly clear: bedrooms are for sleeping and for having sex. A single life does not mean a celibate life. Unstated but lurking between the lines of bachelor discourses is the knowledge that men can and do procure sex. Michael Slater has written about the Bachelor's Pocket Book for 1851 which catalogued descriptions of some of London's prostitutes. 72

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Married men as well as bachelors would have found such publications useful. Later in 'A Spinster's Musings', the writer asserts that 'clubs, Freemasonry, trips to London and other luxuries thus take the place of what under happier auspices would have been domestic happiness and comfort'. 73 She identifies all-male spaces as being inferior replacements for the only true happiness. 'A Spinster's Musings' did not go unanswered: an exchange of articles occurred in subsequent issues. In 'A "Quid Pro Quo"', a misogynistic bachelor responds by saying that 'ladies must bear the chief of the blame' for bachelorism, because ladies are expensive to keep and, frankly stupid: And if young men have 'rooms and studies' of their own, is it not often because in 'society' the 'amusements and studies' and employments of ladies are to say the least of it, frivolous if fashionable, and alike undignified and wasteful.. . . Hair wandering like 'tangled tow' adown the back now puffed and padded into monstrous shapes and sizes above and behind the head, or rolling like immense waves, at each side thereof; the contemplation of these not unfrequently drives the beholder to the littered and lumbered regions of his own, and to - 'sublime tobacco'. 74 The Gorgon has driven Poseidon out of the house, back into a sea of men. Just as Sir Anthony moaned that 'lazy hounds about the place are eating me up', all men are likely to be devoured in marriage. 'Marriage in Real Life', a more philosophical response to the spinster and published in the same issue as 'A "Quid Pro Quo"', argues that marriage is no longer the sole reason for existence of either men or women, and that happiness for both sexes can be found outside of marriage. 75 In a follow-up piece, the spinster welcomed these responses for drawing attention to the problem, but she maintains her thesis that men are selfish and asserts that a single life is an unnatural one. 76 It takes one to know one. In addition to these bachelors' periodicals, pamphlets and single penny-a-sheet poems circulated discussing the single life in a usually light and joking tone. A London pamphlet measuring two by three inches called Bachelorism Portrayed, 'By a member of the Female society for the extinction of that useless portion Mankind, Old Bachelors', came out probably in 1865, with brief

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sayings and titbits on single men: 'Bachelor's Island', 'Causes of Bachelorism', and a bachelor's 'Thermometer/. It included the poem 'Bachelor's Portrait', also published separately as a penny poem, printed and sold in Manchester. Similarly, the 'Thermometer', which charted each year of a bachelor's life from age 16 to 60, was issued as the poem 'Bachelor's Register', again emanating from Manchester. In the voraciously male Punch, a drawing appeared in December 1865 depicting two women forcing their prayer-books in front of a weary-eyed man. The caption reads: 'Distressing Dilemma For Our Young Bachelor Surgeon!' 77 All of these texts - small poems, pamphlets and periodicals - point to circulating discussions about the bachelor question available to Fortnightly readers around the time of the serialization of The Belton Estate. Sir Anthony's anti-marriage pitch to his son is connected to a whole series of images of and arguments about the bachelor, so that readers would have understood the meanings of Sir Anthony's references. Not surprisingly, then, Captain Aylmer recognises a validity in his father's advice: 'in fitting his father's words to his own case, Captain Aylmer did perceive that a bachelor's life might perhaps be the most suitable to his own peculiar case. Only he would do nothing unhandsome' (ch. 27, III, 147). He resolves that if Clara will only obey his mother, he will consent to marriage. At times it seems that Clara is just a pawn between two men who both want the same thing. It is only when Will thinks Aylmer will succeed that he refocuses on Clara, and vice versa, as if each man desires Clara simply because the other does. In the end, Will marries Clara and Captain Aylmer marries a Lady Emily. Marriage is settled upon as the right economic thing to do for Captain Aylmer, and Will remains a Belton of Belton. However comforting Trollope's tidy conclusion may be, his novel raises gendered issues which complicate the serial's place within the Fortnightly. During the serialization, Trollope's novel is the only place within the magazine that addresses issues about the Woman Question in any extended and considered way. Elsewhere in the periodical's non-fiction, women as subjects and contributors are conspicuous by their relative absence, the effect of which is a silence with regard to women's political and reform topics. In its way, the novel speaks for women and women's issues; Clara's burst of independence and ultimate acceptance of marriage may be indicative of Trollope's own convictions, but engages in a

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particular construction of women in a liberal magazine. The Belton Estate, however, also speaks to men, to the magazine's largely male readership. It articulates male reservations about marriage and sympathizes with the desire of men to be with men. Anything more than such general empathy would go against the grain of Positivism specifically a n d middle-class periodical fiction (circulating-library fiction) generally. For men, The Belton Estate is not just another Trollope novel about young ladies. It is a cultural document which in the context of an all-male Fortnightly expresses a deep anxiety over the roles of men, women, marriage, and property within middle-class culture.

THE DEBATE OVER ANONYMITY: HOW RADICAL WAS SIGNATURE? The Fortnightly'?, policy of total signature was new to periodical culture and to the higher journalism especially, although previously a number of magazines were partially signed and contributors could be revealed in other ways. The great reviews such as the Edinburgh and the Quarterly in the early nineteenth century were unsigned because in the most serious form of journalism it was thought ungentlemanly to introduce personality into criticism. Book reviewing, the basis of the quarterlies, in fact offered an opportunity to discuss important topical political and social questions to public figures who needed to remain anonymous. Of course, given their price, the length of articles and the discourses covered, the reviews were class-based. The concept of the gentleman writer or the brilliant amateur prevailed, and journalism was not regarded seriously as a profession until later in the century. Magazines of different social milieux did introduce signature to varying degrees. Bentley's Miscellany (1837-68), originally edited by Dickens, was about 50 per cent signed by the 1860s, and signature had been frequent for many years before. The prominence of fiction in magazines like Bentley's distinguished them from the weighty journals, so signature was less important. Bentley's purpose was as much optimistic entertainment as instruction, and 'its positive goal was realized mainly in serialized novels and short fiction'. 78 Fiction and poetry were often signed even in magazines which were otherwise a n o n y m o u s . Poetry was

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sometimes signed with initials, or serials with 'by the author of, but the gesture at attribution was there. Literary gossip sections and monthly reviews of the periodicals also provided possible routes by which authorial identity might be made public. In these ways, individuals could be credited without absolute disclosure on a contents page. Only a few years before the Fortnightly began to sign, Macmillan's was already almost fully signed. It carried fiction and poetry, but serious non-fiction on a variety of topics including politics and foreign affairs was also included. The prominence of signature is reinforced by the inclusion in the annual bound volumes of an index listing a number of contributors. The index followed the contents pages and was set off by a different typeface, thereby emphasizing the important place of the contributor within the magazine's configuration. Macmillan's is an interesting case because it follows the tradition of using the name of the publishing house in its title, but the actual authority of the magazine is shared with individual writers. The magazine's contributors were often on Macmillan's book lists, so the periodical was partly a way of selling the firm's authors. Still, Macmillan's was unique in this burgeoning monthly market in its signature policy, for whatever reasons. Contributors could also be credited through advertisements for a single issue of a magazine or for a serialization, and often adverts revealed authorship even when the pages of the periodical did not. Advertisements indicate that no matter what the official policy, editors were willing to announce contributors as bait for readers, at least some of the time. The crediting of authorship through adverts was a way of partially lifting the veil without demystifying the aura of a journal. Furthermore, trade journals like the Publishers' Circular often disclosed otherwise anonymous magazine writers in their literary intelligence sections each fortnight. For the Fortnightly to adopt signature, then, was not as radical as it may seem. Changes in anonymity occurred incrementally in a number of periodicals before the Fortnightly was published. However, by overthrowing anonymity, together with other unconventional moves - fortnightly frequency, fiction alongside review-like journalism, no house style - the proprietors and editor were signalling the experimental nature of the periodical proclaimed in the prospectus. As Laurel Brake has argued, 'the foregrounding of individuals . . . posed a threat to the collective

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identity of the periodicals, an identity fostered by the "house" style, the collective "we", and the circulation of a periodical persona through a sobriquet such as "Maga".' 79 The Fortnightly, then, was threatening conventional publishing practices in a number of ways. We ought to ask, who had most to lose from the Fortnightly's independence? That distributors seem not to have accepted the magazine as a fortnightly after 20 months may be evidence of the industry reasserting its power over the ambitious periodical. Yet several determined articles in the pages of the Fortnightly reinforced the principle of signature: Lewes in his 'Causeries'; Trollope in 'On Anonymous Journalism'; Morley in 'Anonymous Journalism'. George Saintsbury laid out the parameters of the anonymity debate in his history of nineteenth-century literature, published in 1896. He admits that even in the climate of an almost totally anonymous press early in the century, knowledge of authors was 'unofficial', at least by those in the know such as other writers, and members of the publishing industry: 'Even about the editorship of the great periodicals a sort of coquetry of veiling was preserved, and editors' names, though in most cases perfectly well known, seldom or never appeared.' 80 Still, outside the metropolis from which most periodicals emanated, identities of authors could remain unknown without much trouble. An article in the New and Monthly Magazine in 1839 supports this notion by describing the mysteriousness of anonymity as 'the charm of our periodical literature'. 81 This mystery and coquetry were perceived as part of the aura of journalism, perhaps part of the attraction for readers who might enjoy speculating about the identity of particular writers. Resistance to signature focused primarily on two objections, that 'signed criticism diminishes both the responsibility and the authority of the editor' and that 'it encourages the employment of critics, and the reception of what they say, rather for their names than for their competence'. 82 Oscar Maurer, in an important article written in 1948 on the Victorian anonymity debate, suggests four reasons why anonymity was abandoned as a principle for journalism: prominent names could attract a growing reading public; editors saw signature as a responsibility to honesty; 'public curiosity demands names'; and journalism became more respectable so writers could afford to be identified. 83

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As Saintsbury, Maurer, and more recently Brake have recognized, the move away from anonymity was concurrent with an increasing interest in personality. The Fortnightly's policy of signature, in addition to having precedents, occurred within the context of a popular reading culture which began to identify public figures as celebrities. Significantly, several publishers followed the Fortnightly's lead by launching signed periodicals, as with the Contemporary Review and the Argosy. The period during which the Fortnightly began to be published was a transitional one for the industry, just after the taxes on knowledge had been repealed and numerous new periodicals were launched but well before Arnold announced a New Journalism,84 with its particular emphasis on personality. As Lewes put it, readers want either 'an idol or a victim', not a nameless, faceless critic.85 The changing practices heralded a shift in the periodical publishing industry, concerned increasingly with a mass market. The rise of the celebrity, in relation to which signed journalism was elemental, coincided with changes in the industry which could allow for the selling and marketing of personalities. I would argue that stardom - whether in terms of a star system of journalism in the nineteenth century or the Hollywood studio system in the 1930s - is unavoidable once a popular, mass culture can be identified. Although the Fortnightly's circulation was small, popular magazines in the 1860s had shown that a large mass readership (hundreds of thousands of readers instead of tens of thousands) was not only possible, but also eager and available. 86 It is necessary to distinguish between literary celebrity and actual stardom. Andrew Elfenbein, in an excellent study of Byron's celebrity, distinguishes 'the celebrity from merely famous people as a figure whose personality is created, bought, sold, and advertised through capitalist relations of production'. 87 Celebrity at this level, I suggest, is a type of stardom. The distinction between stars and the merely famous is useful when considering, for example, literary lionism, a topic much discussed in the 1830s, which indicates that there were a number of writers who at the time enjoyed a certain amount of fame and popularity. Harriet Martineau addresses the problem of lionism in the London and Westminster Review in 1839. She asserts that celebrity status is 'a tax which a popular author must pay', and that being paraded

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Literary 'lions' have become a class.. .. This testifies to the vast spread of literature among our people. How great a number of readers is required to support, by purchase and by praise, a standing class of original writers! It testifies to the deterioration of literature as a whole. If, at any one time, there is a class of persons to whom the public are grateful for intellectual excitement, how mediocre must be the quality of the intellectual production. 89 Martineau's argument, that a popular readership is an uncritical one (an argument which still exists in many forms today), is based on the binary of Art/Literature and popular entertainment. (For Matthew Arnold, writing in the Cornhill in the late 1860s, the binary between high and low art is presented in the more extreme critical terms of culture and anarchy.) And Martineau interestingly identifies an 'us and them' phenomenon: The crowning evil which arises from the system of Tionism' is, that it cuts off the retreat of literary persons into the great body of human beings. They are marked out as a class, and can no longer take refuge from their toils and their publicity in ordinary life.90 A precondition for lionism, and later for stardom, is the image of being extra-ordinary, different from you and me. Andrew Tudor has theorized this as the star-audience relationship, in which four categories can be classified: emotional affinity, self-identification, imitation, and projection. 91 Martineau accepts that lionizing is in fact a form of showing off, of using literary figures as social objects. The individual author, and not his or her works, becomes a commodity; the audience consumes the star and the image of the star. Also in the 1830s, we could cite as evidence of a personalityfocused journalism the 'Gallery of Literary Characters' which ran in Eraser's Magazine in the 1830s and published one-page descriptions of prominent literary figures such as Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, Caroline Norton, Letitia Landon, and Harriet Martineau.

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around a social gathering to meet a host's friends and neighbours is part of that tax.88 Martineau links the rise of lionism to growing readership, which she denounces roundly, while also betraying her own class fears:

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Each entry was accompanied by a drawing - an image - of the literary lion. In the first issue of Punch in 1841, an article on the London theatre bemoaned the 'star system' in drama. Punch argues that the system of paying individuals huge fees means that the rest of the company of actors is underpaid, so that 'men of education are deterred from making the stage a profession, and consequently the scarcity of rising actors is referable to this cause'.92 Leo Lowenthal, writing in the mid-twentieth century about literature and popular culture in America, believes that interest in individuals is 'a kind of mass gossip'. 93 In the 1830s, the gossip is localized by being contained within the drawing-rooms of the middle and upper classes. For the most part, the literary lions of the early nineteenth century (Byron apart) are not actually stars. For one thing, the technological and economic machinery needed to support a late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century national mass culture had not yet been invented. Yet it was in the 1830s that a young literary figure began his ascent into veritable stardom. After the Pickwick Papers, Dickens's popularity was never in jeopardy, and the reputation he earned with Sketches by Boz was 'soon transformed into a phenomenal triumph, a craze which swept across all class - and soon all national - boundaries, and which proved not to be the nine days' wonder that some people predicted'. 9 4 If anyone was a star in mid-nineteenth-century England, it was Dickens. Perhaps no other novelist has since received the same attention, both critically and popularly, and his status in the late twentieth century, rather like that of Shakespeare, approaches myth. As Mary Poovey asserts, Dickens 'expertly used new advertising techniques to produce an iconography of "Dickens" and a market for his books': On the one hand, by its very nature, the successful promotion of a marketable 'name' depended on distinguishing between this writer and all other competitors. But on the other hand, arguments advanced to discriminate a writer's personality so as to enhance the value of his work often referred to his ability to appeal to or represent the taste of all his readers - to be, in other words, like everybody else.95 Then, as now, Dickens and Dickensian trappings were converted into commodities, products to be consumed by a hungry, starstruck public:

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Consumer goods, from chintzes to cigars, were given 'Pickwick' and 'Weller' brand names; the music shops were soon full of 'Pickwick Quadrilles', 'Artful Dodger Galops', ballads such as 'Nelly Gently Sleeps', 'Dolly Varden', and 'God Bless Us Every One'; inadequately protected by copyright, Dickens's novels were soon being imitated, plagiarised and pirated, and, before he had written, let alone published, the endings of his novels, theatrical adapters invented their own endings and put dramatic versions on the stage. 96 The extensive commodification of Dickens, and of literature broadly, occurred within the context of a rapidly expanding capitalism in which the advertising, to use Marx's terms, fetishized commodities. 97 But Dickens was more than the most commodified, marketed popular novelist of his day. His famous readings contributed at least as much to his star status (and to his substantial coffers98) as his fiction. Although there were precedents for the readings, he was the most successful in this medium of entertainment, which served to enhance his celebrity. The taste for public readings was a desire to see virtuoso performers and was 'related to the tastes of Victorian theatre-goers for strong starquality', 99 the sort of star system that Mr Punch complained about in 1841. But the public platform was not open to everyone: women novelists (who could not be displayed in person) and most poets (who perhaps suffered from the Art/Entertainment dichotomy) are noticeably absent. The rise of celebrity can also be documented in other ways. Who's Who, for example, first published in 1849, contained the names of the royal family, aristocracy, government, judges, directors of companies and other important public figures. There were no entries for literary or creative people, and the pocket-size book was designed for reference rather than gossip. The prominence of biography in periodicals (apparent since the eighteenth century) also indicates, among other things, readers' appetite for important names, generally male. Biographical notices of famous men of history and reviews of biographies were a mainstay of periodicals at all levels, from the heavy quarterlies to Chambers' Edinburgh Journal. But there was a shift in interest from the individual to the personality. The cult of personality increased in the final decades of the nineteenth century, as the practices of the New Journalism became more firmly established in the press

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at all levels. In the 1870s Edmund Yates published a series of articles called 'Celebrities at Home' in the World which were reprinted in three volumes. These pieces were short biographies of royalty, aristocracy, literary figures and other well-known people (including Tennyson, Gladstone, Mary Braddon, Darwin, Sarah Bernhardt and the Prince of Wales), and Joel Wiener has argued that Yates's series was instrumental in creating a celebrity culture: . . . among the significant contributions that Yates made to journalism was to link gossip to the public's interest in famous people. He virtually coined the word celebrity in making the 'Celebrities at Home' series in the World one of its popular features for many years. Providing a peek into the lives of well-known people was the essence of personal journalism, as Yates defined it.100 Wiener notes that Trollope refused to be interviewed for the series 'because he disapproved of "society journalism"'. 101 In the 1880s the demand for famous people was so great that periodicals devoted solely to celebrities were launched. Celebrities of the Day: British and Foreign (A Monthly Repertoire of Contemporary Biography) survived to three volumes between 1881 and 1882, publishing at first between 15 and 20 biographical sketches per month; the number dropped to about six per month by the spring of 1882. The entire series included only two women, both actresses. Our Celebrities: A Portrait Gallery (1888-89) ran to 12 issues as planned, with three biographical sketches and accompanying photo portraits in each issue. The quality of the monthly issues is lavish, with photos by Walery, photographer to the Queen, but such luxury was reflected in the hefty price of 2s. 6d. Subjects ranged from aristocrats to notable professionals, but what is interesting is that artists (such as Frederic Leighton) and literary figures (such as Edmund Yates) are included as are several women. T.H. Huxley appears in May 1889, but chooses to write his own profile, complaining at any rate, T could not see what business the public had with my private life'.102 By this time, Huxley's resistance was already part of a losing battle, for a culture of personality was asserting its dominance. Authors in the 1870s and 1880s were raising their status as professionals by taking the marketing of their books into their own hands. The Author's Note Book and Eiterary Gossip, a penny

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monthly which ran only to five issues, purported to provide a space where authors could speak directly to the reading public: 'The present paper is started under the impression that the reading public would not be uninterested in seeing in a brief form, what authors had to say, by way of explanation, of their own productions . . .'103 Times had changed considerably from the day when authorship was either unknown or only coyly admitted in roundabout ways. Here, authors take responsibility for controlling their own images and those of their literary productions for public consumption. At least two articles appeared during the run on the topic of organizing a type of authors' union to provide a support network for writers and to end authorial isolationism. An article entitled 'Slaughter of the Innocents' describes the difficulty of new periodicals to survive in the face of unhelpful retailers: 'The greatest difficulty encountered by the proprietors of new periodicals is to get them exhibited in newsvendors' windows or upon their stalls.'104 The effect of the Author's Note Book is to combat established publishing practices at every turn - in areas of copyright, authorial status, and the distribution of literature. Authors were coming out all over and seeking self-empowerment not possible in a culture of anonymity. All of this is to say that during the 1860s, when the Fortnightly effectively introduced an author-based journal into periodical literature, it was, in fact, participating in a broader cultural shift which was turning individuals, like Dickens, into highly marketable stars. Enter Trollope, whose Hunting Sketches was reviewed in the Illustrated London News in 1865. The reviewer discussing the book form of the occasional Pall Mall Gazette essays enters the fray over the place of literary personality in popular culture: Let all who are in the habit of asking contemptuously, 'What's in a name?' regard this neat little book.. . . [The essays] are just light, pleasant, easy reading, lively enough, and apparently written by one who understands his subject. Had an ordinary man contributed them to any newspaper, they would have probably have been applauded at the time and consigned to oblivion; but they had appended to them the name or Mr. Anthony Trollope. 105 Two things stand out especially from this passage. Firstly, Trollope is not 'ordinary,' which suggests that he is extra-ordinary, someone

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WHAT'S IN A NAME? CAPITALIZING ON 'TROLLOPE' Trollope, one of the most popular novelists at this time, continually in print with overlapping serials and book publications, was a name to be reckoned with . . . or was he? That was the question on his mind when he decided on an experiment to test his own brand-name worth in the serial literature market. In November 1865, just four months after Trollope had argued for signed journalism in the pages of the Fortnightly, he began writing Nina Balatka, which he hoped to publish anonymously. He offered the serial to George Smith, who declined it, but found a publisher in John Blackwood, who for some time had been wanting to publish Trollope.107 Some Trollope reviewers had complained of too much, too similar Trollope in circulation. Attacks with such a tone were most prominent in the reception of The Belton Estate in 1866.108 Publishing Nina Balatka anonymously, Trollope was testing two things in particular: the genuineness of reviewers, and his own saleability as a name. 109 What it did not do was test the publishing industry's likelihood of publishing an unknown author anonymously. Blackwood knew he was publishing Trollope, and was inclined to accept the author's whim with the hope that Trollope might look to Blackwood with a more usual novel of English society; however, he did desire that a second identity could be made to pay, as a letter from Blackwood to J.M. Langford (an acquaintance of Trollope's from the Garrick) makes clear: I am pleased to hear of Trollope's disposition for further relations. When you see him give him my compliments, and say I am quite inclined. 'Author of "Nina Balatka"' may become a very convenient nom de plume, especially for such a very prolific writer as our friend.110 In Nina Balatka, Trollope distances himself from his other fiction by setting the novel in Prague, where he had recently visited. Although a conventional romance with the usual family compli-

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whose name matters, someone with a star quality. Secondly, the reviewer asserts that the publisher is actually selling Trollope the name - Trollope the commodity, an 'idol of consumption'. 106

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cations and objections, the story revolves around the love affair of a wealthy Jewish young man and a poor Christian young woman. Will they or won't they marry? is the question throughout, but as always we feel safe in assuming that love will triumph over custom, tradition, even religion. Blackwood paid just £450 for the serial (published in Blackwood's Magazine) and one-volume rights, well below the sum Trollope could have commanded with his name attached. The novel was well received but sold poorly, and Trollope's anonymity was generally maintained. Not content with a one-off experiment and again trying to forge a second writing persona, Trollope offered Blackwood Linda Tressel, to be published anonymously on the same financial terms. Another one-volume novel set in foreign lands (this time Nuremberg), Linda Tressel was less enthusiastically received than Nina Balatka, so again the experiment was unsuccessful. N. John Hall suggests, 'Blackwood probably hoped enough people knew of Trollope's authorship to make the secret an open one.' 111 The publisher indulged the author's whim, hoping to keep him on his list, and Blackwood seems not to have been deluded that the experiment would prove very successful; he only published the novels because they were by Trollope. The irony is that Trollope had to publish a different type of fiction, hence the foreign locations and the brevity of the novels. A novel resembling any of the Barchester series would have been immediately recognizable, as would women-and-marriage novels in the vein of Rachel Ray, Miss Mackenzie, or The Belton Estate.112 Certain types of novel were Trollope territory and any attempt at anonymity would have been futile. Blackwood recognized this and commented of Nina Balatka, 'there is nothing in the Tale to recall the popular painter of Englishwomen in the drawing room on the Lawn' (Letters 1, 337). Why, then, incur the risk? Pierre Bourdieu, in 'The Production of Belief, has addressed the relationships between literary and artistic figures and publishers and galleries. For Bourdieu, the accumulation of 'symbolic capital' is one of the functions of cultural vendors: 'Symbolic capital' is to be understood as economic or political capital that is disavowed, misrecognized and thereby recognized, hence legitimate, a 'credit' which, under certain conditions, and always in the long run, guarantees 'economic' profits.113

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In short, w h e n the only usable, effective capital is the (mis)recognized, legitimate capital called 'prestige' or 'authority', the economic capital that cultural undertakings generally require cannot secure the specific profits by the field - not the 'economic' profits they always imply - unless it is reconverted into symbolic capital. 114 This of course assumes that there is an author that can be consecrated. It is perhaps useful to think of this in relation to avant-garde writers and artists, whose cachet translates into a value not specially economic. Edward Bishop has argued that T.S. Eliot's choosing The Dial for publication of The Wasteland demonstrates how radical art can be absorbed and commodified in a mainstream market, while producing 'economic capital' for the magazine. 115 Bourdieu asks the question, 'who is the true producer of the value of the work - the painter or the dealer, the writer or the publisher, the playwright or the theatre manger?' 116 The authority of the author is not the only source of value, for without the cultural apparatus linked to the author - such as publisher and distributor - the author's name is largely valueless. At the time Blackwood accepted Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel, Trollope was a consecrated author in the serial market. Taken up by Smith in 1860, revalued and upgraded with successive serials, moving between various publishers by the mid-1860s, accepted by critics - Trollope's was a name that publishers wanted on their lists. Blackwood was more than happy to do a favour for a star novelist who might one day bring a real Trollope novel to his firm for publication. But there is a second identity concerned here - the anonymous Trollope. Blackwood seems aware in the letters quoted that it is unlikely that the anonymous novels will actually pay off, but he is hopeful that the 'Author of Nina Balatka' might just catch on. Although the book was not selling, the authorship was still talked about. Blackwood's primary interest may have been in his ability to consecrate another identity for Trollope. In Bourdieu's terms, it is in this struggle to consecrate authors that value is actually found, not in individual persons, single institutions, publications, personalities:

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A publisher might endorse an author as 'symbolic capital' rather than as 'economic capital' because the author brings status to the publisher:

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Stardom can be achieved only after the struggle, so that celebrity, one element in the field of production, is really a result of consecration. We need to be careful about using recent theories of media and publishing in order to understand nineteenth-century contexts. It is fair to ask whether mid-Victorian culture lends itself to Bourdieu's late twentieth-century analysis. Some might protest that Victorian publishing was simply too small in scale to warrant an analysis more appropriate to advanced capitalist media. However, we know that numbers of readers were increasing greatly; we know that publishing companies were merging, as were their magazine titles; we know that new printing and paper technologies were revolutionizing production; we know that the author was seeking self-empowerment by professionalising his practices. Victorian publishing still appears parochial in its localism and in its club-like mentality, as described at the beginning of this chapter. Yet, it is precisely the intimacy of the club network that makes Victorian publishing so recognizable to us today. Bourdieu asserts that 'entering the field of literature is not so much like going into religion as getting into a select club: the publisher is one of those prestigious sponsors .. . who effusively recommend their candidate.' 118 The way in which cultural commodities are consecrated now, as then, depends on a hegemonic, intimate network of individuals who have the ability to create value, either through economic or symbolic capital. Although the size of the economy has expanded - global publishing conglomerates, closely linked with other media - one essential structure of the publishing world remains familiar: the clubbiness of the network. Trollope's move to create a second public persona would not be unusual today, and one can think of several writers who use alter egos to write different types of novel. The problem is one of image: stars must maintain an image for public consumption. Any attempt to alter the image threatens the value of the star's quality. Trollope wrote an article arguing for signature by periodical writers; not long afterwards, he hoped to serialize an anonymous novel. We see

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it is the field of production, understood as the system of objective relations between these agents or institutions and as the site of the struggles for the monopoly of the power to consecrate, in which the value of works of art and belief in that value are continuously generated. 117

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different approaches to fiction and non-fiction, and Trollope's efforts to sign and then not to sign indicate how popular cultural figures rely on the value of their public images. In testing his own star quality and in trying to create a separate cultural identity, with its own cultural currency, Trollope helps us see the intricacies of the 'field of production' where culture is produced and stars are discovered and named.

Notes 1. See A, 190: 'Before we parted with our property we had found that a fortnightly issue was not popular with the trade through whose hands the work must reach the public; and, as our periodical had to become sufficiently popular itself to bear down such opposition, we succumbed, and brought it out once a month.' However, there were precedents for fortnightly magazine publication in other markets, such as the Family Friend, which was launched as a monthly in 1849, but became fortnightly soon after and attained a fortnightly circulation of 80,000 by December 1850. 2. Prospectus, Fortnightly Review 1 (May 15, 1865), inside front cover. 3. 'On the Anonymous in Periodicals', New and Monthly Magazine and Literary lournal 39 (September 1833), 4-5. 4. For an overview of the anonymity debate in the nineteenth century, see Oscar Maurer, Jr, 'Anonymity vs. Signature in Victorian Reviewing', Texas Studies in English 27 (June 1948), 1-27. 5. See the Fortnightly prospectus. 6. Quoted in M.H. Spielmann, The History of 'Punch' (London: Cassell and Company, 1895), 53. 7. Quoted ibid., 93. For a more complete discussion of the Punch dinners and club-like social formation of the magazine, see ibid., chapter 3. 8. Charles Morgan, The House of Macmillan (1843-1943) (London: Macmillan, 1943), 50. 9. Rosemary Ashton, G.H. Lewes: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 101. 10. Ibid., 198. 11. 'The Positive Philosophy of M. Auguste Comte', Edinburgh Review 127 (April 1868), 305. 12. Laurel Brake offers another explanation. See her chapter, 'The "Wicked Westminster", the Fortnightly, and Walter Pater's Renaissance , in John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten, eds, Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 289-305, in which she argues that the Fortnightly constructs women readers in particular ways through the use of coded language in the articles.

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13. Auguste Comte, Correspondance generate et Confessions, 1846-48 (Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1981), 194: T am delighted that my recent Discours has so pleased you. This is a good sign for the moral and social success of positivism, which, in your country, also corresponds to its intellectual success' (my translation). 14. This letter at the Maison Auguste Comte in Paris is quoted in T.R. Wright, The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 52. 15. Auguste Comte, A General View of Positivism, J.H. Bridges, trans. (London: Trubner, 1865), 225-6. 16. Ibid., 248. 17. Ibid., 277-8 18. Wright, Religion of Humanity, 50. 19. See the following articles on Comte: 'Positive Philosophy of Comte', Edinburgh Review 127 (April 1868), 303-57; William Whewell, 'Comte and Positivism', Macmillan's Magazine 13 (March 1866), 353-62; 'Positivism', North British Review 49 (September 1868), 209-56; W.H. Freemantle, 'M. Auguste Comte and His Disciples on International Policy', Contemporary Review 3 (December 1866), 477-98; Brooke F. Westcott, 'Comte on the Philosophy of the History of Christianity', Contemporary Review 3 (December 1867), 399-421; Brooke F. Westcott, 'Aspects of Positivism in Relation to Christianity', Contemporary Review 8 (July 1868), 371-86. 20. Editor [G.H. Lewes], 'Comte and Mill', Fortnightly Review 6 (1 October 1866), 385-406. See also Lewes's 'Auguste Comte', Fortnightly Review 3 (1 January 1866), 385-410 and his review of Bridges's General View in the Fortnightly Review 1 (1 June 1865), 250-1, in which he accepts Comte's early philosophy but not the later doctrinal religion. As I indicate later in this chapter, another way to regard the Fortnightly's promotion of Positivism is to consider the periodical's relation to radical politics. 21. G.H. Lewes, Biographical History of Philosophy 2 (2 vols; London: John W. Parker, 1857), 662. 22. Wright, Religion of Humanity, 60. 23. Gordon Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters 4 (9 vols; London: Oxford University Press; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956), 496. 24. See, for example, the following letters in Haight, ed., George Eliot Letters 4: George Eliot to Mrs Richard Congreve (28 November 1863), 115-16; George Eliot to Mrs Richard Congreve (3 January 1865), 173-74; George Eliot to Mrs Richard Congreve (28 January 1863), 227. 25. Still, we could add to the anecdotal evidence. Interestingly, Raphael's painting of the 'Sistine Madonna' was perhaps George Eliot's favourite painting in the world and on a trip to Dresden in 1858, the couple, in awe, returned repeatedly to the work. It may be merely coincidence, but nonetheless suggestive, that the 'Sistine Madonna' was a 'central symbol of Positivist worship', and a

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

Trollope and the Magazines reproduction h u n g in the Church of Humanity, Chapel Street. See Wright, Religion of Humanity, 196. Ibid., 129. See Christopher Kent, 'Higher Journalism and the Promotion of Comtism', Victorian Periodicals Review 25:2 (Summer 1992), 51-6. Wright, Religion of Humanity, 128. 'Positivist Papers', British Library, ADD MS 45.259, fos. 1-2. Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), chapter 1. Christopher Kent, Brains and Numbers: Elitism, Comtism, and Democracy in Mid-Victorian England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 89. 'Positivist Papers', British Library, ADD MS 45.227, fo. 21. See Kent, Brains and Numbers, who writes, 'most of the Comtists were devoted clubmen', 88. The Reform Club's membership books indicate that in the mid 1860s, the following Fortnightly contributors were members: E.S. Beesly; Sheldon Amos; Robert Bell; James C. Morison; Marmion Savage; Joseph Charles Parkinson; Charles MacKay; Frederic Harrison. See The Rules and Regulations, with an Alphabetical List of the Members of THE REFORM CLUB with Dates of Entrance (Westminster: Thomas Brettel, 1866). My thanks to Mr Simon Blundell, librarian at the Reform Club, for his assistance in tracking down both contributors and Positivists who were club members. Richard Congreve, The Propagation of the Religion of Humanity: A Sermon Preached at South Fields, Wandsworth (London: John Chapman, 1860), 13. International Policy: Essays on the Foreign Relations of England (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866), v, my emphasis. E.S. Beesly, J.H. Bridges, Richard Congreve, Religion of Humanity, Republic of the West: Papers on the War between France and Germany (London: Edward Truelove, 1870). See Wellesley 2, 189. There were 243 articles (not including book notices, the 'Public Affairs' section or the 'Causeries') during Lewes's tenure. Editor [G.H. Lewes], 'Varia', Fortnightly Review 3 (1 January 1866), 512. Ibid., 512-13, my emphasis. This cultural configuration of the press is still with us in the late twentieth century. See Naomi Wolf, 'Are Opinions Male?' New Republic (29 November 1993), on the contents of the Washington Post and New York Times. Trollope had something to do with Cobbe's appearance in the magazine. See his letter to her (18 November 1866) in Letters 1, 359: T should think that a paper from you would be welcome to the Editor of the Fortnightly'. Note that Morley was editor by this time. Dickie A. Spurgeon believes that 'Morley followed Lewes in encouraging women to contribute to the magazine and in publish-

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44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

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ing articles advocating women's rights'; see his entry on the Fortnightly in Alvin Sullivan, British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837-1913 (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1984), 132. However, I do not accept this and do not see the evidence for it. John Dennis, review of John Malcolm Ludlow, Woman's Work in the Church, in Fortnightly Review 1 (1 June 1865), 252. See the following reviews in the Fortnightly: John Dennis's review of Mary Braddon, Only a Clod in 1 (1 July 1865), 511-12; A.R. Vardy's review of Amelia B. Edwards, Half a Million of Money in 3 (15 January 1866), 654-5; Robert Buchanan's review of Sarah Tytler's Citoyenne Jacqueline: A Woman's Lot in the Great French Revolution in 3 (1 February 1866), 781-2; John Dennis's review of Elizabeth Cooper's Life and Letters of Lady Arabella Stuart in 4 (15 March 1865), 383. Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in England, 1850-1895 (London: LB. Tauris, 1989), 50-1. See chapter 2 on the Married Women's Property Act of 1870. Note that Lewes was out of the country in June and July 1866 and that Trollope edited the magazine for those two months. No 'Causerie' appeared in July, August, or the first fortnight of September 1866. Editor [Lewes], 'Comte and Mill', 406. Ibid. Editor [Lewes], 'Criticism in Relation to Novels', Fortnightly Review 3 (15 December 1865), 353. Ibid., 355. Editor [G.H. Lewes], 'The Principles of Success in Literature: The Principle of Vision', Fortnightly Review 1 (1 June 1865), 187. Both the Fortnightly, initially, and the Revue appeared fortnightly. In 1865-66, the Revue published articles on foreign affairs, and a number of articles about England. A serial in 1864 about an English aristocrat was called Austin Elliot, Etude de la Vie Aristocratique Anglaise. The cover of the Revue lists the cities where the periodical could be purchased, emphasizing its internationalist base. The Fortnightly'^ dedication to internationalism can be seen best in Lewes's 'Public Affairs' section which provides an ongoing narrative of events in Europe and America. In addition, the two periodicals also wrote on similar and sometimes the same topics. London Review 12 (3 March 1866), 260. Athenaeum 1866 I (3 February 1866), 166. Trollope's fiction often teases out the tensions between love and money. See, for example, William A. Cohen's provocative chapter ('Trollope's Trollop') on The Eustace Diamonds in his study Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 158-90. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973; London: Hogarth Press, 1985), 174-5. Frederic Harrison, 'The Limits of Political Economy', Fortnightly Review 1 (15 June 1865), 366-7.

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59. See, for example, the pamphlet Positivist Articles, Reviews, and Letters reprinted from the Bengalee (Calcutta: Bengalee Press, 1870), 105-6. 60. [F.W. Newman,] 'Capacities of Women', Westminster Review 56 n.s. (October 1865), 359. 61. 'The Laws of Marriage and Divorce', Westminster Review 52 n.s. (October 1864), 458. The author is unattributed in Wellesley 3. 62. Shanley, Feminism, 14. 63. See ibid., chapter 2. 64. [Helen Taylor,] 'The Ladies' Petition', Westminster Review 31 n.s. (January 1867), 66, reprinted in Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, eds, Sexual Equality: Writings by John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill and Helen Taylor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 219. 65. See, for example, The Belton Estate (ch. 24, II, 664-5). We should note, however, that Will's disavowal of the estate is linked inextricably with his relationship with Clara and her relationship with Captain Aylmer. 66. Interestingly, a number of the Fortnightly's Positivists at the time were experiencing, in Christopher Kent's words, a 'prolonged bachelorhood' (see Kent, Brains and Numbers, 101). In 1869-70 this period of 'prolonged bachelorhood' came to an end when Beesly, Bridges, Harrison, and H. Crompton all got married. 67. 'Our Old Bachelors', Bachelors' Buttons (June 1860), 32. 68. 'Spinsters and Bachelors', Bachelors' Buttons (June 1860), 32. 69. Editorial Preface, Bachelors' Papers (November 1870). 70. 'A Spinster's Musings', Bachelors' Papers (February 1871), 95. 71. Ibid., 96. 72. Michael Slater, 'The Bachelor's Pocket Book for 1851', Tennessee Studies in Literature (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 128-40. 73. 'A Spinster's Musings', 98. 74. 'A "Quid Pro Quo"', Bachelors' Papers (April 1871), 149. 75. 'Marriage in Real Life', Bachelors' Papers (April 1871), 157-60. 76. 'A Spinster's Criticisms', Bachelors' Papers (May 1871), 172-6. 77. Punch 49 (16 December 1865), 238. 78. See the entry on Bentley's in Wellesley 4, 7. 79. Laurel Brake, '"The Trepidation of the Spheres": The Serial and the Book in the 19th Century', in Michael Harris and Robin Myers, eds, Serials and Their Readers (Winchester: St. Paul's Bibliographies, 1993), 91. 80. George Saintsbury, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (London: Macmillan, 1896), 450. 81. See note 3 above. 82. Saintsbury, A History, 451. 83. Maurer, 'Anonymity vs. Signature', 10-11. 84. See Matthew Arnold, 'Up to Easter', Nineteenth Century 21 (May 1887), 638. 85. Editor [Lewes], 'Causerie', Fortnightly Review 4 (1 April 1866), 507. 86. Consider, for example, the early success of Good Words or Cassell's. Of course, working-class Sunday papers such as Reynold's and Lloyd's

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87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97.

98.

99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

a Flybrid

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had circulations in the hundreds of thousands, and readerships many times greater. Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 47. Elfenbein suggests convincingly that Byron was the model for literary celebrity in the nineteenth century, and that periodicals were largely the means through which public opinion about 'Byron' was constructed and disseminated (see chapter 2, 'The Creation of Byronism'). Harriet Martineau, 'Literary Lionism', reprinted in Harriet Martineau s Autobiography 1 (3 vols; London: Smith, Elder, 1877), 283. Ibid., 276. Ibid., 285. Tudor's argument is summarized in Richard Dyer, Stars (1979; reprinted London: British Film Institute, 1992), 20-1. Dyer's book is an invaluable introduction to the study of 'stars'. 'The Drama', Punch 1 (17 July 1841), 12. Leo Lowenthal, Literature, Popular Culture and Society (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 110. Philip Collins, 'The Popularity of Dickens', Dickensian 70 (January 1974), 6. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 108. Poovey argues that Dickens came to represent a type of 'national character' which 'implicitly constructed the middle-class male as the norm by obliterating class (and gender) differences', 110. Collins, 'Popularity', 8. See Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (London and New York: Verso, 1990), especially the Introduction. Richards makes the point that 'the icons of Victorian commodity culture all originated in middleclass periodicals. Until the very end of the nineteenth century advertising consisted almost entirely of the bourgeoisie talking to itself, 7. Philip Collins, Reading Aloud: A Victorian Metier (Lincoln, UK: Tennyson Society, 1972), 7. Collins's account of the popularity of public readings, lectures, and recitals informs the next few paragraphs. See also Philip Collins, ed., Charles Dickens: The Public Readings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), xvii-xxx. Collins, Reading Aloud, 25. Joel Wiener, 'Edmund Yates: The Gossip as Editor', in Joel Wiener, ed., Innovators and Preachers: The Role of Editor in Victorian England (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1985), 269. Ibid., 270. See Huxley's entry in Our Celebrities 1 (May 1889), 1. 'First Words', Author's Note Book and Literary Gossip (December 1876), 1. 'Slaughter of the Innocents', Author's Note Book (February 1877), 24. 'Current Literature', Illustrated London News 46 (20 May 1865), 491. Lowenthal's phrase in Literature, Popular Culture, 115.

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107. N. John Hall gives the details of Nina Balatka's publishing history in Trollope: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 283-9. 108. See for example the London Review 12 (3 March 1866), 260, and Henry James's review in the Nation 2 (4 January 1866), 21-2. 109. See Judith Knelman, 'Trollope's Experiments with Anonymity', Victorian Periodicals Review 14:1 (Spring 1981), 21-4. 110. John Blackwood to J.M. Langford (3 April 1867), quoted in Mrs Gerald Porter, Annals of a Publishing House: John Blackwood (vol. iii of Margaret Oliphant's William Blackwood and His Sons: Their Magazine and Friends) (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1898), 361. See also Blackwood to Langford in Letters 1, 337, note 2: 'There is an individuality about [Nina Balatka] which will make any one who reads it remember it. Whether this is sufficient to make it really popular & stand out from the ruck as the work of an anonymous author is a doubtful point. My own feeling is that it would not produce such an effect in the Magazine or sell to such an extent afterwards as to make it wise for me to offer a large sum for the copyright. 111. Hall, Biography, 304. 112. As it was, some guessed Trollope's identity. See Trollope to John Blackwood (17 August 1866) in Letters 1, 349, and John Blackwood to J.M. Langford (3 April 1867) in Porter, Annals of a Publishing House, 361-2. 113. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 75. 114. Ibid. 115. Edward Bishop, 'Re: Covering Modernism: Format and Function in the Little Magazines,' in Ian Willison, Warwick Gould, and Warren Chernaik, eds, Modernist Writers and the Marketplace (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1996), 287-319. 116. Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 76. 117. Ibid., 78. 118. Ibid., 77.

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Transitions: Phineas Finn and Masculinity in Saint Pauls Magazine TROLLOPE IN TRANSITION The year 1867 was a watershed for Trollope. He had more or less disassociated himself from the increasingly progressive Fortnightly Review. He was at the peak of his powers, publishing in part issues The East Chronicle of Barset, which he regards in the Autobiography as his finest achievement in fiction (A 274), and he remembered 1867 with great nostalgia - the Barchester series was complete and the Palliser novels were well under way. More significantly for his personal life, at least as he later recalls, was the decision to resign from the Post Office. Trollope's deep sense of hurt at having been passed over for promotion in 1865 eventually led to his resignation in autumn 1867. Knowing that his literary work would provide at least as much income as his civil service job, Trollope resigned on 3 October. The publisher James Virtue had for several months discussed a new periodical for Trollope to edit, and with feelings of bitterness towards his beloved Post Office, Saint Pauls Magazine1 was launched in October 1867. Looking back, Trollope believed the years 1867-68 to be the 'busiest in my life' (A 322): he left the Post Office, travelled to America, established Saint Pauls, wrote journalism for the magazine, wrote five novels, hunted three times a week each winter and lost a parliamentary election. Whether or not we accept Trollope's construction of his life as told in the Autobiography, a story of making good through dedication and diligence if ever there was one, 2 it is true that 1867 was a transitional year for him. Virtue had approached Trollope about editing a magazine over a year before Saint Pauls was launched, and by December 1866 141 10.1057/9780230288546 - Trollope and the Magazines, Mark Turner

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4

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the author had agreed to be editor and plans were under way. Trollope's primary concern was that the first issue be postponed until October 1867.3 Trollope was different from other well-known editors in that he demanded full editorial control in deciding on contributors and their payments, and he was encouraged by Virtue to 'pay the contributors well to get good talent' (Fetters 1, 358). His own salary was £750 per year, 4 and at a pound a page for non-fiction, his rates to contributors were comparable to those of the quarterlies. Fiction (apart from Trollope's own, which earned a higher rate) was paid at the rate of 25 shillings per page, and it is worth noting that the other, lesser-paid serial novelists under Trollope's editorship were all women: Baroness Blaze de Bury, Frances Eleanor Trollope, and Mrs Oliphant. Trollope's place at the head of the magazine, it would seem, was not to be overshadowed by any other more popular novelist. However, his editorial control and generosity 5 were not enough to make the venture lucrative, and he admits in the Autobiography that 'publishers themselves have been the best editors of magazines' (A 288). 'I calculate that a sale of 25,000 would pay,' Virtue wrote to Trollope, 'but I certainly expect a far higher circulation' (Fetters 1, 358). As it was, the circulation never reached above 10,000, and Virtue sold the magazine to Alexander Strahan in May 1869. In January 1870, at the same time Trollope's serial of Ralph the Heir was added as a supplement to the magazine, 6 the authoreditor was informed that the publishers could no longer afford his services. By July he was out and Saint Pauls was left to 'edit itself in the manner of Blackwood's (Letters 1, 495). Four years later, after an unsuccessful intervention from yet another publisher, the magazine came quietly to an end in mid-volume. In the same month in 1867 that Trollope resigned from the Post Office and launched Saint Pauls, his experiment with anonymity continued with Linda Tressel in Blackwood's (as discussed in Chapter 3). Interestingly, while he was testing the power of his 'brand name' with Linda Tressel, advertisements for his own periodical were anything but modest about the attraction of 'Anthony Trollope'. Adverts in September and October clearly use his popularity to sell Saint Pauls. In a full page advertisement which appeared in the Athenaeum and Saturday Review, for example, his proper name and his role as editor are both invoked three times 7 (Fig. 4.1). Virtue had initially wanted Saint Pauls to be called Anthony Trollope's Magazine, but the humble author balked

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Transitions

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I mm HSOWTHLV HftOAZIlli* 18STI3D B¥ ANTHONY TRO^tOFE,

Trollope and the Magazines

at the notion, and at a late date the convention of using a London place-name was agreed. 8 Saint Pauls followed magazines such as Cornhill and Temple Bar in using a London location; but the fashionable use of place-names had a real significance. Just as Mary Braddon's Belgravia was a middle- and lower middle-class periodical inviting readers to buy into the notion of 'society', Trollope's title suggests a distinctly male part of London poised between the city and the courts, in the heart of the publishing world. 9 Conventional practice though it was, the name signalled a particularly male readership, while the inclusion of fiction certainly bid for women readers. As the adverts indicate, the new shilling monthly was clearly dominated by Trollope. Unlike older monthlies such as Blackwood's and Eraser's, many of the new monthlies in the 1860s (generally following the precedent of Dickens's weekly Household Words in the 1850s) relied to an extent on the popular names of their editors: Thackeray at Cornhill and Braddon at Belgravia, for example. In the summer of 1867, the new Tinsley's prominently displayed Edmund Yates's name as editor, as did the Argosy in advertising its new editor, Mrs Henry Wood. 10 Interestingly, at the time Trollope agreed to edit a magazine for Virtue, Lewes had just resigned from the Fortnightly, and gradually Trollope's presence at that progressive periodical diminished. Whether he was hoping in some measure to achieve at his new magazine what he failed to do at the Fortnightly - that is, found an intellectually liberal (not radical) journal of politics - is uncertain. However, we do know that Saint Pauls was always conceived of in Trollope's mind as a political venture. 11 In a letter to Virtue, he suggests two names to the publisher: 'The Monthly Westminster' and 'The Monthly Liberal'. He adds, 'I would propose to have every month a political article, - one month on foreign politics and one month on home politics' (Fetters 1, 361). From the beginning, then, politics was intended to be a primary focus for the magazine. While editing Saint Pauls, Trollope was considering yet another career move. In the autumn of 1868, he bid unsuccessfully to become MP for the borough of Beverley in Yorkshire. It was a corrupt election and a defeat about which Trollope was deeply disappointed; certainly, it coloured his treatment of politics and electioneering in his fiction.12 One reason John Sutherland offers for Trollope's taking on the editorship of the magazine was his expectation that he would become an MP; if that were the case,

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145

'St. Paul's would give Trollope a platform outside the house on which he could not only speak himself, but which he could hospitably make available to party friends'. 13 Phineas Finn, the Irish Member, one of the serials which inaugurated Saint Pauls and the first of his novels to deal primarily with the machinations of men in Parliament, helped voice the thwarted writer's political views. He says of the Palliser series generally, 'as I was debarred from expressing my opinions in the House of Commons, I took this method of declaring myself (A 317). Saint Pauls was an almost wholly political undertaking for Trollope. Fiction, poetry, and miscellaneous articles were an important part of the periodical, but as he states frankly in an 'Introduction' in the first issue, 'Saint Pauls, if it be anything, will be political,' and 'the good old Liberal cause still needs support'. 14 Just after the passing of the second Reform Bill in 1867, such statements were avowedly party political, not least because the Bill was passed by a Tory government which was seen to have hijacked Liberal policies. At the core of Phineas Finn is a struggle for the soul of liberalism, and many political articles on post-Reform Bill questions in Saint Pauls, and some by Trollope, are resonant in the serialization of Phineas Finn. By this time, Trollope had had experience as a frequent contributor of fiction and non-fiction and as a proprietor in periodicals such as Cornhill, Good Words, Blackwood's, the Fortnightly, Pall Mall and others. Trollope's experience ranged from dailies to monthlies, from the Conservative to the Liberal. Although each of these magazines is unique in its own market, what these periodicals have in common is a middle-class readership. We can see in his serializations how Trollope wrote for slightly different markets. In Chapter 3, I suggested that The Belton Estate discusses more openly subjects such as the fallen woman because of its initial publication in a periodical aimed primarily at men. His Cornhill fiction and, indeed, his fiction rejected by Good Words are suited to a different middle-class readership which includes women. In Saint Pauls we see Trollope writing again for a distinct market: Phineas Finn is a political novel in a magazine Trollope declares to be political. 'St. Paul's, John Sutherland asserts, 'has a strong aroma of the club smoking-room about it: The magazine aims at professional and university men, with a series of articles on outside manly pastimes: the turf, hunting (naturally), Alpine climbing, rowing. In my view the journal's

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Trollope and the Magazines

The serial fiction by Trollope, with its emphasis on politics, is bound up in the larger project of the magazine devoted to male subjects and a male reader. Trollope had attempted to found a Liberal periodical with the Fortnightly, but as I have suggested, its progressive politics went too far for Trollope the 'conservative Liberal'. Differences between the Fortnightly and Saint Pauls raise interesting questions. Why, when Trollope argued so vigorously for signature in the Fortnightly, does he generally abandon that principle in Saint Pauls?16 Clearly, there is a separate intention in the Trollope of the experimental Fortnightly and the Trollope of the shilling monthly Saint Pauls - although I would argue that both magazines cater for a male reader. 17 While the Fortnightly was radical in its attempt to pioneer a hybrid journalism with elements of the Review and the magazine, Trollope's Saint Pauls is constructed by the editor as rather ordinary: 'SAINT PAULS MAGAZINE is not established, on and from this present 1st of October, 1867, on any rooted and matured conviction that such a periodical is the great and pressing want of the age.' 18 His hopes for the shilling monthly were not radical or innovatory, and a more modest introduction to a new periodical in a competitive market could hardly be imagined; by contrast, as we have seen, advertisements loudly announced that Trollope and Saint Pauls were arriving at the booksellers and newsagents. There is a discrepancy between what Trollope says in his self-effacing introduction and what the publisher had to do (and did) commercially. In the full-page Athenaeum advertisement (Fig. 4.1), Saint Pauls is called 'A Monthly Magazine of Fiction, Art, and Literature' and politics is not mentioned overtly. The political content announced in the Introduction and contents, Trollope's primary interest in the magazine, receives no special mention, and what is to the fore is the fiction intended to sell magazines to readers. Undoubtedly, this indicates the different ways the editor and publisher viewed the new publication, and these differences were never reconciled successfully. As in the Fortnightly, the fiction bids for women readers, and

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best contributions are in this sector with Trollope's vigorous pieces on field sport and Leslie Stephen's dryly fanatic celebrations of rowing and climbing. If nothing else, St. Paul's gives a reflection of the mid-Victorian, Liberal gentleman's cultural and physical recreations. 15

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the anonymous sensation novel All For Greed (written by Marie Pauline Rose, also known as the Baroness Blaze de Bury, who signed her novel 'A.A.A.') seems particularly included to attract women readers of popular fiction. Alas, it did not. Furthermore, an article in the first issue, 'Taste' by the artist Henry Nelson O'Neil, surely would have discouraged (and offended) many potential women readers. After arguing that women are prone to following fashion by noting the number of red-haired women to be found after the appearance of the Pre-Raphaelites, O'Neil asserts that women do not and cannot have taste: Considering the ease with which a woman adapts her opinions to prevailing fashion, and how suddenly her unintellectual admiration is bestowed on what previously excited her disgust, there is really some ground for accusing the sex of the want of a true appreciation of the beautiful, - or, if not an absolute want, at least a fearful weakness. They have all the feeling necessary for the possession of taste, but they want judgment, and while having the sensibility to admire what is pretty or pleasing, they lack the discrimination to select what is really beautiful. And what removes their feeling from taste is its absence of critical power. Moreover, though women are keen in perception, they have less reflection and are more precipitate than men. 19 Would an editor seriously interested in bidding for women readers include such an article in the very first issue? The way to attract women readers is not to say that they are weak, ill-judged, undiscriminating, timid, and uncritical - not if you want them to buy the second issue. The lack of women readers was perceived as one of the magazine's weaknesses by Strahan, after he had taken over as publisher and Trollope had left as editor in the summer of 1870. Under the new publisher, Saint Pauls tried to shift its target market in a number of ways: signature, less politics, and women's advice columns indicate a move toward a more conventional, female reader of shilling monthlies. 20 Advertisements for the post-Trollope February 1871 issue tend to list only the serial fiction, and not non-fiction articles on subjects such as 'Convivial Pauperism', 'Hints to Army Reformers', or 'The Gamut of Light'.

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The year 1867 was as much a year of transition for the country as it was for Trollope. The second Reform Bill, despite having been passed by a Tory government, renewed hopes for Liberalism. A whole new class of voters was ushered in at a single stroke, altering the political topography of Britain forever. A number of calls for reform went unanswered - the secret ballot and female suffrage, for example - but enlargement of the franchise to include most working-class men was bold, and measured by many as an indication of British progress. 2 1 However, alongside such an optimistic reading is another, more pessimistic one. Matthew Arnold's late 1860s Cornhill articles attacking a mid-Victorian society of philistines were collected as the socio-political tract Culture and Anarchy in 1869. And as an article in Macmillan's on 'Social Disintegration' put it, the growing gap between rich and poor was part of 'an evil of ever-increasing magnitude in its influence on the lives and characters, the moral and physical well-being, of each member of what should be one body politic and religious'. 22 For this writer, what is missing in society is the sense of the obligation of the rich to fulfil their responsibility to the poor. Arnold's polemic and the Macmillan's article are just two distinct examples of disquiet as industrial capitalism created material distance between the prospering middle classes and the working classes. The often sombre tone of the Last Chronicle, which documents a clergyman's spiritual and financial isolation from society, also signals social unease. Many of the social anxieties of the late 1860s, relieved to some extent by the second Reform Bill, are present in the pages of Saint Pauls,23 and it is significant to note how a number of contributions are connected intertextually within the periodical. Numerous articles on reform issues, the Irish Question, and the working classes intersect with issues raised in Phineas Finn, which is set (and was written) during the second Reform Bill debates. And there are other interesting moments of self-referentiality within the periodical. For example, an article on the Irish Church refers to 'the diocese of Killaloe', and in the same issue a Phineas Finn chapter tells us that 'Phineas returns to Killaloe'.24 In the following issue, an article written by a man posing as an old maid advises that 'the study proper to womankind' is 'to make yourself the best possible wife for your best possible husband'. 2 5 The advice

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runs concurrently with Chapter 23 of Phineas Finn, in which Laura's unhappiness at her dismal marriage becomes increasingly difficult to bear. In January 1868, Trollope's article on garrotting in London suggested that street violence was not as severe as it was often made to seem. But in an instalment of his serial in May, Phineas saves Mr Kennedy from garrotters. 26 These examples demonstrate that within the periodical (in a single issue and across issues) there is a network of references and understandings, allowing the reader in on the intricacy of the magazine and often challenging him or her with contradictions. It also may indicate how an author-editor can control and shape the periodical text. One of the most interesting intersections expresses the tensions in 1867-68 about gender, particularly about masculinity and man's proper role in society. Phineas Finn depicts the development of a young man in at least two ways: the movement of an Irish outsider within the British establishment and the education of a youth learning to become a man. Definitions of manliness were much discussed and disputed in the 1860s, and one of the discourses of the serial expresses a young man's anxiety as he seeks to fit into the male culture of British Parliament. Phineas undergoes a number of male rites of passage as he learns what it means to be a middle-class man; but, ultimately, he returns to Ireland, away from the centre of power and the dominant English culture. In the Autobiography, Trollope describes Phineas Finn as a novel of development, a parliamentary Bildungsroman: . . . I had constantly before me the necessity of progression in character,-of making the changes in men and women which would naturally be produced by the lapse of y e a r s . . . . So much of my inner life was passed in their company, that I was continually asking myself how this woman would act when this or that event had passed over her head, or how that man would carry himself when his youth had become manhood, or his manhood declined to old age. (A 319) Phineas Finn and the sequel, Phineas Redux, published in the Graphic in 1873-74, are 'but one novel' (A 320) for Trollope, and in fact, the whole of the Palliser novels form an extended investigation into the generational development of a particular milieu of society.

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Trollope's belief in the slow development of his characters is reminiscent of Darwin's notion of the development of species: 'We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages . . .'27 The serialized maturation of Phineas, from suffering to success, from vanity to honesty (A 320), would have taken a year and a half for the reader to complete, and the incremental progress inherent in the two serials, part of a whole series of such studies in change, is an example of the slow progress of time. 28

TRANSITIONAL MASCULINITIES IN THE 1860s As Phineas was growing and changing, so too was British culture. It is significant that Phineas arrives in London from Ireland, a marginalized space within Britain, during the Reform Bill debates. He participates in the political progress of the day while learning how to be a man. As previous chapters have shown, the 1860s was a decade of ideological debate and contradiction with regard to gender issues. The various aspects of the Woman Question focusing on education, employment and marriage - were continually under public scrutiny in the periodicals and newspapers. Trollope had addressed these discourses both directly and indirectly in The Small House at Allington and The Belton Estate, for example. However, most critical work on gender in mid-Victorian culture has tended to focus on women and femininity, often to the exclusion of men and masculinity, 29 at least until very recently. The project to examine masculinity has emerged largely from feminist criticism and ought to be studied alongside work on femininity. As one critic discussing Victorian culture puts it, 'the question of the young male who belonged to the newly recognized middle class and his maturation and development in society' needs to be examined in connection with work on the Woman Question. 30 For Phineas Finn, development and maturation includes fitting into a man's world and learning what it means to be manly. Most accounts of Victorian manliness describe a general shift from a religious to a physical manliness, from morals to muscles.31 But in the 1850s, especially after the publication of Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), definitions of manliness signalled the beginning of a burgeoning boy's own culture. Claudia Nelson asserts of Tom Brown's Schooldays that 'more than any other

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work it bears the responsibility for making "manliness" a crucial term in the Victorian lexicon of boyhood'. 32 Boyd Hilton argues that Frederic William Farrar's Eric, or, Little by Little (1858) was also a model, 33 but both critics identify boys' literature as a focus for examining the development of manliness as a term and ideal. Nelson maintains convincingly that an androgynous spirituality defined early notions of manliness and that manliness did not become associated with masculinity and physical strength exclusively until later in the century, perhaps after the 1870s. She asserts that in the 1860s the cult of the physical had not yet taken over as a model for boys. 34 However, I think both discourses were available to readers at the time of Phineas Finn. The number of children's periodicals founded in the 1860s which distinguish a gendered reader is illuminating. A far greater number of boys' magazines were started in the 1860s than in any previous decade, and the numbers would increase even more in the 1880s-1890s. One reason for the growth in boys' periodicals was the belief that boys and girls ought to read different material; Jeffrey Weeks asserts that the growth of gendered children's literature was 'particularly acting to increase sex segregation and reinforce stereotypes'. 35 A Book About Boys (1868) crystallized feelings about the growing cult of boys in the 1860s; for the author, A.R. Hope, boys' love and friendship surpasses even that of men. 36 Manliness became a characteristic of ideal masculinity in the pages of boys' periodicals, partly because it was in youth that one learned how to be a man. 37 Concurrent with the serialization of Phineas Finn was the discourse around mid-century aestheticism and the often vociferous reactions to the aestheticized man, challenging norms of masculinity. Arnold's 'Culture and Its Enemies' in Cornhill in July 1867 (what would become the basis of 'Sweetness and Light' in Culture and Anarchy, 1869) was ridiculed for its dandyism by Frederic Harrison in a humorous Fortnightly article in November. 38 Walter Pater had recently published a homoerotic essay on the eighteenthcentury art historian 'Winckelmann', in the Fortnightly in January 1867. Pater writes of Winckelmann's 'enthusiasm' for Hellenism that this enthusiasm, dependent as it is to a great degree on bodily temperament, has a power of reinforcing the purer emotions of the intellect with an almost physical excitement. That his

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affinity with Hellenism was not merely intellectual, that the subtler threads of temperament were inwoven in it, is proved by his romantic, fervent friendships with young m e n . . .. These friendships, bringing him into contact with the pride of human form, and staining the thought with its bloom, perfected his reconciliation to the spirit of Greek sculpture. 39 Richard Dellamora reads 'Winckelmann' as a response to Arnold, and maintains that Pater, unlike Arnold, 'eroticizes aesthetic discourse'. 40 Dellamora also argues that 'homoeroticism was central to Winckelmann's sensibility and to his ideal of culture', and this is partly what appeals to Pater. 41 Pater's discourse, and that surrounding aestheticism in general, give us a glimpse into male-male desire in the 1860s.42 However, there are other, less high-culture examples of a tangible gay culture. For example, in 1870 two penny pamphlets sensationalized the cases of Boulton and Park, two men arrested at the Haymarket Theatre for transvestism. 43 At the time Phineas Finn was serialized, definitions of masculinity were contested, not least by the nascent gay culture of which Pater and others were a part. Masculinity is not a fixed category. The use of the term should be historically specific, for, as we have seen, masculinity meant something different in the early nineteenth century as compared with the end of the century. As Peter Gay asserts: The nineteenth century ideology of manliness had a history of its own, a history of mounting defensiveness and vulgarization and of regression to more uninhibited verbal brutality and more militant postures. . . . for much of the age, even beyond Queen Victoria's death, manliness was, as we have seen, a debatable ideal. 44 In 1867 the notion of manliness had not fully taken on the imperative of an imperialist show of strength defining both man and nation so prominent later in the century; however, as early as 1859, John Brookes connects manliness with the notion of national progress, and, as we shall see below, an article on shooting in Saint Pauls appears to be rooted in a culture of imperialism. 45 The late 1860s was, however, a period of transition, in which the term 'manliness' appropriates both spiritual and physical meanings. I do not wish to suggest that at any one time there is a single,

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unified definition of manliness or masculinity since there are always competing forms of masculinity, however much there may be a hegemonic, normative definition of it. Phineas's version of masculinity is middle-class, urban (perhaps even metropolitan), 46 and upwardly mobile; this, I would suggest, is the type of masculinity also projected by Saint Pauls. According to David Newsome, ideals of manliness stemmed from two traditions of thought: the spiritual from S.T. Coleridge and Thomas Arnold; the physical from Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes. 47 Both discourses were available to readers in 1867. Samuel Smiles's Self-Help, first published in 1859 but reprinted in 1866, preaches that 'truthfulness, integrity, and goodness qualities that hang not on any man's breath - form the essence of manly character'. 48 Christian Manliness, 'A Book of Examples and Principles for Young Men by the Author of "Christian Home Life"' published by the Religious Tract Society in 1866, offers the religious line on manliness. The final chapter is called 'Following Christ', and, indeed, by the end of the 1870s, Christ had become a model of manliness. 49 John Caird preaching to Glasgow university students in 1871 declares that 'religion is the manliest of all things', but Caird recognizes the sexual awareness of the young men he addresses: How shall one with youth's warm passions tingling in his veins, its eager impulses, its sensuous susceptibilities, its impatience of restraint, its new zest of life's pleasures, its joyous use of unwonted freedom, undergo unharmed the transition from the guarded security of early life to the freedom and independence of manhood? 5 0 It is worth noting that most pamphlets which discussed manliness are aimed at young men of Phineas Finn's age and younger, at a transitional moment between youth and manhood. Manliness is associated with masculine strength in a number of lectures and sermons. Believing that to be manly is to be Christlike, Revd H u g h Stowell Brown discusses how to put manliness into practice. Theatre is unmanly, and most other amusements are 'silly and effeminate' or 'demoralising'. Already in 1858, manliness implies not-feminine, and Brown lists the following mostly middle-class sports as manly: fencing, wrestling, skating, curling, cricket, shooting, coursing, hunting, fishing, yachting, and

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rowing. Excessive drinking, betting, singing obscene songs, laughing at virtue and chastity are unmanly in the extreme. And already one can determine manliness by observing physical appearance. Tailored men in monocles with jewels and walking-sticks and other such fops 'that go by the name of men' were hardly men, let alone manly. 51 Brown had precedents for this, as a letter describing the fear of the Tractarian Puseyites from Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, to a friend in 1858 attests: Our men are too peculiar - some, at least of our best m e n . . . . I consider it a heavy affliction that they should wear neckcloths of peculiar construction, coats of peculiar cut, whiskers of peculiar dimensions - that they should walk with a peculiar step, carry their heads at a peculiar angle to the body, and read in a peculiar tone. I consider all this as a heavy affliction. First because it implies to me a want of vigour, virility and self-expressing vitality of the religious life in the young m e n . . . . Secondly, because it greatly limits their usefulness and ours by the natural prejudice which it excites.52 Wilberforce's categories of dress, voice, and gait continue to be used as determinants of manliness, and Lynne Segal's recent work on masculinity argues persuasively that notions of physicality and manliness were used to stigmatize homosexuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.53 Brown's views on manliness, which include both spiritual and physical elements, were reiterated often verbatim by John Brookes's Manliness: Hints to Young Men in 1859, 1875 and 1877. Lectures and sermons in the 1850s-60s, based on homophobia, send conflicting signals which place importance on both religion and physicality, as in Tom Brown's Schooldays. Sport increasingly played an important part in preparing boys and young men to be manly and masculine. In 'Culture and Its Enemies' Arnold recognizes the 'essential value' of physical strength but advocates the 'subordination to higher and spiritual ends of the cultivation of bodily vigour and activity'. 54 Between 1860 and 1880, 'games became compulsory, organised and eulogised at all the leading schools', and men like Leslie Stephen at Cambridge took up athletics with a vengeance. 55 For Stephen, who became an atheist, sport and physical ruggedness were integral to manliness, which had nothing at all to do with religion.

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During the serialization of Phineas Finn, several articles about sport appeared in Saint Pauls. Stephen contributed two anonymous articles, about rowing and alpine climbing. He was an avid oarsman at Cambridge, and his nostalgic memories of his all-male experience in rowing certainly question just what it meant to be manly: To be in the same boat with a man is a proverbial expression implying the closest conceivable bond of union.. .. But the bond established for the time being between the members of a racing crew, is perhaps the closest known, with the single and doubtful exception of marriage . . . If rowing does nothing else, it serves as a bond of unusual strength for drawing men together just at the time when their affections are, so to speak, most malleable and most cohesive; when they have the greatest faculty for receiving and retaining new impressions. 56 These two passages show that Stephen, like Caird in his sermon, is aware of the sexual eagerness of young undergraduates; but for Stephen, the cure for such passion is to get close to several other young men in a narrow boat and stroke vigorously in unison - a curious exercise in manly behaviour. It is worth reading his fine appreciation of young and virile male bonding alongside his anti-aesthete response to Pater's Renaissance in the Cornhill.57 And it is also interesting to note that Stephen found Trollope a particularly manly individual, as he notes in a letter when he says that Trollope was 'as sturdy, wholesome, and kindly a being as could be desired'. 58 Another article, in an Iron John-like attempt to define masculinity through man's relationship with his untamed nature, asserts of the 'manly and genuine sportsmen' who enjoy shooting: So natural is the taste for wild and adventurous shooting, which is innate in every man who is worthy of the name of man, and which it takes a long course of luxury, and of battue-shooting and of hot luncheons among the brown fern, to finally eradicate. 59 The writer, Francis Lawley, clearly prefers wild shooting to other domesticated forms, and wild shooting, in fact, rescues one's manliness from the dangers of luxury. Lawley adds that the best

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wild shooting is found in places such as Ireland, Scotland, Africa, India, and North America; clearly, there is an imperial overtone in his assertions that in other lands, one can revivify one's masculinity. 60 Other sports articles which appeared include pieces by Trollope on hunting, and by others on fishing, yachting, cricket, and horse-racing; only horse-racing does not appear on Brown's list of acceptable manly activities noted above. The articles were collected and edited by Trollope as British Sports and Pastimes in 1868. As the title signals, all of the articles emphasized the essentially national character of the sports, so that if the sports were manly and vigorous, so too were the Englishmen who practised them. Hunting and shooting are important to the male social network of politics in Phineas Finn, and as in many of Trollope's novels, a whole chapter is devoted to foxes and hounds. Middle-class men were expected to identify with a national type, the hearty British man or gentleman, and to emerge as sound individuals. Smiles asserts in Self-Help that the great optimism in liberal progress is to be found in the triumph of individualism: National Progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice... . the highest patriotism and philanthropy consist, not so much in altering laws and modifying institutions, as in helping and stimulating men to elevate and improve themselves by their own free and independent individual action. 61 The struggle to be an individual is part of Phineas's dilemma as he tries to break free of his dependence on his father and assert his position as an MP and man of the world. He must try to negotiate the border between party loyalty and personal integrity. As he embarks on his career, Phineas tells one of his political allies, Barrington Erie, 'I wouldn't change my views in politics either for you or for the Earl, though each of you carried seats in your breeches pockets', (ch. 2, I, 112).62 About the same time, Phineas's legal mentor, Mr Low, warns the youth that no good can come of entering Parliament at such a young age: '. . . I see nothing in it that can satisfy any manly heart. Even if you are successful, what are you to become? You will be the creature of some minister; not his colleague. You are to make your way up the ladder by pretending to agree whenever agree-

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ment is demanded from you, and by voting whether you agree or do not. . . .'

Low associates manliness with self-assertion and independence. One of the more annoying things about Phineas is indecisiveness which leads him to renounce his principles: depending on his father for his living, pursuing Violet Effingham, and accepting Whig patronage all go against his instincts. Part of his education and maturation involves his emergence as an individual through a sort of Hegelian struggle with the slavish boy battling the masterful man within, but a return to Ireland away from the metropolitan culture is what he decides by the end of the novel.

PHINEAS ON THE BORDERLINES Phineas Finn is a divided subject. He is both Irish and British, both boy and man. He is at a transitional crossroads in history when, among other things, his home country fights for basic democratic rights, 63 and one commentator writing in Saint Pauls sees 1867-68 as an exceptionally transitional time: All ages are ages of transition; for man is essentially the child of progress, and from the days of flint hatchets to those of electric telegraphs has been going on; but of the present time we may say, with special emphasis, that it is characterised by transition.64 Like the country from which he comes, Roman Catholic Phineas tries to establish himself as an independent subject at the very centre of shifting power in a dominant culture. But his maturation from boy to masculine/manly self is complex and full of anxiety and uncertainty. Jonathan Rutherford writes that 'masculinity is overly dependent for its coherence upon external public discourses. In consequence, men will experience periods of social and cultural transition as a disturbance to their identities.' 65 It is worth considering Phineas's position accordingly. In the most public and most male of discourses (politics) at a time of cultural disturbance (after the Reform Bill) Phineas tries to become a man and an individual.

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The second Reform Bill, certainly as it is constructed in the novel, acts as a pivotal moment for political generations. In Trollope's political world, the ballot becomes an issue which appears to define how far an older generation of politicians is willing to go in relinquishing established principles. Mr Mildmay, the Liberal Prime Minister for most of the novel, is on the brink of retiring, and the Reform Bill minus the ballot is to be his final gift to the country. In actual fact, the 1868 election which ushered in Gladstone had something of this feeling about it, and readers would have followed Gladstone's new wave of liberalism while observing Mildmay's passing generation. John Sutherland notes that 'all parties shared a common excitement that society was about to take "a leap in the dark"'; 66 indeed, this was a catchphrase for reform. The unsigned lead article in the first issue of Saint Pauls is 'A Leap in the Dark' by Edward Dicey, and Punch also used the catchphrase in cartoons. Some hoped that new generations of MPs, represented at their youngest by Phineas, would continue the momentum of change. Roper and Tosh, in Manful Assertions, argue: one of the most precarious moments in the reproduction of masculinity is the transfer of power to the succeeding generation. . . . The key question is whether the 'sons' take on the older generation's gender identity without question, or whether they mount a challenge, and if so how. 67 Part of the challenge for Phineas in becoming an individual is in trying not to replicate the sins of the fathers. In this respect, Phineas's ultimate return to Ireland, among other things, demonstrates an unwillingness merely to mimic the patterns of political manoeuvring of a previous generation of party politics. That Phineas is a young boy at the beginning of the novel is made clear a number of times. Trollope insists that we see the development from youth to adulthood. Barrington Erie believes Phineas to be 'a plunging coif and the narrator refers to him as 'a gosling' (ch. 2, I, 113 and 114). However, his most important relationship is with Lady Laura Standish, who becomes both a surrogate mother and unrequited lover to Phineas. Phineas's boyish innocence is reinforced by total blindness to his physical attractiveness, which everyone else notices (especially the women). Laura is the daughter of the Earl of Brentford, a powerful Whiggish

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Liberal and eventual cabinet minister. Her cousin is Barrington Erie, and it is almost certain that Laura's influence has secured for Phineas his parliamentary bid. Part of Trollope's critique of politics in the Palliser series is the very cliqueish nature of establishment politics, the ways in which the social and the political are, at times, seamless. As the radical Liberal MP Sir John Trelawny wrote in 1863, 'we are governed by cliques'. 68 In examining the ruling elite, Trollope is making a real political point, since part of the argument for reform focused on dissatisfaction with cliqueish government. T will take upon myself the task of mentor,' Laura declares to Phineas, who in her eyes has the fault of 'being impetuous, - being young, - being a boy' (ch. 8, I, 361). But, then, 'Phineas liked being called an impetuous Irish boy' (ch. 8,1, 362). This early exchange between Laura and Phineas establishes the mother-son strand of their relationship. Later we are told that 'Phineas had been, as it were, adopted by her as her own political offspring, - or at any rate as her political godchild' (ch. 27, II, 231). Laura, however, is a complex character. Her desire for Phineas is entangled with a desire for activity and for power denied to women. She accepts that the closest she can ever get to real political power is through the influence she exerts on the men around her: It was her ambition to be brought as near to political action as was possible for a woman without surrendering any of the privileges of feminine inaction. That women should even wish to have votes at parliamentary elections was to her abominable and the cause of the Rights of Women generally was odious to her; but, nevertheless, for herself, she delighted in hoping that she too might be useful, - in thinking that she too was perhaps, in some degree, politically powerful; and she had received considerable increase to such hopes when her father accepted the Privy Seal. The Earl himself was not an ambitious man, and, but for his daughter, would have severed himself altogether from political life before this time. (ch. 10, I, 372) Madame Max later asserts that 'the one great drawback to the life of women is that they cannot act in politics' (ch. 40, II, 633). However, Laura is able to exert some power through her marriage

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(at least initially), so she is not completely passive. Her mistake is partly in choosing the wrong husband, rather as Dorothea does in Middlemarch, published three years later. But it does turn out that Laura's tragedy is giving up her own life, hoping instead to live vicariously through the lives of the men around her. She sacrifices her fortune to save her brother, which in turn forces her to sacrifice her love for Phineas and to make a dismal marriage which, in the sequel, Phineas Redux, leads to a broken marriage, the attempted murder of Phineas by Mr Kennedy, and Mr Kennedy's eventual madness. Toward the end of Phineas Finn, when she is made ill by the imprisonment of her marriage, she asserts that it is a 'great curse to have been born a woman' (ch. 32, II, 371). Laura's sacrifice for her brother Lord Chiltern reminds us of Clara Amedroz's similar difficulty in The Belton Estate; remember Clara lashing out by saying, 'I think it would be well if all single women were strangled by the time they are thirty.' 69 Clara's reward is the gift of comedy, whereas financial, marital, and political constraints on Laura are severely damaging. Laura as both mother and lover to Phineas occupies an ambiguous position in the young man's psychological development, and it is to theories of psychology we might turn to understand the dynamics of the relationship between Phineas and Laura. Lynne Segal has used the 'object relations' theory in psychoanalysis, developed in Britain in the 1960s with the work of Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott, to describe a phase of maturation necessary for masculine development. The object relations theorists concentrated on the pre-Oedipal phase of childhood sexual development in which the 'boy is obliged to abandon his identification with the mother . . . and to identify, instead, with the father'. 70 Phineas becomes intimate not just with Laura but also with her father and brother. The Earl acts as a political patron (Phineas stands in as the male heir), a surrogate father for Phineas, and Chiltern is classically both brother and rival. The break from Laura, of which she feels the sting deeply, is part of Phineas's progress away from a nurturing mother/unconsummated lover to a more adult but all-male world. Again, Segal provides two interesting comments about masculine development which help to theorize these relationships: Given suitable rites of passage, which must involve separation from the dependency and weaknesses of childhood and a new

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The point is that it is insufficient for the 'men' to be distinguished from the 'boys'; the 'men' must be distinguished from the 'women'. 7 1 In order to become an adult male, with a developed sense of masculinity, Phineas must abandon Laura and enter fully into the male domain of politics and Parliament. The second passage is important to keep in mind when we remember the point made earlier about children's magazines in the 1860s and the increasing distinction according to gender. Although importantly Saint Pauls included serial fiction aimed at the woman reader, it wished primarily to be a political, male magazine, so the separate gendered spheres articulated in the novel parallel the gendering of some periodical literature. Having accepted political patronage from Laura's father (after a fleeting case of guilty conscience) and moved out of the realm of the 'mother', Phineas pursues Violet Effingham in earnest. But it is at this point that Phineas recognizes his divided self: He felt that he had two identities, - that he was, as it were, two separate persons, - and that he could, without any real faithlessness, be very much in love with Violet Effingham in his position of man of fashion and member of Parliament in England, and also warmly attached to dear little Mary Flood Jones as an Irishman of Killaloe. (ch. 35, II, 493) Dear little Mary Flood Jones is the village sweetheart back home with whom Phineas has shared a kiss. Occasionally, when courting Lady Laura, Violet, and, later, M a d a m e Max, Phineas remembers his lover in Killaloe. What this passage observes so acutely is Phineas's own sense of himself as an incomplete, divided subject. In Playing and Reality, Winnicott connects schizophrenia to children: 'if we look at our descriptions of schizoid persons we find we are using words that we use to describe little children and babies, and there we actually expect to find the phenomena that characterize our schizoid and schizophrenic patients.' 7 2 Importantly, Winnicott emphasizes the role of environment in

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sense of belonging to a distinct world of adult males, men can collectively acquire a confidence in their masculinity.

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schizophrenic patients who feel disunified in their personalities, 73 and it is precisely environment (nurture rather than nature) which Phineas links to his separate identities: he is one person in Ireland, and another in England. He is also both boy and man, because although he is a man of the world, he is so only under the auspices of surrogate parents for much of the novel: his own father, who supports him at the beginning of the novel; Laura, who guides him safely into politics; and Brentford, who gives Phineas his second seat when his Irish borough is no longer available. 74 Perhaps the supreme hurdle in Phineas's process of maturation is the need to speak in Parliament, to become a fully realized speaking subject. For an MP, a maiden speech in the House is a rite of passage; but, more broadly, the ability to assert oneself in front of other men forms part of masculine, manly development. Following Winnicott, Rutherford argues for the importance of language in the child's separation from the mother: 'Until the grasp of language, the infant's meaning resides in the mind and body of the mother. With the word the infant acquires a new transformational object enabling the establishment of subjectivity and participation in language games.' 75 Phineas had always prided himself on his powers of speech because of some notoriety he garnered in the debating society at university in Dublin. But Parliament is the mother of all debating societies. He is understandably nervous, 'with a tremor of blood round his heart when the moment for rising had come' (ch. 12, I, 486), when contemplating his first words in the House. There is a sexual metaphor at work here as well; speaking in the House is a test of virility. Phineas had been warned that speaking too soon would be unwise (words should not come prematurely), but, at last, 'Mr. Monk had become his friend, and had encouraged him to speak during the next session, - setting before him various models, and prescribing for him a course of reading' (ch. 16, I, 614). Mr Monk, one of the older generation who takes Phineas under his wing, is another of the Mentors who aid the young Telemachus. Laura urges him by saying, 'I think you ought to speak, Mr. Finn' (ch. 17, I, 624) and Phineas himself believes that 'to be in the House and not to speak would, to his thinking, be a disgraceful failure. . . . He would speak. Of course he would speak' (ch. 20, I, 738). Of course, Phineas does not speak during the debate on the ballot as all the world had hoped, and 'he left the House

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alone, carefully avoiding all speech with any one' (ch. 20, I 743). It is significant that the debate is about the ballot since, according to Phineas's Liberal colleagues, the ballot would allow men to cast their votes secretly, not in the open. Phineas sees the ballot as 'unmanly, ineffective, and enervating' (ch. 17, I, 621), and in a cartoon in March 1869, Punch even personified the ballot as a young boy. 76 That his maiden speech is a test of masculinity is made obvious the next day when, in conversation with Laura, Phineas over-dramatically compares himself to one of Scott's heroes in whom 'there was none of the strength of manhood' (ch. 20,1, 744). The anxiety which speaking in Parliament causes Phineas is an integral part of his maturation. When approached and given the opportunity to speak during the ballot debate, Phineas has what today would be termed a panic attack: The chamber seemed to swim round before our hero's eyes.. .. The task was exactly that which, of all tasks, he would best like to have accomplished, and to have accomplished well. But if he should fail! And he felt that he would f a i l . . . . At this moment, so confused was he, that he did not know where sat Mr Mildmay, and where Mr Daubeny. All was confused, and there arose as it were a sound of waters in his ears, and a feeling as of a great hell around him. (ch. 20, I, 741-2) Phineas drowns in a sea of impotence, unable literally to rise to the occasion and deliver his speech. Confirming Freud, Melanie Klein has argued that the chief anxiety for men is in the castration complex, 'in the phantasy of losing the penis or having it destroyed inside the mother - phantasies which may result in impotence.' 77 Rutherford notes that Klein accepts the notion of anxiety as a fundamental element of maturation. 78 The worth of MPs in the novel is determined largely by speeches in the House, so Phineas, in not having a voice, is politically impotent and experiences acute anxiety. Alas, he is still a boy. The most effective members of Parliament deliver the most effective speeches. Speeches are what get reported in the newspapers, sometimes less than accurately if it is the People's Banner, and create public reputations for men in the House. Phineas's relations in Killaloe, for example, expect daily to read about their

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he was gifted with a powerful voice, with strong, and I may, perhaps, call them broad convictions, with perfect self-reliance, with almost unlimited powers of endurance, with hot ambition, with no keen scruples, and with a moral skin of great thickness. (ch. 18, I, 628) Trollope's Radical may be comfortably well-off, lack absolute sincerity, and be a bit of a bully, but 'once he had learned the art of arranging his words as he stood upon his legs, and had so mastered his own voice as to have obtained the ear of the House, the work of his life was not difficult' (ch. 18, I, 629). Phineas, too, must learn to master his own voice if he is to be politically and personally potent. After his initial failure, Phineas does make other more successful attempts, and he finally finds his voice during the humorous debate about potted peas: 'he was astonished at the easiness of the thing, and as he left the House told himself that he had overcome the difficulty just when the victory could be of no avail to him' (ch. 31, II, 361-2). The irony is twofold: Phineas would soon be leaving Parliament altogether, and his great speech hitherto had been about a ridiculous and unimportant topic. It is particularly important that Phineas finds his voice because it is through a speech in Parliament that the young boy finally becomes a young man and asserts his individuality. The debate is about Irish land reform in which Phineas cannot agree to support his party and government. As Roy Foster argues, 'Phineas's Irishness remains a vital dimension of his politics, particularly regarding tenant right and the moral test imposed by giving a correct vote on the issue.' 79 Having resigned his position at the Colonial Office, Phineas waits for his opportunity to speak and recalls his first unrealized attempt to speak in the House. Waiting impatiently to speak, 'his audience was assured to him now, and he did not fear if:

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local hero in the papers. Mr Turnbull, almost certainly modelled on John Bright, is the great popular Radical of the 'Manchester School' whose speeches in Parliament are renown. Turnbull 'was not a great orator', although

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He spoke for about an hour, and while he was speaking he knew nothing about himself, whether he was doing it well or ill.. .. He had been told, he said, that it was a misfortune in itself for one so young as he to have convictions. But his Irish birth and Irish connection had brought this misfortune of his country so closely home to him that he had found the task of extricating himself from it to be impossible. (ch. 75, IV, 243-4) In delivering such a speech, Phineas has found his voice and become a fully realized speaking subject. The schizophrenic of before, uncertain of his identity, is now an assured and confident Member of Parliament able to vocalize his principles to his male peers. He has gained a sense of nationality, and as Julian Wolfreys believes, 'his resignation is an affirmative refusal of English identity'. 80 Phineas is an outsider in English society whose position on the margins is reinforced: the Irish man in England, the boy in a man's world, the humble man in high society. Early on, observing English politics at work, he realizes that 'he, at any rate, could not be one of them' (ch. 9, I, 370),81 but in the end he emerges ahead of the pack. In his farewell speech we see a synthesis of the strands of his maturation: he speaks out publicly and decisively for personal principle and embraces an understanding of his own identity. That this development relates to his masculinity is made clear in the conclusion; Phineas resolves that in the move back to Ireland, 'he would make the change, or attempt to make it, with manly strength' (ch. 76, IV, 252, my emphasis). Part of Trollope's boldness in the novel is to put an Irishman at the centre, so that at a time when the Irish Question was passionately debated, the serial acts, in accordance with the Liberal politics of the periodical, as a political statement about Irish identity within British culture. Phineas's maturation and development are put into relief by other male characters who serve as foils to the protagonist. Most obvious of these is Laura's husband, Mr Kennedy, Phineas's first successful rival, who is the antithesis of Phineas. The contrast between the two helps set up the action/inaction binary so central to the novel. Phineas is pure eagerness, energy and enthusiasm - a young man full of testosterone, with a huge ambition. He demonstrates his willingness to work conscientiously even with

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a matter of no importance such as the potted peas committee. As explained earlier, Laura wishes to experience some of the activity of life that is the domain of the men around her. Trying to convince herself of Mr Kennedy's worth, she admits that he is 'neither zealous nor active' (ch. 14, I, 498); eventually, as her need for action runs up against Mr Kennedy's will for her inaction, the marriage can only be seen as doomed. However, our sympathies are with Laura in her marriage, because Mr Kennedy ultimately lacks manly vitality and, more importantly for Trollope's heroes, sympathy. Note that Mr Kennedy never speaks in Parliament, and hardly ever in society. In addition, he lacks manly strength and a competitive edge: Phineas must save him from the dangerous garrotters, and at one point Mr Kennedy asserts, 'it is so odd to me that men cannot amuse themselves without pitting themselves against each other' (ch. 15, I, 506). He refuses to play the games men play, at least not with their rules. He represents a different version of masculinity from Phineas, but one which is not given credence in the novel. That he is a misogynist seems clear from his treatment of Laura (more painfully explicit in the sequel), and he may share characteristics with the aestheticized man quiet, inactive, unwilling to compete in male bonding rituals. However, he gains a place in politics because Mr Kennedy embodies new money, although his exact place in the highest echelons of the establishment is uncertain. His only pleasure is found in Scotland, far from London's political scene, and this inadaptability eventually leads to his madness in Phineas Redux.

AGGRESSIVE YOUNG MEN Rutherford asserts that 'a more prominent response to transitional changes and crisis in masculine identities is violence to others', 82 and the idea of politics as combat circulates in the novel. Tory leader Mr Daubeny is a 'gladiator thoroughly well trained for the arena in which he had descended to the combat' (ch. 7, I, 249). This allusion to the ancients was not unique, and Punch cartoons used the image of the gladatorial arena in depicting Reform Bill politics. Phineas's landlord, Mr Bunce, among the masses protesting for workers' rights, joins a trade union because 'he longed to be doing some battle against his superiors, and to be putting himself in opposition to his employers . . . because some

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such antagonism would be manly and the fighting of some battle would be the right thing to do' (ch. 7, I, 254). To be manly, one must be aggressive. Phineas has the opportunity to demonstrate his manly willingness to fight when challenged to a duel by his friend Lord Chiltern. As rumour has it, Chiltern is a fast and violent man: . . . all the world knew that he drank. He had taken by the throat a proctor's bull-dog when he had been drunk at Oxford, had nearly strangled the man, and had been expelled. He had fallen through violence into some terrible misfortune at Paris, had been brought before a public judge, and his name and his infamy had been made notorious in every newspaper in the two capitals. After that he had fought a ruffian at Newmarket, and had really killed him with his fists. (ch. 11, I, 379) He refuses his position in the aristocracy, has no interest in assuming a political role, and seems to care most for riding to the hounds. Whereas Phineas is dedicated, hard-working, and upwardly mobile, Lord Chiltern is static, idle and without purpose, except when it comes to hunting. However, he provides yet another version of masculine development. Initially he is pure muscular manliness without spiritual, let alone religious, attachment, but Trollope gives him room for redemption. As an avid huntsman, Chiltern prefers the all-male company of fellow sportsmen, and this may have signalled laxity in morals for Trollope's readers. In his article on hunting, published in March 1868, Trollope denies the 'erroneous idea that hunting is fast, in the slang sense of the word, and that it coexists naturally with drinking, swearing, gambling, bad society, naughty women and roaring lions'. 83 This passage reads almost as a warning for us not to believe everything we hear about Chiltern, that his morals are not as loose as they seem. His coarseness is softened - indeed, in some ways he is feminized through his affection for Violet - and he is brought back into the family through his marriage to Violet in the comic resolution. He is a Prince Hal figure whose reconciliation with his father displaces Phineas. The rupture between Phineas and Chiltern occurs because Phineas loves Violet; when Chiltern learns that his friend has designs on her, he challenges Phineas to a duel.

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It is significant that in 1867-68 Trollope uses a chivalric code to determine manliness. He likes harking back to the mores of earlier times, and it is one method he uses to decentre the present and question the nature of social change and progress. 84 Here, he reverts to a duel, an initiation which occurs on the Continent, a traditional site of sexual licence for men in English fiction. Although duels were made illegal in England in 1844, duelling was more frequent in America and in Europe at mid-century. Peter Gay maintains that the duel was an integral part of European, male bourgeois experience, and he cites particularly the Mensur in Germany, in which university students duelled using rapiers hoping to receive 'the cherished scar' of fighting. 85 Gay observes that the Mensur, an element of the nineteenth century's 'cultivation of hatred', was acceptable and regulated: it 'was the codification of adolescence; it was one way - not the only, or the best - for certain nineteenth-century bourgeois to regulate their aggressions'. This is interesting in relation to the Phineas/ Chiltern duel because it helps us to view such a match as integral to a process of maturation. In Britain, Gay links aggression to competition, the construction of the Other (especially the racial Other), and the cult of manliness. However, he recognizes the slipperiness of 'manliness' as a blanket term because of the layers of meanings attributed to the word: 'the meaning of "manliness" was infected with incurable imprecision and subject to dispute' and 'one single, apparently simple word stood for diverse fantasies, meant many things to many men - and women.' 86 Yet, aggression - whether on the playing-field, in Parliament, or face-to-face - is one way to define middle-class manly behaviour in the 1860s. Chiltern throws down the gauntlet because he believes that Phineas, once a friend (notably almost a brother) and now a rival, has offended him by loving Violet: ' . .. What I require of you is that you shall meet me. Will you do that?' 'You mean, - to fight?' 'Yes, - to fight; to fight; to fight. For what other purpose do you suppose that I can wish to meet you?' Phineas felt at the moment that the fighting of a duel would be destructive to all his political hopes. Few Englishmen fight duels in these days.. . . And a duel between him and Lord Brentford's son must, as he

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thought, separate him from Violet, from Lady Laura, from Lord Brentford, and from his borough.

'To fight, to fight, to fight' - like a brattish Coriolanus, this is initially the only way Chiltern is able to make sense of adversity. Phineas, too, 'had come to think that the duel was in very truth the best way out of the difficulty' (ch. 38, II, 615). Neither is presented simplistically. The warrior in each takes over, and, while the contest is ostensibly about love, it can also be seen in terms of the successful middle-class hero combatting the angry, displaced aristocrat. And, of course, we again must remember the cultural moment around the Reform Bill debates. The meeting takes place in Blankenburg and results in Phineas being shot in the shoulder, thereby receiving his own 'cherished scar'. What is different about this duel is the secrecy which the duellists maintain; it is hoped that as few people as possible will learn the real cause of Phineas's injury. It is a male secret and the duel acts as a male rite of passage. It is significant, therefore, that after the duel Phineas is presented as more confident, and 'words were very easy to him, and he would feel as though he could talk for ever' (ch. 40, II, 630) in the House. He is described as 'a man who was pleasant to other men, - not combative, not self-asserting beyond the point at which self-assertion ceases to be a necessity of manliness' (ch. 40, II, 630). Phineas is aggressive and willing to fight, but not more than is required. At a time when manliness was being defined in a range of literature, duelling, too, was being discussed in periodicals. Of particular interest to commentators were the French duels involving literary men. The Saturday Review writes in 1858, 'it is a shallow and inadequate view of the late French duels to consider them as other than grave symptoms of a deep social disorder'. 87 All the Year Round in 1862 discusses duels as a particularly Irish endeavour, and mocks the notion that duels are a 'manly mode of adjusting human differences'. 88 According to the article, in no country but Ireland has duelling enjoyed so healthy a vitality. It was sustained con amore. The men and women of the country fling themselves in the exciting pastime with a generous enthusiasm. It was part

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(ch. 36, II, 510)

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This is all playfully taunting, but the writer insists that such barbarity was popular before the Act of Union - before Ireland became officially civilized by the English. It is true, however, that duelling was associated especially with Ireland, and the Irish Code of Duelling (adapted in 1777) became a model for other countries. 90 The duel, then, was a part of Phineas's heritage, but note that the Englishman proposes 'to fight; to fight; to fighf. Duelling is an act of competition between men, one rite of passage to becoming a man. Mr Daubeny looks upon debates in the House as similar combats: he 'was in the habit of looking at these contests as duels between himself and the leader on the other side of the House' (ch. 25, II, 118). And because of the Irish tradition of duelling, the meeting takes on an additional nationalist meaning: Phineas the wild Irishman is doing battle with Chiltern the aristocratic Englishman. Household Worlds in 1857 (the year of Tom Brown's Schooldays) published an article criticizing men's need to use violence as a way of proving superiority. Street-corner brawls had replaced the duel, but the m e a n i n g of both is fundamentally the same. More insightful still, the article connects male violence to imperialism: When a despotic sovereign bent on self-aggrandisement lays claim to territories not his own: when other nations interfere, and tell him he has no right to back his claims, and when at last the question is put to the dread arbitrement of war. What is this after all, but a gigantic fight to prove the better man? 91 The male writer questions a culture in which male violence is used to prove superiority over each other and other nations. Writing at the same time, Revd Brown (whose lecture on manliness was discussed previously in this chapter) accepts that manliness and aggression are, at least sometimes, compatible: 'I believe war under some circumstances to be manly, noble, and glorious'. Between Brown and Household Words is the spectrum of opinions on what it meant to be manly in the 1860s. There is another form of violence, less genteel than the duel, on which Trollope touches. In the heat of the Reform Bill debates, Mr Bunce is arrested as one of an angry mob petitioning for the ballot out-

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of the curriculum of education. Every man was a knight of the pistol. 89

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side Parliament. 'The crowd', 'the mob', 'the roughs' - the working men gathered in protest were those newly enfranchised in 1867 whom many feared and distrusted. The fear of group violence took other forms, such as anxiety over trade unions and the rise of the Fenians. Middle- and upper-class fears were rooted in such events as the Hyde Park riots (1866), the Sheffield unions disaster (1867), and the Fenian terror campaigns (from 1865). During the serialization of Phineas Finn, all of these issues were discussed in Saint Pauls in one way or another, giving the novel an extra topicality and energy. Punch linked two of the middleclass bogeys in a cartoon in October 1867, when Phineas Finn was just beginning: Murder (personified as woman) treads on Justice and commands the unionists and the Fenians forward. Punch had a history of treating the Irish disparagingly, particularly in the drawings which depict the Irish as simians and monsters. In 1861, Punch had asserted that the Irish Yahoo was 'a creature between the mongrel and the baboon'; 92 this treatment was particularly savage, but it demonstrates the extent to which the Irish Question was an emotive subject, intersecting with discourses around issues of race, national identity, and class. One difference between the duel and the riot, as depicted in Punch and Phineas Finn, is the difference between man-to-man, gladiatorial, warrior combat and (what is perceived from above as) group anarchy. Both forms of aggression are class-specific: the one condones, regulates, and supports the power structure; the other antagonizes and challenges the status quo from below.

RAEPH THE HEIR AND SAINT PAUES 'In writing Phineas Finn, and also some other novels which follow it,' Trollope records in the Autobiography, 'I was conscious that I could not make a tale pleasing chiefly, or perhaps in any part, by politics. If I wrote politics for my own sake, I must put in love and intrigue, social incidents, with perhaps a dash of sport, for the sake of my readers' (317). Trollope was aware, then, that he had at least to try to make his novels (and his periodical) appeal to a wider audience than a strictly political novel could do. He faced this problem again in the other serial he contributed to Saint Pauls, published as a supplement to the periodical beginning in January 1870. Trollope left as editor in July 1870,

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but the novel was written to be serialized in the periodical and the discourses of Ralph the Heir are attuned to the political, male discourses of the magazine generally. Trollope's own judgement on the novel was harsher than reviewers when he recorded in the Autobiography, T have always thought it to be one of the worst novels I have written, and almost to have justified that dictum that a novelist after fifty should not write love-stories' (343). For Trollope's money, 'it was in part a political novel; and that part which appertains to politics, and which recounts the electioneering experiences of the candidates at Percycross, is well enough' (343). As in Phineas Finn, then, we see Trollope wanting to write a political novel, but filling it out with love interests, presumably aimed at readers of (especially his own) popular domestic fiction. In his introduction to his edition of Ralph the Heir, John Sutherland makes convincingly the point that the novel was always intended to be a man's story. 93 The working title for the novel was 'Underwood', indicating that the focus was to be on Sir Thomas Underwood, the old lawyer who spends most of his time in chambers, supposedly working on a biography of Francis Bacon. Sutherland argues that Underwood was imagined as a Lear figure, and that Trollope only introduced the romantic love plots around the two Ralphs when it became possible that the novel might not be serialized in the failing Saint Pauls: Another, less friendly paymaster [than Virtue], Alexander Strahan, took over St. Pauls in June 1869. Strahan was bound to honour Virtue's contract to serialize the new novel (although he declined to have it actually in the magazine) but he was not obliged to take it for its volume reissue. Nor did he. He leased the first book-form issue of Ralph the Heir to Hurst and Blackett. Hurst and Blackett were successors to Henry Colburn and a second- or third-rate house, specializing in slushy threedeckers for the circulating libraries. Trollope evidently foresaw a shadow over his novel while he was writing it and duly broadened its appeal to cater for the romance-loving general reader. Having diluted his narrative with young love, the author later came to hate it - hence such extravagantly disgusted remarks as 'one of the worst novels I have written'. 94 Sir Thomas is the most interesting character in the novel, and in

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the love plots, we have conventional romance characters and no exceptionally well-wrought heroines on a par with, for example, Lily Dale or Lady Glencora. However, Ralph the Heir complements Phineas Finn in a number of ways, which emphasizes the particularly the male focus of Saint Pauls. Most obviously, the two Ralphs remind us of Phineas and Chiltern, on the verge of passing from youth into manhood. Both Ralphs share the same lover, and like Phineas and Chiltern, Ralph Newton (the heir) 'was nearly driven wild with the need of deciding' who to marry and how best to take responsibility for his life (RH, bk. 1, 208). Ralph is particularly close to Chiltern in his spendthrift attitude and passion for hunting and its attendant men's pleasures. Much of the novel is taken up with his need to resolve whether or not to marry Polly Neefit, a breeches-maker's daughter with a large fortune, in order to pay off the substantial debts from his lavish bachelor's life of pleasure. The other Ralph Newton (a bastard cousin of the heir) is described as having 'a double memory, and a second identity' (bk. 2, 68), just as Phineas is said to have two separate identities. This Ralph is isolated by birth in a similar way as Phineas's Irish identity sets him apart from the clique of Liberals who form his circle of friends. Both Ralph the heir and Ralph the bastard would have been familiar in some ways to readers of Phineas Finn. There are other discourses in Ralph the Heir which further indicate the male focus of Saint Pauls. I have already mentioned the election at Percycross in which Sir Thomas encounters all manner of political corruption. As in Phineas Finn, the politics is metaphorized as a battle. When Sir Thomas returns with a broken arm to his daughters after the election, we are told that, a hero is never so much a hero among women as when he has been wounded in the battle. The very weakness which throws him into female hands imparts a moiety of his greatness to the women who for the while possess him, and creates a partnership in heroism, in which the feminine half delights to make the most of its own share. (RH, bk. 2, 39-40) His cherished scar makes him a hero. But Sir Thomas brings up other discourses about men, particularly about male responsibility

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and work and about the separate spheres that men and women inhabit. Something which Sir Thomas must confront is that his life especially in later years has been unproductive, that, literally, he does nothing of use or importance. Most ridiculously, he has been preparing a Life of Bacon for 35 years without having written a single word, and, finally, he must accept his own failures: He had promised himself once that books should be the solace of his age, and he was beginning to hate his books, because he knew that he did no more than trifle with them. He had found himself driven to attempt to escape from them back into public life; but had failed, and had been inexpressibly dismayed in the failure. . . . Why should he have dared to arrange for himself a life different from the life of the ordinary men and women who lived around him? Why had he not contented himself with having his children around him; walking with them to church on Sunday morning, taking them to the theatre on Monday evening, and allowing them to read him to sleep after tea on the Tuesday? He had not done these things, was not doing them now, because he had venture to think himself capable of something that would justify him in leaving the common circle. He had left it, but was not justified. He had been in Parliament, had been in office, and had tried to write a book. But he was not a legislator, was not a statesman, and was not an author. He was simply a weak, vain, wretched man, who, through false conceit, had been induced to neglect almost every duty of life! (bk. 2, 285) As this passage attests, the novel is, in Sutherland's words, 'suffused with a premature but overwhelming sense of age's growing impotence and exile from all that previously gave life savour'. 95 It registers male fear - fear of domesticity, of ageing, of failure, of neglected duty. If Phineas Finn depicts the growth of a young man on the threshold of a brilliant career, Ralph the Heir depicts an old man whose achievements were only ever illusory. Phineas's promising political career is cut short, while Sir Thomas is left to wonder how he has so profoundly misjudged his life. The novels share similar concerns but use men at different times of life to discuss them.

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There are other connections between Trollope's two novels serialized in Saint Pauls, such as the definition of what it means to be a gentleman in the late 1860s and the discourse over workers' rights and trade unionism. A cluster of issues dealing specifically with men's lives (male development and maturity) and with men's concerns (chiefly in the political sphere) dominate these two serials. Both novels were suited to the project of Saint Pauls, intended to be a male magazine, addressing male readers on male subjects. 96 Phineas Finn, as the inaugural novel by the editor, helped define to a large extent the magazine's tone and position, and the male focus was simply reiterated and rearticulated in the second novel published as a supplement. During the serialization of Phineas Finn, a number of discourses circulated which defined and redefined the nature of manliness, and, by implication, masculine development. A year of political transition, 1867, threw a number of assumptions into question. Some middle-class men saw a newly empowered working class as a threat to their livelihoods. Ambitious men like Mr Bunce, hungry for power, were challenging the dominant classes' absolute right to govern. Chiltern represents an aristocracy in retreat - unable to accept noblesse oblige and unwilling to take his place in a changing socio-political milieu. Mr Kennedy is unbelievably rich from industrial new money but is paralysed (and by implication impotent) by an inability to act. When the outsider arrives, infiltrates the family seat, and begins to pursue his woman, Chiltern starts literally to fight for what he perceives as his rights. Trollope thought it 'a blunder' to make Phineas Irish (A 318); however, Phineas can only be an Irish member. From a marginal space, a land often romanticized in the English mind, arrives an 'impetuous Irish boy' who quits London and the centre of establishment politics as an Irish man with Irish principles. As a male Bildungsroman, Phineas Finn charts one young man's quest for masculinity in a time of transition, when what it means to be a man is uncertain at best. However, of importance in his first parliamentary career, in the first of the Phineas novels, is that the hero find his own voice - where the centre of self-empowerment really rests. Saint Pauls focused around Liberal politics, and Trollope's inaugural serial serves to reinforce the political mission of the magazine. His second serial novel addressed similar issues, masculine development, politics, male responsibility. Trollope was defining his periodical against other shilling monthlies which, to

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a greater or lesser degree, were suitable for family reading and paid special attention to the woman reader - Temple Bar or the Argosy, for example. He was bringing the notion of separate spheres, articulated in both his Saint Pauls serials, to the monthly magazine. It was not unique, but where other magazines were hybridizing in order to merge markets, Saint Pauls is resolute under Trollope's control that it will cater for men. Between his two serials in Saint Pauls, Trollope published a series of short stories called 'An Editor's Tales', which can also be read in relation to the identity of the Saint Pauls as a magazine addressing men's anxieties and desires.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

I have retained the spelling of the magazine which occurs on the title-page to volume 1 and in Trollope's 'Introduction' in the first number. See R.H. Super, 'Truth and Fiction in Trollope's Autobiography', Nineteenth-Century Literature 48:1 (June 1993), 74-88. See Trollope to Virtue (13 December 1866) and (14 December 1866), in Letters 1, 361. For a discussion of the founding of Saint Pauls, see John Sutherland, 'Trollope and St. Paul's 1866-70', in Tony Bareham, ed., Anthony Trollope (London: Vision, 1980), 116-37. See also discussions in Wellesley 3, 358-64 and in Patricia Thomas Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan: Victorian Publisher (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986), esp. 91-2, 112-13, 132-3. Judith Wittosch Malcolm, 'Trollope's Saint Pauls Magazine' (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1984), is the only full-length work on Saint Pauls. Her study is largely descriptive and makes broad assumptions about the nature of periodicals, contributors and readers; still, it is useful for the information it provides. He was given £1000 per year, out of which he paid his sub-editor, Edward Dicey, £250. In 'Trollope and St. Pauls', Sutherland observes that the person to whom Saint Pauls was most generous was Trollope himself. He received £3200 for Phineas Finn in addition to money from his nonfiction and his editorial salary. As Sutherland puts it, Trollope was 'skimming all Virtue's cream for himself, 125. Ralph the Heir has a complicated publishing history. It was intended as a serial for Saint Pauls but ended u p as a monthly supplement sewn into the back of the magazine. It was published simultaneously in monthly parts at 6d. See John Sutherland's 'Note on the Text' in his edition of Ralph the Heir (1871) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, World's Classics, 1990), xxiv-xxx. All subsequent

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7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

177

references to the novel will be from this edition, and noted parenthetically in the text with the abbreviation RH, the book number, and page number. Similarly, Mary Braddon's roles as editor and contributor were used to advertise Belgravia. See for example Publishers' Circular 29 (November 1, 1866), 708. Publishers' Circular 30 (2 September 1867), 513, notes the vogue for periodicals to be named after public buildings. Virtue's offices were in Ivy Lane and the City Road. The use of big-name editors to attract readers is just one indication of the competitiveness of the monthly magazine market. The new Broadway, an Anglo-American periodical, sold over 100,000 copies of its first issue just one month before the launch of Saint Pauls. The new Tinsley's, widely advertised, made a strong bid for women readers and initially included such innovations as regular coloured drawings of Paris fashions. Prospectus adverts state that the magazine was 'especially commending itself to Lady readers'. See the Athenaeum (13 July 1867), 62. Defining one's market precisely was increasingly necessary in such a competitive environment. Sutherland makes this point in 'Trollope and St. Paul's', 123. Most obviously, this occurs in the chapter on the election at Percycross in Ralph the Heir, which closely resembles Trollope's own experience. In the Autobiography, Trollope says that 'Percycross and Beverley were, of course, one and the same place', 343. Sutherland, 'Trollope and St. Paul's', 118. [Anthony Trollope,] 'Introduction', Saint Pauls 1 (October 1867), 4 and 5. Sutherland, 'Trollope and St. Paul's', 119. Sutherland believes that Trollope follows Thackeray (and that Saint Pauls follows the Cornhill) in this regard, that both were gentlemen's magazines. While I agree that Cornhill non-fiction is primarily addressed to male readers (as argued in Chapter 1), the serial fiction, largely domestic, suggests the bid for women readers. We can see the difference between the Cornhill and Saint Pauls in Trollope's serials for each. Framley Parsonage and The Small House (both extremely successful Cornhill serials) deal closely with domestic politics, not Westminster politics, and have women at the centre of the plots. As Figure 25 shows, the ads for the first issue announced serial writers and one miscellaneous contributor. Articles by Edward Dicey and Francis Lawley were unattributed. In 'Trollope and St. Paul's, 127, Sutherland suggests four reasons for the periodical's anonymity: Cornhill was anonymous and it was a model for Saint Pauls; anonymity in the Fortnightly was not particularly successful; anonymity allows a politician to speak his mind in print and Trollope was hoping to be a politician; and, finally, readers would not have known what rank of writer they were getting for their shilling each month, which was good for Saint Pauls since that rank was not very high. [Trollope,] 'Introduction', 1.

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[Henry Nelson O'Neil,] 'Taste', Saint Pauls 1 (October 1867), 99. Note that he was attributed in the advert. 20. See Malcolm, 'Trollope's Saint Pauls Magazine', ch. 4. 21. Jonathan Parry in The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), describes the terms of the Reform Bill: 'the English Borough electorate rose from 500,000 to 1.25 million between 1866 and 1871. This seemed a revolutionary change. Male household suffrage on a one-year residence qualification was virtually established in the boroughs, and Britain had, it appeared, become a democracy', 217. 22. [William Rathbone,] 'Social Disintegration', Macmillan's Magazine 16 (May 1867), 31. 23. The novel clearly alludes to living politicians, despite Trollope's denial, and m a n y r e a d e r s w o u l d h a v e picked u p on direct connections to actual political figures and events during the Reform Bill debates. See the Illustrated London News 52 (8 February 1868), 134 and (4 April 1868), 319, and 54 (9 January 1869), 46 and (6 March 1869), 231, which objects to the vulgarity of Trollope drawing on real figures for his fiction. John Sutherland discusses the thinly veiled real figures in 'The Background to Phineas Finn' in his edition of Phineas Finn (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 36-7. It is worth noting that Trollope sat in the gallery of the House of Commons in order to study the manners and procedures of MPs. 24. See [John Herbert Stack,] 'The Irish Church' and 'Phineas Returns to Killaloe' in Saint Pauls 1 (February 1868), 569 and 614-18, respectively. 25. [George John Cayley,] 'On Matrimony', Saint Pauls 1 (March 1868), 735. 26. See [Anthony Trollope,] 'The Uncontrolled Ruffianism of London, as Measure by the Rule of Thumb', Saint Pauls 1 (January 1868), 419-24, and ch. 30 ('Mr Kennedy's Luck') of Phineas Finn in Saint Pauls 2 (May 1868), 250-6. 27. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859), John Burrow, ed. (London: Penguin Classics, 1985), 133. 28. See Linda K. H u g h e s and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 68. 29. The most significant contribution to the study of Victorian masculinity remains Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Other important full-length studies of Victorian masculinity include: Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries 1870-1930 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Jonathan Rutherford, Forever England: Reflections on Race, Masculinity and Empire (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1997);

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19.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

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Herbert L. Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). A number of works have been published on Trollope's women, but I know of no full-length work on constructions of masculinity in his fiction. A study such as Robin Gilmour's The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), with a chapter on Trollope, traces an ideal in fiction, although it does deal tangentially with manliness and masculinity. Alex J. Tuss, The Inward Revolution: Troubled Young Men in Victorian Fiction, 1850-80 (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 2. The seminal work on manliness in Victorian culture is David Newsome's Godliness and Good Learning: Four Studies on a Victorian Ideal (London: John Murray, 1961). More recent works on manliness which amend some of Newsome's conclusions include: Michael Roper and John Tosh, eds, Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London and New York: Routledge, 1991); Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (Lond o n : L o n g m a n , 1981); L y n n e Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (London: Virago, 1990); Peter Gay, The Cultivation of Hatred (London: W.W. Norton, 1993). Recent work on masculinity in general includes Jonathan Rutherford, Men's Silences: Predicaments in Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1992). Claudia Nelson, 'Sex and the Single Boy: Ideals of Manliness and Sexuality in Victorian Literature for Boys', Victorian Studies 32:4 (Summer 1989), 526. Boyd Hilton, 'Manliness, Masculinity and the Mid-Victorian Temperament', in Lawrence Goldman, ed., The Blind Victorian: Henry Fawcett and British Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 66. Nelson, 'Sex and the Single Boy', 526. Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, 50. Weeks also notes that in the 1860s many new male-bonding clubs were formed, indicating the separation of the sexes was for adults as well as children, 40. Note, however, that there are other reasons for the general growth in children's periodicals, e.g. the post-taxes magazine boom of the 1860s. A.R. Hope, A Book About Boys (Edinburgh: W.P. Nimmo, 1868). See a review of the book in the Saturday Review 26 (10 October 1868), 501-2, which agrees with the author on the importance of boys. Kelly Boyd writes: 'Manliness is one of the central goals of character-formation, and the boys' story paper offered readers a place to see this in the making'. See her article, 'Knowing Your Place: The Tension of Manliness in Boys' Story Papers, 1918-39', in Roper and Tosh, Manful Assertions, 147. Matthew Arnold, 'Culture and Its Enemies', Cornhill Magazine 16 (July 1867), 36-53. Frederic Harrison, 'Culture: A Dialogue', Fortnightly Review 2 n.s. (November 1867), 601-14. Walter Pater, 'Winckelmann', in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and

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Transitions

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57.

Trollope and the Magazines Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, World's Classics, 1986), 1223. The original title of the work in 1873 was Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Dellamora, Masculine Desire, 15. Ibid., 110. See also Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). See The Lives of Boulton and Park. Extraordinary Revelations and Men in Petticoats (London: 5 Houghton Street, 1870). Gay, Cultivation, 115-16. John Brookes, Manliness: Hints to Young Men (London: James Blackwood, 1859), 1. Brookes's work was republished in 1875 and 1877. It should be noted that much of this work appears to be plagiarized from Revd Hugh Stowell Brown, Manliness: A Lecture (London: James Nisbet, 1858). I would like to thank Lyn Nead, who suggested to me the idea that Phineas's masculinity is particularly urban. Newsome, Godliness, 197. Note that several critics do not accept Newsome's lumping of Hughes with Kingsley. This partly depends on how one reads Tom Brown's Schooldays. See Nelson and Hilton, for example. Although I generally do not accept that Hughes was a muscular Christian in the same vein as Kingsley, my point here is simply to distinguish two strands of thinking about manliness. Samuel Smiles, Self-Help (London: John Murray, 1866), 385. See especially Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ (London: Macmillan and Co., 1879). Much of this book first appeared in Good Words. John Caird, D.D., Christian Manliness, 'A Sermon Preached before the University of Glasgow' (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1871), 29 and 27. Brown, Manliness: A Lecture [14-18]. The pages of the text are not numbered. Quoted in Newsome, Godliness, 208. See also James Eli Adams's discussion of this passage in 'Gentleman, Dandy, Priest: Manliness and Social Authority in Pater's Aestheticism', ELH 59 (1992), 456. Segal, Slow Motion, 139. Also note that in the nineteenth century the effects of sexual deviancy, especially masturbation, were thought to be seen physically in things like acne; see Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, 49. Arnold, 'Culture and Its Enemies', 43. Newsome, Godliness, 222 and 216. See also Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, 40. [Leslie Stephen,] 'About Rowing', Saint Pauls 1 (December 1867), 329 and 330. See [Leslie Stephen,] 'Art and Morality', Cornhill Magazine 32 (July 1875), 91-101. Stephen's argument is that morality is an essential element of all art, and that Pater's Renaissance (although not mentioned directly) encourages, indeed glorifies, immorality. Note that Stephen read the first edition which contained the notorious and

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58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76.

181

homoerotic 'Conclusion', suppressed in the 1877 edition. For an interesting discussion of Stephen's reaction to Pater, see Perry Meisel's The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), especially 1-10. Quoted in Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), 303-4. [Francis Lawley,] 'On Shooting', Saint Pauls 1 (February 1868), 548. Ibid., 559. Smiles, Self-Help, 3. See also Erie's hope to get a party-man and not an uncontrollable 'semi-Fenian' (ch. 1, I, 106-7). A primary reform issue for the Liberals after the Reform Bill was the Irish Question. Edward Dicey's 'Our Programme for the Liberals', Saint Pauls 1 (March 1868), 659-74, argues that disestablishment of the State Church, the minority Protestant Church, in Ireland is a point of agreement for all Liberals. John Herbert argues similarly in 'The Irish Church', Saint Pauls 1 (February 1868), 564-77. Phineas, of course, resigns office defending Irish land reform against the Liberal Government. [Peter Bayne,] 'Progress', Saint Pauls 1 (March 1868), 723. Rutherford, Men's Silences, 15. John Sutherland, 'Introduction' to Phineas Finn, 10. He also notes, however, that critics such as Matthew Arnold were against the new empowerment of the masses. Roper and Tosh, Manful Assertions, 17. T.A. Jenkins, ed., The Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 18581865 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1990), 256. Quoted in Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, 208. Trelawny is complaining that the relationship between opposition and Government is too snug. The Belton Estate, ch. 8, Fortnightly Review 1 (1 July 1865), 415. Segal, Slow Motion, 73. See D.W. Winnicott, Playing With Reality (1971; reprinted London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 79-81. Segal, Slow Motion, 131 and 132. Winnicott, Playing with Reality, 67. Ibid., 66. For an interesting Derridean reading of Phineas as a decentred subject, see Julian Wolfreys, 'Reading Trollope: Whose Englishness Is It Anyway?' Dickens Studies Annual 22 (1994), 304-29. Among other things, Wolfreys observes that the name 'Phineas Finn' combines both Latin and Gaelic forms and that it acts 'as a sign of movement between cultures, between dominance and subjugation, between authority and subversion', and that it is resonant with words like 'Fenianism', 307. Rutherford, Men's Silences, 109. The ballot became a key political issue after the 1868 election; it was passed in 1872, to Trollope's displeasure. It is also interesting to note that in 'Anonymous Journalism', Saint Pauls 2 (May 1868), Leslie Stephen compares anonymity to the ballot: 'Let us endeavour,

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77.

78.

79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

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in the first place, to state the accusation fairly. The objection to anonymous writing resembles the objection to secret voting.. . . The ballot, - say its assailants, - implies that the voters are freed from proper responsibility. The ballot, - reply its supporters, - insures that the voters shall enjoy a proper independence', 217. Melanie Klein, 'The Psycho-Analytic Play Technique: Its History and Significance' (1955), in Juliet Mitchell, ed., The Selected Melanie Klein (1986; London: Penguin, 1991), 50. These 'phantasies' are unconscious, hence the spelling 'ph-'; see Mitchell's introduction, 22. Rutherford, Men's Silences, 50. In her Introduction to the Selected Melanie Klein, Mitchell says that Klein's 'understanding of anxiety' is 'the centrepoint of Klein's therapy', 23. R.F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1993), 145. Wolfreys, 'Reading Trollope', 307. Later in the novel, Phineas 'found himself among them as one of themselves' (ch. 37, II, 512). However, this clearly is not the case, as the end of the novel insists. Rutherford, Men's Silences, 173. [Anthony Trollope,] 'About Hunting II', Saint Pauls 1 (March 1868), 676. Ralph Newton in Ralph the Heir is associated with the fast image of hunting. One thinks, for instance, of the Ullathorne Games in the middle of Barchester Towers (1857), in which a medieval tournament is staged. Gay, Cultivation, 11. Ibid., 33 and 99. 'Military Terrorism in France', Saturday Review 5 (22 May 1858), 526. 'Dead (And Gone) Shots', All the Year Round 7 (10 May 1862), 216. See also 'French Dead (And Gone) Shots', AU the Year Round 9 (18 April 1863), 189-92. 'Dead (And Gone) Shots', 212. Robert Baldick, The Duel: A History of Duelling (London: Chapman and Hall, 1965), chapter 3. 'The Best Man', Household Words 15 (12 November 1857), 490. 'The Irish Yahoo', Punch 41 (21 December 1861), 245. See Sutherland, Introduction to Ralph the Heir (World's Classics), vii-xxiii. Ibid., xvi. Ibid., xii. Sutherland's point about Ralph the Heir originally being primarily about Sir Thomas supports my argument. Had that version of the novel been serialized, it would have shown the male focus even more dramatically. As it is, Trollope tried to add romance for the popular reader, but in so doing, he still concentrates on male development.

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The Editor as Predator in Saint Pauls The cultural formation of Saint Pauls Magazine under the founding editorship of Trollope suggests that the periodical was gendered male - as indicated by the prospectus, the political discourse of the non-fiction, and the constructions of masculinity in Phineas Finn. I do not wish to suggest that no women read the periodical, rather that the discourse of Saint Pauls seems to address men rather than women. As a shilling monthly edited by Trollope with illustrators such as Millais, Saint Pauls might be expected to follow the lead of other family magazines, most notably Cornhill, which largely defined the family shilling monthly in the 1860s. The tension between Trollope's wish to edit a political monthly and his publisher James Virtue's wish to bring out a popular magazine is revealed in the gap between the magazine's subtitle and the original prospectus - the one ignoring the central role of political discourse in the magazine, the other explicitly announcing the Liberal mission. In this chapter, which again focuses on Saint Pauls under Trollope, I interrogate the writer's authority both as a leading contributor and as the omnipotent editor. In particular, I look at his series of stories called 'An Editor's Tales', which began in Saint Pauls in October 1869 and was published in volume form as An Editor's Tales in May 1870, and consider how the author and the editor functions are negotiated in the stories and subsequent book issue, and how the stories themselves construct the positions of author and editor, especially in terms of gender. What is striking in the tales is the intensely sexual language and the editor's role as a sexual predator. The stories were written by an author-editor whose fictional subject is the editing of other authors; the editing process, based upon an uneven power relationship, is conceived of in terms of heteroand homosexual male fantasy. That reviewers then and critics 183 10.1057/9780230288546 - Trollope and the Magazines, Mark Turner

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now often unproblematically read Trollope into the editor of the tales is not surprising, but such readings support my misgivings about our need to construct the presence and the authority of the author-editor. Ultimately, my argument is that in eroticizing the stories, sometimes almost pornographically, Trollope ideologically universalizes the editor and often the successful periodical contributor as male, which in turn supports my reading of Saint Pauls as a magazine gendered male.

THE PROFESSIONAL WRITER As indicated throughout this study, the economy of serialization, which includes the novel in book form, author, periodical, editor, advertisements, and publishing house, is one of interconnectedness and interdependence. The meanings we may construct out of serializations depend upon plurality at the site of production and reception. What we notice again and again in studying periodicals is the circularity of the network: in periodicals of the 1860s, for example, the circuit includes the ways publishing houses use magazines both to establish and to promote names from their book lists, the ways authors use magazines to generate books, and the ways advertisements participate in both these processes. In Saint Pauls, Trollope's negotiations with periodical and book production are very much in evidence; during his three-year editorship, from October 1867 to about July 1870, Trollope produced four works out of the periodical (one of which he edited). Appendix A provides a list of publications which shows Trollope's works through the period of and just after his editorship of Saint Pauls. I have included this detailed list to show explicitly Trollope's movements within the periodical press in a very brief span of time. His project of anonymity in Blackwood's (which began with Nina Balatka), his links to a number of publishing houses, his experiments with weekly and monthly part-issues (unusual for this time), his attempt to write a play (never produced), his editing of Saint Pauls and its yield of four books - all demonstrate how he was connected to the middle-class periodical press and how the production and distribution of fiction and non-fiction were intertwined with aggressively capitalistic publishing ventures. He wrote about love, politics, primogeniture, women's roles, sports, eastern Europe, prostitution, the classics, and the publishing

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industry. Trollope's name was everywhere - on novel volumes, weekly and monthly part-issues, the covers of periodicals, the covers of cheap reprints, and advertisements for all of the above. Such a brand-name blitz shows the mechanics of the industry at this time, the circulation paths within the economy of serializations.1 This media blitz occurred at a time when Trollope had left his civil service job, lost a parliamentary bid, and was ensconced as an editor of a new shilling monthly. His over-exposure on the market may indicate a financial anxiety, or it may point to his wish to professionalize and thus to augment further his status as a full-time writer. In Michel Foucault's construction of events, the 'author' only came into existence as we know him/her at the moment when literature became fully 'property' after the copyright laws of the late nineteenth century. It was then that the author was accepted 'into the social order of property which governs our culture'. 2 Foucault does not discuss earlier interventions in the struggle to legitimize writing as a valid profession, for example eighteenthcentury writers such as Pope and Johnson. However, I take his point that by the end of the nineteenth century the author function was inextricably linked with literary production as commodification, partly due to a greatly expanded market through periodical publication. In the 1860s, in the various periodicals on which I have focused, we can see how this expanding periodical market helped to commodify both literature and its producers. We see this in the way Trollope's authorial identity is used to sell periodicals or in the way the Fortnightly, for example, contributed to a growing culture of celebrity. The complex negotiation of authority within the sociology of the periodical text became more pronounced toward the end of the century, especially as new technologies were developed and new markets were realized, expanding the mass production of periodical literature generally. Discourse in the mid-nineteenth century about the professional writer took shape in a number of debates, including those focusing on the copyright and the establishment of charitable funds for writers. Trollope was outspoken in urging the need for legislation to protect the literary labourer from international piracy, especially with regard to American editions and serializations. A public letter to James Russell Lowell published in the Athenaeum in 1862 demonstrates precisely the seriousness with which Trollope regarded the business of writing:

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To you and me, and to men, who like us, earn our bread by writing, the question is, of course, one of pounds, shillings and pence, or of dollars and cents; although there are those who affect to think that an author should disregard such matters, and that he should work for fame alone. For myself, I profess that I regard my profession as I see other men regard theirs: I wish to earn by it what I may honestly earn, - so doing my work that I may give fair and full measure for what remuneration I may receive. (Fetters 1, 194) Note that Trollope's profession here is writing, not working at the Post Office. Discussing nineteenth-century copyright in relation to Thackeray, Peter Shillingsburg asserts that the link between the author and literary property had not fully been established, and authors did not always understand their own rights as creators: . . . the concept of authors' copyright as opposed to printers' or booksellers' or publishers' copyright was relatively new in the nineteenth century, and not all authors had learned to prize or use the possession. An author's ability to hang on to and improve the value of his copyrights depended - as possession of all valuable commodities do - on the author's economic strengths and weaknesses. 3 Trollope, of course, understood his rights, and argued vociferously for them. But the fact remains that the relationship between many authors and their work was uncertain, and debates about copyright, for example, are sites of struggle over literature as property. The precarious position of the professional writer, as opposed to the brilliant amateurs whose non-fiction work was part of the discourse of the higher journalism, also took the form of continuing efforts to establish charitable organizations which could ensure writers a small pension. As Nigel Cross notes, in 1850 Dickens and Bulwer-Lytton established the Guild of Literature and Art in opposition to the long-established Royal Literary Fund 'to honour professional writers by awarding them pensions ("salaries") and, if required, free purpose-built homes near Stevenage'. 4 Dickens and others felt that the Literary Fund belittled writers

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by forcing them to beg for charity. In 1864, the Newspaper Press Fund was inaugurated partly to redress the imbalance of the Royal Literary Fund, which only gave money to book writers. This is just one indication of the ongoing tension within professional writing, and of how the valuing and privileging of the book over ephemeral journalism had been institutionalized; it is also indicative of class divides, as professional, often freelance, journalists (the 'hacks') were more likely to be from lower middle-class and working-class backgrounds and so had less access to the capital behind the book-publishing industry. (Of course, embedded in the term 'hack' for professional, probably freelance, journalists is a whole debate about the status of journalists and journalism.) Trollope, together with Dickens, Tennyson, G.A. Sala, J.A. Froude, and Robert Bell (whom Trollope asked to sub-edit Saint Pauls), was among the Press Fund's literary vice-presidents. 5 Often, the position of the author in the nineteenth century has been considered within the construct of a binary relationship between the hack and the genius. In 1896, Leslie Stephen provided a history of the professional writer in which he projected precisely this binary in journalistic writing. He discusses the gap between the lower-class Grub Street writer (the journalist) and the gentlemen/scholar contributor (the man of letters) present in middle-class periodicals from the eighteenth to at least the mid-nineteenth century. 6 Shillingsburg has problematized the assumption that the best authors are those who have not written for money. a mythology about writing has developed around words like imagination, fancy, creativity, genius, inspiration, the Muse, and artistic integrity. Simultaneously, the independence or autonomy of the artist has come to be thought traduced by insolent and insensitive patrons or by screwing publishers and booksellers. Such a mythology demands of authors that they conceal the sweat. Fits of creative passion, bouts of wrestling with the Muse or of striking with white heat upon her anvil are images passing muster, but daily discipline, writing to deadlines of time or space, exchanging one's soul for money are infra dig. 7 Thackeray was one of those who sweated; Trollope more so, as his Autobiography famously attests. Shillingsburg's essential point here is that 'the whole exercise of connecting the greatness of

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the literary output to the monetary motives for its production' is erroneous. 8 And I agree. However, it is worth asking why this binary distinction between the paid hack and the inspired man of letters was so significant - what are the ideologies which support it? Mary Poovey, discussing the nineteenth-century literary debates about professionalization in terms of class and gender, argues persuasively that discussion in the 1840s and 1850s, focused on the place of literary men in society and on issues of work and money. Her view is that the two opposing images of the writer - the 'genius' (from romanticism) and the 'hack' (from the press) - collapsed into the image of the 'autonomous individual' as seen in the development of a protagonist such as David Copperfield. 9 Although Poovey perpetuates the notion of a binary, I accept her essential point that writers were reacting to their 'problematic place in the market economy and the proprietary form of the subject', 10 which took the form of gendering the writer as male and linking his project to that of national character and unity. I wish to argue that it is within this context - of the struggle to define exactly what constitutes professional writing and who represents the writer figure - that we can read An Editor's Tales. The place of the writer at mid-century, then, was not merely understood as a unified subject. In Chapter 3, I discussed a range of periodicals which were launched aimed specifically at professional writers; these (trade) journals were partly attempts to focus on authors, as distinct from those periodicals already established for publishers and others in the industry, such as the Publishers' Circular. It is important for my argument to accept that the cultural position of the editor was as much contested as that of the writer or author; this has not always been recognized by press historians and critics of Victorian periodicals. For example, in a recent full-length collection of essays dealing with Victorian editorship, Innovators and Preachers, a number of unifying and totalizing assumptions are made by the editor: Editing is at the core of the Victorian experience. In an age characterized by the proliferation of print, the editor acted as a conduit between text and a u d i e n c e . . . . In brief, the editor was situated at the nucleus of the Victorian world: He typified both the transformations that were making Britain an urban nation and a stable society.11

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I find a number of trouble-spots in this account of the Victorian editor: whose Victorian experience is presumed and which nucleus of the world being considered? Generally, the editor is universalized as male, although passing mention is made in the introduction to women of the press, and each of the case studies of individuals is of a male editor. What about male editors who posed as women? What about important and powerful women editors themselves? The collection wants to respond definitely to the question 'What is an editor?' but it seems from the outset not to allow that such a question needs to be qualified. An exchange of opinions in the Publishers' Circular two months before An Editor's Tales began to be serialized shows, for example, that the role of women within publishing was being affirmed and contested. Women from the Victoria Press wrote to the trade magazine to refute charges made a fortnight earlier that the employment of women as compositors and printers was a failure. Another correspondent (with whom the Publishers' Circular agreed) wrote that the failure of women in the printing office could be proven on practical, utilitarian, physical, and moral grounds. 12 One way to read these interventions is to consider that the success of the Victoria Press caused some men in the industry a certain amount of anxiety since the gendered boundaries within publishing were increasingly less stable. Gaye Tuchman's work on the publishing industry at this time demonstrates how men were 'edging women ouf of a field of public discourse open to women; 13 this indicates to me the need to reconsider how categories such as 'editor' and 'author' are constructed and to concede that our presuppositions about authority in the press need to be modified.

AN EDITOR'S TAEES: FROM SERIES TO BOOK The publishing history of An Editor's Tales is interesting for what it reveals about the movement from periodical to book form and the life of the work after it is out of the author's hands. The stories were published anonymously in Saint Pauls for eight months consecutively from October 1869, in the following order: 'The Turkish Bath', 'Mary Gresley', 'Josephine de Montmorenci', 'The Panjandrum', 'The Spotted Dog', and 'Mrs. Brumby'. 'The Panjandrum' and 'The Spotted Dog' both took two issues to complete.

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Each story was numbered and appeared under the general title 'An Editor's Tale'. On the contents page to Volume V of Saint Pauls, the story titles are numbered and indented under the general title, as if the stories were chapters of a larger whole. The volume form of An Editor's Tales came out in May 1869, now attributed for the first time. The stories were reset but appear in the same order as in the periodical. Soon after the first edition, Chapman and Hall took over the copyright and issued it in 1871 as one of their yellow-covered 'Select Library of Fiction' series. It was renamed Mary Gresley and An Editor's Tales (although the cover says Mary Gresley or An Editor's Tales), cost two shillings, and the first two stories were rearranged so that 'Mary Gresley' led the volume. The nearest approximation to An Editor's Tales was the Trollope Society's book of stories called Editors and Writers, which contained all six stories without the original ordering plus two other stories. As far as I have been able to ascertain, An Editor's Tales has never been republished in Britain with the original title and original ordering of stories until 1993, as part of 'The Penguin Trollope', a series which is capitalizing on a renewed interest in the author by publishing all the novels, stories, and the Autobiography in a chronologically numbered sequence. Stories have been selected from Trollope's three collections and published miscellaneously as The Parson's Daughter and Other Stories (1949) or The Spotted Dog and Other Stories (1950). All of Trollope's stories have been collected and published in various editions, most recently a twovolume set by Oxford University Press in the 'World's Classics' series.14 Because this edition publishes the stories in chronological order, the Saint Pauls tales do appear in the original order. I am discussing the distribution of the Tales because it indicates how the stories have been circulated disregarding their original publication in a periodical edited by Trollope. The stories were published in a particular order and in a particular place at a time when he had a very particular authority within the magazine, but subsequent reprints of the tales have obscured the tensions between the individual story, the periodical and the book.15 Later in this chapter, I will argue that this has something to do with the sexual nature of the stories. My point here is not that publishing the stories without the general series title and original ordering is somehow less correct than other forms of publishing, rather that the place and mode of publication can suggest possible meanings within and between the tales. What is interesting

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in these stories for my study of serialization is how, taken collectively, they construct editors, contributors, readers, books, and periodicals in a periodical under the control of the same editorwriter. One of the places where the cultural meanings of literature can be evaluated is in the space between tenuous categories. In previous chapters, I have shown how our inherited conception of the 'novel' - a self-contained, uninterrupted narrative unity predicated on the book form and attributed to an author - has failed to allow for more flexible possibilities. Our readings of literature are often based on presuppositions about the form in which a work appears.

WHAT IS AN EDITOR? The Illustrated Eondon News seems to have been one of the few periodicals to mention Trollope's tales in their review of the magazines each month, and they regularly commented on the worth of almost each story. Of the October 1869 issue, they commented that 'the gem of the number is Mr. Trollope's own story of the Turkish Bath, one of the richest pieces of humour, not unmixed with pathos, for which we have ever been indebted to him'. 16 This sort of praise was maintained throughout the series. They did not review the volume form, but given the large amount of Trollope's work on the market at the time, it is not too surprising that An Editor's Tales was not widely reviewed. The Saturday Review believed that these stories do not show Trollope at his best, unravelling multi-plot novels, and so found the stories mostly boring, except 'The Spotted Dog'. Importantly, they asked whether the stories were fact or fiction, indicating that perhaps the failure of the stories for them was in the ambiguous relation between Trollope and the editor in the tales. 17 Similarly, a brief, negative review appeared in the Athenaeum which closes: 'As experiences of an editor's life, the tales tell us nothing trustworthy, for we are not informed where fiction ends or fact, if there be any, begins. Altogether, the book is hardly worthy of the author.' 18 Like the Saturday Review, the Athenaeum presumes that Trollope as editor should be writing about his own experiences, but these stories are not journalistic pieces about life in Paternoster Row. In the Autobiography, Trollope writes:

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The Editor's Tales was a volume republished from the St. Paul's Magazine, and professed to give an editor's experience of his dealings with contributors. I do not think that there is a single incident in the book which could bring back to any one concerned the memory of a past event. And yet there is not an incident in it the outline of which was not presented to my mind by the remembrance of some fact.. . (337) The stories were not intended to be exact memories, and he admits to condensing and constructing a number of editorial experiences into particular stories. But fiction is not fact and it is at least problematic to criticize it as such. Biographers and critics continue to relate the stories to details from Trollope's life, as Richard Mullen does in his recent biography (1990). He believes that Mary Gresley (Trollope's grandmother's name) is really a slightly veiled Kate Field, and he calls 'The Panjandrum' an 'autobiographical short story': it is likely that 'the narrator in the short story . . . represents the author in the 1830s (and many clues point to it).' 19 John Sutherland equally reads the stories in light of what we know about Trollope's life and his working habits. For example, he believes that in the traumatic outcome of 'The Spotted Dog' we can understand 'Trollope's pathological need to work'; 20 the failed writer there is a version of what Trollope could have been. It is plausible, but it is a reading which relies on a certain amount of knowledge about Trollope's life. Trollope himself tries to distance his own life from the fictional editor's through his particular title, 'an' editor, not 'the' editor, and he seems to be playing with the ambiguity and slippage in identity. This playfulness, I will suggest below, is related to the sexual nature of the tales, which will be discussed at length below. For now, it may simply be useful to invoke Roland Barthes's concerns that ' w h e n the author has been found, the text is "explained"'. 21 My question is not about the biographer doing this (such is the prerogative of the biographer) so much as what values and meanings the figure of the author has for readers. Barthes's famous essay 'The Death of the Author' (1968) suggests a number of interesting positions which can help us to think critically about the role of authority in An Editor's Tales. Barthes describes the single voice of the author, but Trollope frequently

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uses the first person plural narrator in the stories. As Trollope writes in the first story, 'The Turkish Bath', 'our readers, we hope, will, without a grudge, allow us the use of the editorial we. We doubt whether the story could be told at all in any other form.' 22 The single voice of the editor gains strength by using the plural, collective voice (partly by depersonalizing the editor) which is the privilege of the periodical press. 23 In his memoirs, James Payn, an editor of Chambers's Journal and Cornhill, described the editorial stance as the 'impersonality of the mysterious "We"'.24 Although Trollope does not use this form in all stories, he is ever aware of his power to use 'the delicious plural' (P, V, 434). At the beginning of 'The Panjandrum', which describes the efforts of a group of acquaintances to found a new periodical, Trollope seems to disclaim, temporarily, his right to that collective authority: The great WE was not, in truth, ours to use We shall, therefore, tell our story, as might any ordinary individual, in the first person singular, and speak of such sparks of editorship as did fly up around us as having created but a dim coruscation, and as having been quite insufficient to justify the delicious plural. (V, 434) In fact, this is the only story which does not use the authority of the editor to speak as a collective, but even here his awareness of his power to do so maintains a kind of editorial authority. The collective includes both the contributors and the publishing house, which was almost without exception a male enterprise, hence a gendered cultural formation, but it also may include the collective of readers. An opposition is made between the editor and 'any ordinary individual' and the mock-heroic construction of the editor as extra-ordinary is maintained throughout. In 'Josephine de Montmorenci' the editor is a Jupiter figure and the magazine called the Olympus, further constructing the puissance of the editor. 25 Barthes uses the term 'writing' to distinguish when language performs, not 'me', the author. This notion is useful when thinking about works without relying on the figure of the author or the individual at the point of origin. However, I would maintain that in periodical literature, a number of 'performances' can be seen: yes, in language, but also, and perhaps especially, in the

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mode of production which is so crucial to periodicals and serializations of novels and stories. In the periodical configuration, it seems more revealing to consider where authority in the periodical text lies: who maintains power in the editor-contributor (-reader) relationship, and how is that power exercised within the network of circulation? In An Editor's Tales we never actually see a writer writing; rather, we are presented with two people who potentially control the production of a text. The position of the manuscripts in the stories are always and only ever in flux because of the demands of the editor. While I would agree that 'to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text', 26 it seems necessary to me to consider the authority of the text, if not the actual creator-originator. It may be that the editor maintains a fragmented authority, one shared with the status of the publishing house, with the collective of contributors and the reader who can roam through a periodical text. In studying periodicals, it is important to recognize how the editor may function as a signifier of the text, like Thackeray at Cornhill, without necessarily reinscribing the 'author' in the 'editor'. 27 What is most useful from Barthes's essay in relation to periodicals is his notion of the text as 'a multi-dimensional space' with a variety of writings. 28 This understanding allows us to open up a text and explore within it where authority, if not the author, is centred. Although Barthes is not only concerned to empower the reader by disempowering the author, one effect of his move is to displace the centre of power away from the author so that the multiplicity of writings within a text can be focused in readers, not in the author: textual meaning is produced in destination, not in origin. 29 The reader looks for internal structures in a text and generates meaning accordingly. This is certainly liberating in the move to get around the omnipotence of the 'author', but the problem with placing authority with the reader is that s/he may look to the single figure of the author, or in periodicals the editor, in a search for authoritative meaning. Furthermore, as Foucault has argued, the danger becomes one of replacing the authority of the author with the authority of structuralism. 30 One of Foucault's moves in asking 'What Is an Author?' (1969) is to introduce history. Instead of focusing myopically, we must view texts panoptically: consider context and the traces authors leave. 31 He begins by teasing out the functions of the author's name:

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[The author's name] is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. A name can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others. A name also establishes different forms of relationships among texts. The author's name is not a function of a man's civil status, nor is it fictional; it is situated in the breach, among the discontinuities, which gives rise to new groups of discourse and their singular mode of existence. Consequently, we can say that in our culture, the name of an author is a variable that accompanies only certain texts to the exclusion of others: a private letter may have a signature, but it does not have an author, an anonymous poster attached to a wall may have a writer, but he cannot be an author. In this sense, the function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation and operation of certain discourses within a society.32 Let us consider these passages in relation to the serial stories which ran in Saint Pauls from October 1869 to May 1870, and the book published in May 1870 as An Editor's Tales. We must remember that we are dealing with two texts and two modes of production (although contained within one network). First, the stories were published anonymously in the periodical, which in most cases means there is no 'author' with whom to identify. However, the periodical had an editor who wrote fiction and the editor's name was widely publicized. The identification of the periodical editor with the fictional editor was likely (the Illustrated London News identified Trollope in their reviews each month), but not necessary. There is room for negotiation. We must remember Trollope's own attempt to distance himself from the text using the ambiguous title. Second, the book publication overlapped with the final story (as book publications of periodical material normally did) and was published with the author's name. There is no indication that the stories were from a periodical at all, let alone from a periodical which the author edited. What we have are two cultural products (commodities) which use differently and playfully the positioning of the originatorcreator. In the periodical, it is Trollope's status as editor - a plural, even fragmented identity - which readers might connect to the stories; in the book, it is Trollope's role as author which was intended to sell the volume. In 'An Editor's Tales' (the series) and An Editor's Tales (the volume), we see a negotiation of authority

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- that of the editor and that of the author - to attach different values to each cultural product, but there is room for ambiguity in identifying the author-editor and this may have been intentional. If we return now to the negative reviews of the volume which criticized the factual nature of the stories, we may begin to see the 'breach' and the 'discontinuities' in the meanings we attach to literary authority. Foucault asserts that the 'author' is used biographically to explain events in fiction (he is discussing the novel): these aspects of an individual, which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as an author), are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice. 33 At its worst, this sort of literary criticism leads to a crude reductionism of the plurality of the text, of Barthes's 'multidimensional space'. It also disallows that the same individual may act differently as an editor than as an author, and that the editor functions much more impersonally than does the author. Laurel Brake has noted, for example, that Leslie Stephen at Cornhill did not always agree in his personal beliefs with his editorial persona, hence the danger in reading into the editor the man. 34 Foucault describes this biographizing of fiction in terms of our post-Enlightenment need to find unity wherever possible; therefore, the search for the author 'serves to neutralize' the possible contradictions which may arise in a text/set of texts. 35 1 find these contradictions and discontinuities nowhere more rich than in a series of stories by an editor-author who constructs editors, authors, readers, periodicals and books first in a periodical and subsequently in a book.

AN EDITOR'S TALES AS SOFT PORN One reason that Trollope maintained a distance from the periodical stories may be found in the nature of the stories themselves. In these 'editor's tales' very little editing of manuscripts ever occurs. This, of course, is a definitively Trollopian approach in his fiction,

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for in writing about the church and government, he was as much concerned with the social networks around these institutions as with the religion or politics exclusively. His point is that institutions - whether the Church, the government, or the publishing industry - are made up of human relationships, which, broadly, is the focus of his fiction. The world of periodical publishing may simply have afforded him another milieu he knew well in which to observe social behaviour, its hierarchies and power struggles. However, Trollope constructs very definite gendered positions in the series; when the editor addresses 'our brother editors' (V, 110) in the first tale, the editor figure is universalized as male, at a time when women were increasingly making headway with positions of authority in middle-class periodical culture (something I suggested in Chapter 4). Furthermore, this male world is eroticized in the tales, so that the seemingly benign male editor is in fact a sexual predator whose potential conquests are the men and women who approach him with manuscripts. In the context of a magazine addressing men and male subjects, these stories can be read as sexually charged. The editing process is predicated on a power relationship favouring the editor who uses his power to (try to) elicit sex from contributors; the framework of the editing process acts as a veil for the sexual nature implicit in the tales. Perhaps with an eye to his desired target readers, the clubmen in and around St James, Trollope pushes the boundaries of what is acceptable in a supposedly general-reader shilling monthly. The stories are analogous to soft porn because of the undertext of complicated sexual meanings. 'Pornography' is a slightly anachronistic term to be using for the late 1860s, although the word did exist at that time. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first use of 'pornography' in 1857, when the term still referred mainly to prostitution. Although the distinction between soft and hard-core porn did not occur until the late twentieth century, there was a huge growth in the late nineteenth century of what we would recognize as pornographic literature, much of which sexually explicit, underground material is strikingly similar to the pornography produced today. Pornography (at least in the West), I would argue, is at the margins in a spectrum of principally male reading, and it is to the margins that Trollope's tales lead us. As current debates demonstrate, pornography as a category of literature is not necessarily a stable term. The distinctions between

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pornography and erotica, let alone the distinction between soft and hard porn, continue to be contentiously argued today. Andrea Dworkin believes that 'erotica involves mutuality and reciprocity, whereas pornography involves dominance and violence;' for her, erotica is a 'subcategory of pornography'. 3 6 Peter Michelson, formulating a poetics of the obscene, argues that 'pornography functions in terms of the obscene, while erotica functions in terms of sexual love'. 37 I will be using 'pornography' to denote sexually titillating material founded upon an uneven and abused power relationship. My argument is that Trollope's tales use some of the conventions of porn (coded for a male reader) and so approach a veiled form of pornography intended to appeal to his male audience. 38 This is, of course, an unusual and even perverse way of discussing Trollope's fiction. But my point is not to suggest in a simplistic way that the author was writing porn; rather, I want to tease out a possible way of reading these tales, in a magazine gendered male, without relying on the figure of the author to understand them. These tales which began in 1869 occur at an interesting historical moment when attempts had increasingly been made to regulate sexual behaviour; 12 years earlier the Obscene Publications Act had been passed, and just five years earlier the first of the Contagious Diseases Acts. The Obscene Publications Act of 1857 effectively gave magistrates statutory power to destroy what they determined to be obscene material, and, in his history of pornography, H. Montgomery Hyde argues that this act made magistrates literary censors, while also encouraging a huge growth in the underground porn industry. 39 The Contagious Diseases Act gave magistrates the right to force women suspected of being prostitutes to undergo medical examinations. These two Acts defined acceptable sexual behaviour, and the ideological implications of these legislations has been discussed interestingly elsewhere. 40 For my purposes, it is enough to know that sexual behaviour by the end of the 1860s was seen as something that needed to be controlled by the establishment. In addition to such public evidence of sexual subcultures, there were numerous pornographic books and materials available in the 1860s, and it is interesting that Trollope's friend Monkton Milnes 'owned what was probably the largest collection of erotica ever assembled by a private collector'.41 Steven Marcus asserts that Milnes's collection of French porn 'was well known through the upper reaches of

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English literary society'. 42 The other notable porn collector at this time (of whom we are aware) was Henry Spenser Ashbee, whose bibliography of porn remains invaluable in researching nineteenthcentury porn. 43 In addition to these private interests in the industry, works such as the Kama Sutra were beginning to be translated (the first English edition appearing in 1875). The often sexually violent tales of the Arabian Nights were published in an illustrated edition by Dalziel between 1863-65. Richard Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights began to appear in 1886, in a limited edition of 1000 for private (presumably male) subscribers. His notes to the tales make explicit what often in the tales is only implicit, and in his terminal essay he includes a lengthy and frankly detailed discussion of pederasty. In his translator's foreward he argues that the general tone of The Nights is exceptionally high and p u r e . . . . Subtle corruption and covert licentiousness are utterly absent; we find more real 'vice' in many a short French roman, say La Dame aux Camellias; and in not a few English novels of our day than in the thousands of pages of the Arab. Here we have nothing of that most immodest modern modesty which sees covert implication where nothing is implied and 'improper' allusion when propriety is not outraged; nor do we meet with the Nineteenth Century refinement; innocence of the word not of the thought; morality of the tongue not of the heart, and the sincere homage paid to virtue in guise of perfect hypocrisy.44 Interestingly, this attack on Mrs Grundy occurs at precisely the moment when others, notably George Moore in Literature at Nurse, were attacking the hypocrisy of British literary institutions such as the circulating libraries; the thrust of these arguments is a call to masculinize literature. Burton's explicit edition was challenged on the grounds of obscenity, as an Edinburgh Review article about the various translations of the Arabian Nights shows: Probably no European, even if he have lived half a century 'in Orient lands,' has ever gathered together such an appalling collection of degrading customs and statistics of vice as is contained in the notes to Captain Burton's translation of the 'Arabian Nights.' It is bad enough in the text of the tales to find that Captain Burton is not content with plainly calling a spade a

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For the Edinburgh Review, the boundaries of what constituted literature, let alone healthy literature, was at stake in Burton's work. An expurgated version of the Nights came out in 1886, edited by Burton's wife, intended for household reading; cavorting and adultery are left in, but, for example, the introduction which sets up the framing narrative appears without Burton's footnote on why women are sexually tempted by Black men particularly. 46 More widely available than Burton's candid limited edition of the Arabian Nights (and more acceptable than underground works) were reprints and translations of works by the ancients, such as Petronius's 'Satyricon'. There were even a few pornographic periodicals, the most long-lived of which was the Pearl, running to 18 monthly numbers from 1879 to 1880. Furthermore, sexual transgression was increasingly being covered (as sensational scandal) in the popular press; remember the case of the crossdressing Boulton and Park in 1870. Transgressive sexual practices, then, were available in a range of forms, from underground porn books and periodicals to the popular press, and it is with such material that Trollope's tales can be compared. Porn of the mid- and late nineteenth-century has a number of general characteristics in common (all of which remain elements of late twentieth-century porn): repetitiveness; violence; voyeurism; the chase or hunt; the true story; fetishism; the sexual buildup. 47 All of these characteristics, in one form or another, can be identified in An Editor's Tales, the central dynamic of which is the eroticization of the contributor for the pleasure of the editor. Furthermore, the reader is identified with the editor and so participates and colludes in the pleasure of the editor. This is one of the trademarks of porn; it must allow the reader/viewer a way into the material. This can occur in a number of ways, for example by focusing on exaggerated genitalia rather than on personal characteristics, in order to allow the reader/viewer to project identities onto the sex object.48 In Trollope's stories, the (male) reader is implicated partly by the ambiguous use of the editorial 'we' in almost each story; the slippery 'we' of the editor becomes the 'we' of the readership. The stories can be read at

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spade, but he will have it styled a dirty shovel; but in his notes he goes far beyond this, and the varied collection of abominations which he brings forward with such gusto is a disgrace and a shame to literature. 45

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WHAT MEN DESIRE If we begin to think about the tales as eroticized stories about editors and contributors, it is fascinating to note that the first story in the series, 'The Turkish Bath', is about the sexual tension between two males. The first third of the story takes place in the all-male surroundings of the Jermyn Street Baths, in the neighbourhood of the gentlemen's clubs and shops catering to men like 'Jones from Friday Street' and 'Walker from the Treasury' (V, 113). Before entering the baths, the editor's attention falls on a man 'clad in vestments somewhat the worse for wear' (V, 110) across the street: 'We barely saw him, but still were thinking of him as we passed into the building with the oriental letters on it, and took off our boots, and pulled out our watch and purse' (V, 110). The editor's thoughts linger on this rough man ostensibly because he is so familiar with that type who comes begging for literary mercy from editors the world over. However, what we have here is a cruising scene: a lower-class man and our middleclass editor make eye contact outside a bath house, and moments later the two are together, naked, enjoying their Turkish bath. It is important that to note that as the editor undresses, his thoughts are on the man on the street. The mood of the baths is set by 'picturesque orientalism', 'the eastern tone' and the 'very skilful eastern boys who glide about the place and create envy by their familiarity with its mysteries' (V, 112 and 111). The lengthy description of homosocial behaviour in the baths is necessary because 'everyone has not taken a Turkish bath in Jermyn Street' (V, 110). Those who have not had the pleasure include women (although other bathhouses in London catered for women), and we might believe that Trollope is writing this story with Saint Pauls' women readers in mind, offering a glimpse of gendered leisure time; however, the homosocial nature of the story seems to preclude female interests. Turkish baths were something of a fad in the 1860s, the effects of which, as I will show below, were debated in articles and pamphlets. The Illustrated London News published a drawing of the Turkish bath

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one level as constructions of male fantasies: in 'The Turkish Bath' it is homosexual; in 'Mary Gresley' it is taboo sex with a child; in 'Josephine de Montmorenci' it is sex with a whore.

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in Jermyn Street at the time it was built in 1862. There were baths which catered for both sexes, but Trollope's Jermyn Street baths was not one of them. There, as at other all-male clubs, what men do is conduct business in surroundings which exclude women, and a number of male codes operate in the story (such as the use of quotations from the classics) which further signal maleness and gentlemanliness particularly. Molloy is the man worse for wear seen on the street outside the bath house, who gains entry to the baths, approaches the editor, engages him in conversation, and charms the pants off him supposedly in order to be published. The potential contributor begins by trying to establish a false worldliness: '. . . How unintelligible is London! New York or Constantinople one can understand, - or even Paris. One knows what the world is doing in these cities, and what men desire'. 'What men desire is nearly the same in all cities', we remarked, - and not without truth, as we think. 'Is it money you mane [sic]?' he said, again relapsing. 'Yes; money, no doubt, is the grand desideratum, - the "to prepon," the "to kalon," the "to pan!"' (V, 114) This exchange occurs before the editor realizes that this man is the same man he eyed outside the baths; here, Molloy is assumed to be an equal, even a superior. The two, remember, are naked together and this exchange of conversation equates male desire and money. This linking of money with desire points to an undertext of sexual exchange: the editor is approached by a man perhaps interested in money for sex (such would not be unheard of in bathhouse culture). We remember that Molloy (a name which looks very much like 'Molly', slang both for prostitute and for homosexual male) was in fact loitering in front of the bathhouse; he spotted his target and proceeded to enter the Jermyn Street Baths. If we consider that both male and female prostitutes at this time solicited clients often around Haymarket and Regent Street, and if we consider the proximity of Jermyn Street to these areas, it is possible to see Molloy as a male prostitute. In fact,

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[Henry] James celebrated the traditional prerogatives of the privileged urban spectator to act, in Baudelaire's phrase, as flaneur, to stroll across the divided spaces of the metropolis, whether it was London, Paris, or New York, to experience the city as a whole. The fact and fantasy of urban exploration had long been an informing feature of nineteenth-century bourgeois male subjectivity. 49 Molloy masquerades as a flaneur, claiming to be familiar with the ways and manners of a number of cosmopolitan cities. His terrain is the urban space, his topic for discussion is the urban male's desires. One of the better-known books of almost exclusively homosexual pornography from the late nineteenth century, Sins of the Cities of the Plains (1881), begins precisely with a cruising scene analogous to that in the 'The Turkish Bath': The writer of these notes was walking through Leicester Square one sunny afternoon last November, when his attention was particularly taken by an effeminate, but very good-looking young fellow, who was walking in front of him, looking in shopwindows from time to time, and now and then looking round as if to attract my attention. Dressed in tight-fitting clothes, which set off his Adonis-like figure to the best advantage, especially about what snobs call the fork of his trousers, where evidently he was favoured by nature by a very extraordinary development of the male appendages; he had small and elegant feet, set off by pretty patent leather boots, a fresh looking beardless face, with almost feminine features, auburn hair, and sparkling blue eyes, which spoke as plainly as possible to my sense, and told me that the handsome youth must indeed be one of the 'Mary-Anns' of London, who I had heard were often to be seen sauntering in the neighbourhood of Regent Street, or the Haymarket, on fine afternoons or evenings. 50

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this is part of the ambiguity of the tale: what is Molloy doing outside the baths? As Judith Walkowitz has documented, the wandering urban male was increasingly a feature of mid-nineteenthcentury fiction:

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The rent-boy Jack picks up the narrator around the area of Regent Street; he is taken back to a Baker Street flat; the two men discuss Jack's finances, which we learn are perfectly secure because his massive penis 'provides for all I want' (an explicit link between money and desire).51 Later in 'The Turkish Bath', the editor admits that 'when we had been all but naked together I had taken him to be the superior of the two, and what were we that we should refuse him an interview simply because he had wares to sell which we should only be too willing to buy at his price if they were fit for our use' (TB, V, 121). The point is not that Molloy necessarily is a rent-boy like Jack (in fact Molloy is middle-aged), rather that the atmosphere surrounding the Jermyn Street Turkish bath scenes suggest homoerotic tension and an ambiguity in the exact nature of the editor/contributor relationship. It further suggests an uncertainty about how men and women ought to behave in the changing urban centre. 52 Interestingly, Derek Jarman has written about the Jermyn Street Bath scene in the 1940s: As a young MP, Flarold Macmillan - who was expelled from Eton for an 'indiscretion' - used to spend nights at the Jermyn Street Baths; anyone who went to them would have been propositioned during the course of an evening. I went there myself on two or three occasions. They were a well-known hangout: dormitory and steam rooms full of guardsmen cruising. 53 Even if we acknowledge that the bathhouse of 1869 was different from that of the 1940s, the nature of Trollope's Turkish Bath seems intended to arouse by teasingly positing the possibility of a homosexual encounter to male readers. The young, oriental boys, the heat, the steam, the nudity, the silence, the tension about etiquette, the supply of men: this is the stuff of cruising. 54 The editor becomes completely charmed by Molloy (posing as a gentleman), and we learn that 'his manner of moving about the place was so good that I felt it to be a pity that he should ever have a rag on more than he wore at present' (V, 115). A deception is at work in that the editor is increasingly excited by Molloy and expects or at least hopes for a sexual encounter, but the only thing offered to the editor is a manuscript. At his point, the editor 'felt that everything was changed between us, and that the man had plunged a dagger into us':

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Yes; he had plunged a dagger into us. Had we had our clothes on, had we felt ourselves to possess at the moment our usual form of life, we think that we could have rebuked him. As it was we could only rise from our chair, throw away the fag end of the filthy cheroot which he had given us, and clap our hands half-a-dozen times for the Asiatic to come and shampoo us. (V, 117) Here, the manuscript doubles as a phallic dagger sodomitically piercing the editor. When Molloy delivers his manuscript to the editor's office, and the editor realizes that Molloy is the man from in front of the baths, he notes 'how well the fellow had understood it all, and had known his own capacity!' (V, 119). 'Mr. Molloy's little game' (TB, V, 119) of make-believe was all too real to the editor, seduced by the prospect of sex, and Molloy's manuscript is imagined as a phallus a second time: 'And now that you are here, Mr. Molloy, what can we do for you?' we said with as pleasant a smile as we were able to assume. Of course we knew what was to follow. Out came the roll of paper of which we had already seen the end projecting out from his breast pocket, and we were assured that we should find the contents of it exactly the thing for our magazine. (V, 119) At the end of the story, just before Molloy is shown to be a fraudulent madman, the editor continues to hope that something will come of his object of desire: 'there had been the man at the Baths in Jermyn Street, and the two manuscripts had been in our hands, and the man had wept as no man weeps for a joke' (V, 126). The editor wants desperately to believe that he has not been foolish, but he finally must admit that 'we had certainly been "done" by the most elaborate hoax that had ever been perpetrated' (V, 126). That Molloy should end up insane is significant for two reasons. Firstly, the madness displaces the sexual tension (much as Josephine's lameness does in the third story), and explains away Molloy's previous behaviour. Secondly, Molloy's condition intersects with the discourse of health which surrounded Turkish baths at mid-century. In fact, at the time Trollope published this story,

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a whole debate was raging about the medical usefulness of taking steam baths. Numerous lectures, pamphlets, and guides were printed either extolling the healthy virtues of Turkish baths or condemning them as harmful. 55 Part of this discourse contained implicitly a sexual element, because, as one bath enthusiast argued, syphilis was one of the diseases which 'peculiarly recommend[s] to sufferers the use of the hot-air Bath'. 56 One reason for going to the baths was preventative and curative medicine, so it is interesting that Molloy is so mentally unhealthy. A prevalent discourse on sexual health at this time argued that masturbation was unhealthy, that the spilling of semen was in fact a waste which depleted the male body. It is therefore significant that there are a number of masturbation images in Trollope's story. The editor, considering whether there is any possibility of publishing a mediocre manuscript, muses: And yet if the short thing be only decently written, if it be not absurdly bad, what harm will its publication do to any one? If the waste, - let us call it waste, - of half-a-dozen pages will save a family from hunger for a month, will they not be well wasted? (V, 118) An implicit sexual allusion here asks, if Molloy masturbates for pay, will any real harm come of it? Consider the following passage in which the editor has the power to confer privileges upon contributors: The butter-boat of benevolence was in our hand, and we proceeded to pour out its contents freely. It is a vessel which an editor should lock u p carefully; and, should he lose the key, he will not be the worse for the loss. We need not repeat here all the pretty things that we said to him, explaining to him from a full heart with how much agony we were often compelled to resist the entreaties of literary suppliants, declaring to him how we had longed to publish tons of manuscript, simply in order that we might give pleasure to those who brought them to us. (V, 121-2)

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The sexual tension inherent in the bath scenes is carried over to the editor's work and transformed in his power to give pleasure to contributors: the manuscript acts as the displaced object of sexual desire. The image of spillage returns after the editor learns of Molloy's deception: 'We did not regret the sovereign so much as those outpourings from the butter-boat of benevolence' (V, 126). These images of depletion become even more significant if we remember that according to one discourse in public health, masturbation caused insanity. 57 In mid-Victorian porn, the fear of masturbation as a health risk is openly accepted. A male prostitute in Sins of the Cities of the Plains recalled that too much 'frigging' by one schoolboy 'fairly broke his health down'. 58 This notion remained prevalent (and still acts as part of cultural, if not medical, discourse), as seen in D.H. Lawrence, who has written of pornography that it exists 'to provoke masturbation', and while intercourse is about 'give and take', masturbation is 'exhaustive'. 59 In 'The Turkish Bath', then, we have a complex negotiation of issues around male sexuality and health which, because couched in a language and form reminiscent of porn, implicates the (male) reader in an obscene and even dangerous erotics.60 There is never a moment of completion or satisfaction in 'The Turkish Bath'. What we have is a series of build-ups which cannot ever reach climax without the story tipping over from a playfully ambiguous tale of editing into a story of fully realized homosexual desire and activity. This playfulness may have been acceptable for Trollope's middle-class male readers in a way that a more sexually satisfying story could never be. It is one thing to allude to a homosocial world, even to tease and tantalize readers with the sexual tension of such a world; it is quite another thing to present that world as sexually satisfying. That is perhaps one difference between Trollope's lascivious tales, which can safely appear in a shilling monthly, and pornography, which most often appears underground.

SEDUCTIONS AND SECRETS 'Mary Gresley' followed 'The Turkish Bath' in November 1869, and shifted the sexual object from a man to a young woman. At the beginning of the story, we are told that young Mary Gresley possesses an unconscious power over men:

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We have known many prettier girls than Mary Gresley, and many handsomer women,-but we never knew girl or woman gifted with a face which in supplication was more suasive, in grief more sad, in mirth more merry. It was a face that compelled sympathy, and it did so with the conviction on the mind of the sympathiser that the girl was altogether unconscious of her own power.. . . there came to us from our intercourse with her much of delight mingled with the sorrow; and that delight arose, partly no doubt from her woman's charms, from the bright eye, the beseeching mouth, the soft little hand, and the feminine grace of her unpretending garments. . . . She had little, indeed none, of that which the world calls society, but yet she was pre-eminently social. . . . Of w o m a n ' s vanity she had absolutely none. Of her corporeal self, as having charms to rivet man's love, she thought no more than does a dog. It was a fault with her that she lacked that quality of womanhood. To be loved was to her all the world; unconscious desire for the admiration of men was as strong in her as in other women .. . (MG, V, 237) There are a number of interesting moves here by the editor. Mary is constructed as a woman of extremes; she possesses unknown powers to seduce men; she is simple and innocent in her unworldliness. But the editor already senses that he is getting into trouble in his description of her because after the very long first paragraph describing her, he must back away in order to 'guard ourselves somewhat from miscomprehension' (V, 238). In fact, it is the editor who introduces the notion of an indecent love into the reader's mind, ensuring that Mary would be perceived as a possible sexual object if she had not already been. We are unconvinced when told that because the editor is married and Mary engaged, any notion of indecency is nonsense. Having made that claim, he goes on to eroticize Mary further: We regarded her first almost as a child, and then as a young woman to whom we owed that sort of protecting care which a greybeard should ever be ready to give to the weakness of feminine adolescence. Nevertheless we were in love with her, and we think such a state of love to be a wholesome and natural condition.. . . We loved her, in short, as we should not have

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loved her, but that she was young and gentle, and could smile, - and, above all, but that she looked at us with those, bright, beseeching, tear-laden eyes.

The editor comes full circle in the second paragraph from which this passage is taken. He is at pains to describe his love for Mary, trying to convince the reader (and himself?) that nothing was amiss. But he continues on, not content that he has communicated his innocence, by comparing his innocent love with Laurence Sterne's letters to Eliza Draper in 1766-67. Sterne, who was in his 60s and was dying, passionately declared his love to Eliza, who was in her young 20s and was married. 61 Thackeray had railed against Sterne's folly in an article in Cornhill in 1860, and Trollope seems to have inherited his hero's disdain for Sterne. What is problematic in Sterne's ('a worn-out wreck of a man') outpourings of emotion is that 'it was told'. Love such as Sterne's 'is very dangerous because, unless watched, it leads to words which express that which is not intended' (V, 239, my italics). There is an ambiguous space of acceptable behaviour by older men in relation to young women and girls, and the editor is doing his best to convince us that his love for Mary is within that space. That he has to convince us at all suggests the precariousness of his position. The editor might have been more reassuring if the events as told in the story did not indicate so clearly that Mary Gresley is an object of sexual pleasure for him. It may be useful to introduce Baudrillard's notion of seduction in reading this story in particular because it helps elucidate a central dynamic in all of the stories in which voyeurism and sexual language are so important. the uncertainty of existing, and consequently the obsession of proving our existence, prevail over desire that is strictly sexual. If sexuality is putting our identity on the line (down to the fact of having children) then we are really no longer in a position to devote ourselves to this task, for we are too preoccupied with saving our identity to undertake anything else. What matters above everything else is proving our existence, even if that is its only meaning. 62

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(V, 238-39)

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What the editor in the tales continually does is prove his existence by enforcing a construction of the editor figure as male, and one way in which he is able to do this is to assert his sexuality. In 'The Turkish Bath', this sexual assertiveness can be seen in the negotiation of Molloy's manuscript as a phallus; similarly, in 'Mary Gresley', we see the editor's power to control Mary's manuscript, again acting as a displaced sex object. For Baudrillard, 'seduction is not a theme which stands in opposition to others or puts an end to others. Seduction is what seduces, and that's that.' Seduction is not desire, rather something almost beyond it, which when described or interpreted is lost: 'challenge, and not desire, lies at the heart of seduction.' 63 The notion of opposition - that the feminine is opposed to the masculine, or even that the contributor is opposed to the editor - is replaced by an interaction based on seduction. Baudrillard advocates a return to 'the charm of appearances' and an acceptance of 'surface and appearance' as a way of circumventing the need endlessly to produce meaning. Baudrillard is writing in the late twentieth century and is theorizing (somewhat sketchily) a culture in which a plethora of overdetermined images and mass communications circulate to shape indelibly meanings in the world around us; for him, 'we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us'. 64 He wants to lead us out of m e a n i n g . H o w e v e r , w h a t I find interesting is to consider Baudrillard's mass communication theories in relation to the 1860s - when the number of magazines launched was increasing, when figures like Dickens were achieving celebrity status, when the capitalist machinery of a mass press was beginning to define itself and make its mark in ways we generally recognize today. Furthermore, the editor's reliance on surface and appearance indicates how a commodity culture was already determining the ways individuals view each other. This takes a number of forms in the stories: the fetishism of the 'tattered gloves' to denote social relations; the voyeuristic cruising scene which begins 'The Turkish Bath'; the insistence upon seeing Josephine in person in 'Josephine de Montmorenci'. The editor(s) is continually insisting on the importance of appearance, however unreliable it seems as a tool for judgement. A thematic link is made with Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833-34), invoked in 'The Panjandrum', since Carlyle's fiction criticizes modern society for relying too heavily on appearance, and the narrator there notes that 'all visible things are Emblems'. 65 Trollope's editor makes numerous false, super-

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ficial judgements in the tales, and Trollope no doubt shares Carlyle's sentiments when the young naive editor in 'The Panjandrum' thinks, 'what matters a wrapper? Of course, wrappers do matter, and Molloy, Mary Gresley, Josephine and others are all judged based on some preconception of external appearance. Surely of a printed and published work it is by the interior that you should judge if (V, 444). In Trollope's tales, the shifting nature of the press and the use of commodities and objects to determine identity already demonstrate the germ of what would become more extreme in a mass communications culture a century and more later. In the tension between the editor and author as creator of meaning - at a time of transition, linked to the rise of the professional writer and the professionalization of the industry generally - we see one of the seeds of a burgeoning mass culture. Baudrillard's theory of seduction seems to encapsulate a tension which arises in Trollope's tales. Baudrillard's 'entire strategy of seduction is to bring things to a state of pure appearance, to make them radiate and wear themselves out in the game of appearances (but the game has its rule, and its possibly rigorous ritual)'. 66 The important aspect about appearance is that it resists interpretation: There is something secret in appearances, precisely because they do not readily lend themselves to interpretation. They remain insoluble, indecipherable. The reverse strategy of the entire modern movement is the 'liberation' of meaning and the destruction of appearances. To be done with appearances is the essential occupation of revolutions. I am not expressing any reactionary nostalgia; I am merely seeking to regain a space for the secret, seduction being simply that which lets appearance circulate and move as a secret. 67 Secrets circulate throughout An Editor's Tales, and the secret is linked to the desire between editor and (especially women) contributors. Mary Gresley, for example, is positioned as a seductress in trying to get the editor to help her: she has been 'potent' (V, 244) in getting previous publishers to help her; she 'soon established' 'her power over us' (V, 245); 'she was simply irresistible' (V, 247). This is the stuff of male fantasy, one of the classic scenarios in pornography in which an innocent child-like woman turns out to be powerful and experienced in seducing the man.

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Her power is sexual and this is the secret which must be maintained. Recall the statement in the opening paragraph to 'Mary Gresley', that her 'desire for the admiration of men was as strong in her as in other women' but that it must be an 'unconscious' desire (V, 237). She must be unaware of her power to seduce, since, as Baudrillard argues, 'nothing could be less seductive than a provocative smile or inciteful behaviour, since both presuppose that one cannot be seduced naturally and that one needs to be blackmailed into if.68 At the moment when meaning becomes attached to the secret, the tension which forms the dynamic (the challenge) in the editorcontributor relationship vanishes, and the game is up. The editor's secret is that Mary is the child as sex object: 'To us the child of whom we are speaking, - for she was so then, - was ever a child' (V, 239). Yet Mary as child-lover, daughter-lover is checked within the power relations of the editor-contributor relationship: he is able to conceive metaphorically with her because he is a male editor and she a female contributor. In the seduction and in the secret love, safely contained within the walls of the editor's office, is a game of power with its own rules. This is what D.H. Lawrence has called 'the dirty little secret' of pornography: 'The whole question of pornography seems to me a question of secrecy. Without secrecy there would be no pornography... . Secrecy has always an element of fear in it, amounting very often to hate.' 69 This is partly what makes the tales so lascivious for us to read today; we no longer have these secrets. The dirty little secrets of incest, child abuse, rape, and violence are made obvious and acceptable in pornography, and the essence of these acts hovers implicitly but dangerously near in the editor's tales. The concept of the secret is fundamental to Baudrillard's notion of seduction: Only the secret is seductive: the secret which circulates as the rule of the game, as an initiatory form, as a symbolic pact, which no code can resolve, no clue interpret. There is, for that matter, nothing hidden and nothing to be revealed. It cannot be stressed enough: THERE IS NEVER ANYTHING TO PRODUCE. In spite of all its materialist efforts, production remains a utopia. We can wear ourselves out in materializing things, in rendering them visible, but we will never cancel the secret.70

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That the circulation of secrets defies production (in the case of the tales, this means publication of the contributions) is nowhere more clear than in 'Josephine de Montmorenci'. What seduces the editor Brown here is the fantasy that in Josephine he may find an 'adventure', a word which reappears often throughout the story as the motivation for Brown's actions. Now, 'Mr. Brown was an unmarried man, who loved the rustle of feminine apparel, who delighted in the brightness of a woman's eye when it would be bright for him, and was not indifferent to the touch of a woman's hand' (V, 367). In sight, sound and touch, the editor is keenly aware of the physical, sensuous presence of women. The publishers X, Y, and Z arouse Brown's curiosity by writing, "T didn't see her myself, but I am sure there was a mystery"' (V, 368). Women with mysteries were all the rage in sensation novels in the 1860s, and the mystery often involved the sexual activeness of the woman, as we saw earlier with Mrs Askerton in The Belton Estate or with the more infamously mysterious Lady Audley and other B r a d d o n protagonists. 7 1 P u r s u i n g his enigmatic Josephine, in a sexual game of chase, he acts again the role of voyeur by loitering outside her home in Camden Town in order to get a glimpse of her so that he may judge her sexual attractiveness by her appearance. Once more, the editor only considers the writer as a possible contributor because of an implied sexual exchange. The male fantasy being projected here is that of the loose woman. Josephine's 'unparalleled impudence' reduces the editor to a 'humble slave', but in his rejection of her manuscript, 'though this would be unpleasant, still there might be pleasure' (V, 375). For the editor, the pain and pleasure of the master-slave relationship underscores the physical and sexual 'truth' behind the mystery. The editor is desperate to see Josephine and requests a meeting, to which she responds: '"Do as I wish and I will gratify you by a personal interview"' (V, 371). Again, satisfying demands leads to gratification, and the sexual fantasy of the dominatrix stalks barely veiled, birch in hand, beneath the surface of the story. One of the most effusive scenarios of Victorian porn concerned flogging and flagellation, and discussions of the use of the rod in discipline and punishment entered middle-class homes through periodicals. 72 We ought also to remember that Josephine is compared to Leda, who (according to one version of the myth) was raped by Jupiter and gave birth to Helen of Troy, the original

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femme fatale. Josephine is both sadist and masochist, torturer and willing victim. Little secrets accumulate as the story continues. Mrs Puffle, Josephine's ambassador sent to Brown to cut a deal, begs Brown not to tell Mr Puffle of Josephine's writing because 'it's a secret' (V, 378). Brown has allowed her to think that he knows her husband, a trick he keeps up until the end of the story. The actual secret which prevents Josephine from visiting Brown at his office has a painful twist: she is disabled and extremely ill. All of the sexual fantasies which the unmarried editor has projected on to the anonymous Josephine become untenable. The revelation of the secret ends the seduction: And so one can imagine that in amorous seduction the other is the locus of your secret - the other unknowingly holds that which you will never have the chance to know. The other is not (as in love) the locus of your similarity, nor the ideal type of what you are, nor the hidden ideal of what you lack. It is the locus of that which eludes you, and whereby you elude yourself and your own truth. Seduction is not the locus of desire (and thus of alienation) but of giddiness, of the eclipse, of appearance and disappearance, of the scintillation of being. It is an art of disappearing, whereas desire is always the desire for death. 73 The editor-lover's giddiness from the seduction game ends when appearance becomes reality, when Josephine's revealed identity is perceived as non-sexual. In the end, the manuscript is rejected for Brown's periodical, although with patronizing compassion, the editor arranges with X, Y, and Z for the publication of her sensation novel. In each of the first three stories, the pattern of build-up ends not with a climax but with a contrived moment of arrest. In 'The Turkish Bath', Molloy is a fraud, a madman unable to play out the game of seduction he initiated. In 'Mary Gresley', as the editor and contributor become increasingly close through their meetings in the editor's office, Mary must leave London for the countryside to tend to a dying vicar-lover. Most cruelly, Josephine is revealed as crippled, unable to use her legs and so immediately impotent, non-sexual. The build up which occurs in the

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stories remains unresolved, or at least is resolved mechanically, anxiously and so unconvincingly. This is the effect of reading the first three stories, the most sexually charged of the six in the series. The fourth story, 'The Panjandrum', is notable for its lack of obvious sexual language compared with what we have already seen. In fact, this two-part story produces a cooling-down effect - the sexual fantasies of the other stories is checked by this slowmoving tale of a young man's involvement in founding a periodical. The primary sexual image is of the literary work of art as child or offspring. Although the use of generative metaphors for creative works is not new, earlier in 'Mary Gresley', it is given a different twist: It was impossible to resist her. Before the interview was over, we, who had been conversant with all these matters before she was born; we, who had latterly come to regard our own editorial fault as being chiefly that of personal harshness; we, who had repulsed aspirant novelists by the score, - we had consented to be a party to the creation, if not the actual writing, of this new book. (V, 249) The writing is conceived by the male editor and the contributor together; the birth of literature here (constructed by a male authoreditor) literally d e p e n d s u p o n the editor's intervention and intercourse. The editorial table and office replace the bed and bedroom. As the stories progress, however, the act of creation becomes one of violence, as in 'The Panjandrum', in which the writer sadly opines: 'The 'Panjandrum' - which I had already learned to love as a mother loves her first-born, - the dear old 'Panjandrum' must perish before its birth' (V, 565). The creation in 'Mary Gresley' has become abortion, and the failure to produce literature, a failure to produce life. As the tales in the series progress, this violence becomes more pronounced and an unpleasant misogynistic tone is established in 'The Spotted Dog' and 'Mrs. Brumby'.

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'The Spotted Dog', another two-part story, documents the editor's efforts to help a young literary man, Mr Mackenzie (of good birth and education), with a publication by arranging for him to index a friend's manuscript. Mr Mackenzie has the good fortune to be friendly with local pub landlady, Mrs Grimes, who allows him to use her bedroom for his work. The editor questions the propriety of such openness, but Mrs Grimes retorts that the lower classes have no time for the surface morality of the middle classes. She tells him, 'we're different in our ways than what you are. Things to us are only just what they are' (V, 685). The secret at the heart of this tragic tale is that Mackenzie is the head of a fallen household; his wife has desanctified the domestic space with her alcoholism. A diseased home is the real reason that Mackenzie, an educated gentleman, cannot succeed in becoming a fully realized, autonomous individual/writer. Mrs Grimes explains that Mackenzie suffers on because he needs his wife to maintain the home, however negligent she may be: . . . in such a household as that of poor Mackenzie the wife is absolutely a necessity, even though she be an habitual drunkard. 'A husband as drinks is bad', said Mrs. Grimes, - with something, we thought, of an apologetic tone for the vice upon which her own prosperity was partly built, - 'but when a woman takes to it, it's the devil. (VI, 59-60) The consequence of Mrs Mackenzie's fall is the ruin of her home: 'The look of the place was of a spot squalid, fever-stricken, and utterly degraded. And this man who was our companion had been born a gentleman. ..' (VI, 61). Mr Mackenzie's failure to succeed as a writer is symptomatic of the diseased home, and his suicide was 'rather the reflex of her vice than the result of his own vicious tendencies' (VI, 73). Mrs Mackenzie's final act of betrayal of her husband which ultimately leads to his suicide is the violent ripping and burning of his manuscript. Metaphorically, this amounts to another abortion (or infanticide) because for the scholar whom Mr Mackenzie has been helping, the fragmented remains of the manuscript are

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'the ashes of my unborn child' (VI, 76). A mother is responsible for destroying the foetal literary being conceived between her husband and the scholar. This violence might also be an emasculation, since we have seen in other stories how the manuscript acts as a phallus, and certainly here, the manuscript provides a final attempt for Mackenzie to assert a professional, masculine identity. The anger and violence of this story, following on from the disappointment of 'The Panjandrum', prepares us for the final angry editor's tale, 'Mrs. Brumby'. In this story, we have a classic projection of the woman as nasty bitch, and her monstrous bullying of the editor by implication condemns the role of women in writing altogether. The tale begins, We think that we are justified in asserting that of all the persons with whom we have been brought in contact in the course of our editorial experiences, men or women, boys or girls, Mrs. Brumby was the most hateful and the most hated. (VI, 181) The editor concedes that she has good points, but counters that by saying, she was utterly unscrupulous, dishonest, a liar, cruel, hard as nether mill-stone to all the world except Lieutenant Brumby, harder to him than to all the world besides when he made any faintest attempt at rebellion, - and as far as we could judge, absolutely without conscience. Had she been a man and had circumstances favoured her, she might have been a prime minister, or an archbishop, or a chief justice. (VI, 181) Mrs Brumby is reminiscent of Mrs Proudie, a veritable she-devil, but without Mrs Proudie's redeeming features. She possesses all unwomanly qualities, and by rights ought to have been a man and undertaken combative, manly pursuits. The editor believes she would better serve her hostile nature as a politician (religious or governmental), but acknowledges that literature is one of the few fields of work open to women:

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. . . the port of literature is open to women. It seems to be the only really desirable harbour to which a female captain can steer her vessel with much hope of success. There are the Fine Arts, no doubt. There seems to be no reason why a woman should not paint as well as Titian. But they don't. With the pen they hold their own, and certainly run a better race against men on that course than on any other. Mrs. Brumby, who was very desirous of running a race and winning a place, and who had seem all this, put on her cap and jacket and boots, chose her colours, and entered her name. Why, oh why, did she select the course upon which we, wretched we, were bound by our duties to regulate the running? (VI, 182) The metaphors of the captain and runner demarcate the field of literature as male, and begrudgingly allow that (some) women can write. But, like Mary and Josephine before her, Mrs Brumby is not successful within the editor's periodical. Mrs Brumby's chief fault is that she is a woman, and the story could be read as an angry response to the large number of professional women writers. After all, writing was one of the few ports open to women, but Mrs Brumby's is a dangerous woman writer who invades the male space, the editorial sanctum: What business had any woman to be in our room in our absence? Were not our orders on this subject exact and very urgent? Was he not kept there at an expense of 14s. a w e e k . . . paid out of our own pockef-nominally, indeed, as a clerk, but chiefly for the very purpose of keeping female visitors out of our room? And now, in our absence and in his, there was actually a woman among the manuscripts! We felt from the first moment that it was Mrs. Brumby. (VI, 188-9) There are limits to what an editor is expected to tolerate: when the woman in the office turns out to be young and pretty like Mary Gresley, the editor brings out his benevolent butter-boat; but, when confronted by a 'woman meaning to throw off as far as possible her femininity' (VI, 183), the editor really must stay

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firmly anchored. This is part of the message of this story which closes the series: women contributors can be tolerated when they are objectifiable within male fantasies. Mrs Brumby, a hated, monstrous aberration of femininity, comes out of a fear of the role of women in literature, and it is anger and anxiety about the gendering of periodical production which closes the tales.

EDITOR RE-EDITUS I have suggested that the tales as a series use a number of conventions of pornography. We see a pattern of sexual buildup in the first three tales; voyeurism in the predatory editor; fetishism (of commodities and of contributors); and a repetitiveness in the production of male fantasy. What is further interesting about these tales is the way they purport to be 'true stories'. This is one of the key characteristics of porn, one of the ways in which the validity and authenticity of the sexual fantasy is made tenable. 74 As noted previously, biographers of Trollope feel comfortable in extrapolating events from the stories to the author's life, and the reviews quoted above also indicate that there was a feeling that the stories were in some way true, fact not fiction. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, alluded to a number of times in 'The Panjandrum', is an example of the editor as a framing device for a narrative. The construct of the editor figure recounting true stories was also part of the format of a number of pornographies in the mid to late nineteenth century. In Sins of the Cities of the Plain, Jack's life story is recounted in the form of a letter in a section called 'Jack Saul's Recollections - Early Development of the Pederastic Ideas in His Youthful Mind'; this manuscript has been commissioned by the man Jack picks up at the start of the narrative: After resting a while, and taking a little more stimulant, I asked him how he had come to acquire such a decided taste for gamahuching, to do it so deliriously as he did. 'That would be too long a tale to go into now', he replied. 'Some other day, if you like to make it worth my while, I will give you the whole history'. 'Could you write it out, or give me an outline so that I might put it into the shape of a tale?'

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'Certainly; but it would take me so much time that you would have to make me a present of at least twenty pounds. It would take during three or four weeks several hours a day'. T don't mind a fiver a week, if you give me a fair lot, say thirty or forty pages of note-paper a week, tolerably well-written', I replied. And the arrangement was made for him to compile me 'Recollections of a Mary-Ann', which I suggested ought to be the title, although he seemed not to like the name as applied to himself, saying that that was w h a t the low girls of his neighbourhood called him if they wished to insult him, however, he said at last, 'the four fivers will make up for that'. 75 With the business deal cut, Jack goes on to tie down and whip his editor with a birch. There are other true stories recounted by prostitute friends of Jack's, so the whole narrative is one of concentric stories of real life. Like Trollope's own tales, Sins of the Cities of the Plain was based upon historical fact and the figure of 'Jack' was one of the testifiers during the Cleveland Street affair.76 Another book of pornography, The Eadies' Tickler (1866), has a preface written by an 'editor' who explains how this manuscript came into his hands. My Secret Life, published in parts from 1885 and perhaps for us the best-known pornographic work in English from the nineteenth century, also uses the framing device of the 'editor' of a manuscript. Steven Marcus has said of My Secret Life that the author tries to hide himself behind himself. He states in that place [the introduction] that he is really only the editor of this manuscript . . . This device is transparent and is meant to convince no one - not even the author, since he makes absolutely no further use of it. It reminds one, however, in a sad and feeble little way of the Introduction to Waverly and of the frame of Sartor Resartus, and is a kind of witless parody of them, just as its serial printing unintentionally parodies the nineteenth-century novel. 77 Trollope's use of the editor was not simply a framing construct, but it is worth noting that the uneven power relationship inherent in the editor/contributor relationship is ripe for sexual

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tale-telling - the editor's office is a precursor to the casting couch. Furthermore, at least one pornographer recognized that the editor scenario was one available for double entendre and banal sexual innuendo. In an issue of the pornographic periodical The Pearl, the editor of the Standard is sexually lascivious when a woman comes in to his office to place an advertisement. The running joke is that everything the woman says, the editor turns into a sexual p u n (see Appendix B). Of course, the conversation is reported as fact, as something 'which recently took place in the office of the Standard''.78 Here, the editor is a predator and the experience of being editor provides tales, true stories and dirty little secrets.

MEN AND SAINT PAULS 'An Editor's Tales' and An Editor's Tales provide us with a provocative study in the gendering of literary production and in the construction of gender within literary output. Ultimately, this series shows Trollope's playfulness. As editor-author, he blurs the distinctions between the editor and author functions in these anonymous stories but invites the reader to collude with the sexual fantasies framed under the aegis of an editor's recollections. I would suggest, finally, that these stories preclude women readers - from the very first tale of homoerotic tension to the final story of misogynistic anxiety. Taken together as a series, in volume form, the stories were a powerful fiction of male fantasy; might they have been rearranged to defuse the sexual thrust of the first three tales and to try to open a window for women readers? Together with the male project of defining masculinity in his Phineas Finn and Ralph the Heir, each with its focus on the education of men, Trollope in Saint Pauls was helping to create a magazine gendered male. It is perhaps no surprise that with few bids for female readers, in an increasingly competitive marketplace, Trollope's periodical never reached the circulation of 25,000 needed to ensure its place among successful shilling monthlies. When Trollope left a particularly male vision of the magazine was dropped, and the bid to find those all-important female readers was never successful.

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1. That Trollope was highly exposed in the literature industry was noted by reviewers and many subsequent critics. However, often this evidence is used to argue against Trollope as an artist or to explain his lagging popularity (too much of a good thing?). I am not concerned with making value judgements of this kind; what interests me are the meanings which may be produced given the writer-periodicalreader network. 2. Michel Foucault, 'What Is an Author?' (1969) in Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, trans, and Donald F. Bouchard, ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), 125. 3. Peter L. Shillingsburg, Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and WM. Thackeray (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 111. 4. Nigel Cross, The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century New Grub Street (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 32. 5. Ibid., 62. 6. Leslie Stephen, 'The Evolution of Editors', in Studies of a Biographer 1 (4 vols; London: Duckworth, 1898), 51. This article was first published in the National Review 26 (1896), 770-85. 7. Shillingsburg, Pegasus, 2. 8. Ibid., 2. 9. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), chapter 4, especially 101 ff. 10. Ibid., 123. 11. Joel Wiener, 'Introduction', Innovators and Preachers: The Role of Editor in Victorian England (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1985), xii-xiii. 12. See the Publishers' Circular 32 (16 August 1869), 509-10 and (1 September 1869), 529-30. 13. Gaye Tuchman with Nina E. Fortin, Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers and Social Change (London: Routledge, 1989). 14. See Anthony Trollope, Early Short Stories and Later Short Stories, John Sutherland, ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, World's Classics, 1994 and 1995, respectively). 15. Although beyond the scope of this study, it would be interesting to consider how stories became increasingly revalued by the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. An Editor's Tales seems unified as a number of stories which collectively comment on periodical culture (which is not to say that there aren't disruptions within the stories or that other forms of publishing the stories are not valid). Why, for example, do we tend not to break up Joyce's Dubliners, many of which were published periodically, in quite the same way? 16. Illustrated London News 55 (9 October 1869), 362. 17. Saturday Review 30 (13 August 1870), 211-12.

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18. Athenaeum 1870 II (23 July 1870), 112. 19. Richard Mullen, Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in His World (London: Duckworth, 1990), 363, 207, and 478. 20. Sutherland, Introduction, Later Short Stories, xviii. 21. Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author' (1968), in Image Music Text, Stephen Heath, trans, and ed. (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 147. 22. 'The Turkish Bath', Saint Pauls 5 (October 1869), 110. Subsequent references will appear in the text with an abbrieviated form of story title (TB for 'Turkish Bath', MG for 'Mary Gresley', JM for 'Josephine de Montmorenci', P for 'Panjandrum', SD for 'Spotted Dog', and MB for 'Mrs Brumby'), Saint Pauls volume number and page number. 23. At least, this is generally assumed of the editorial 'we'. It might be interesting to start from the premise that instead of unifying and empowering the figure of the editor, the collective 'we' fragments him/her. 24. James Payn, Some Literary Recollections (London: Smith Elder, 1884), 172. 25. Trollope often constructed the editor as an all-powerful, relentless creature (often godlike). See for example, his treatment of the press (the Times especially) in The Warden. 26. Barthes, 'Death of . ..', 147. 27. Another variation of shared identity occurs in the title Blackwood's Magazine, in which the publisher, editor and periodical's identity all converge. 28. Barthes, 'Death of.. .', 146. 29. Ibid., 148. Note that textual unity is almost certainly not possible, as Barthes demonstrates in S/Z: An Essay, Richard Miller, trans. (1970; reprinted New York: Hill and Wang, Noonday Press, 1993). 30. Foucault, 'What Is . . .', 118. 31. Ibid., 118-19. 32. Ibid., 123-4. 33. Ibid., 127. 34. Laurel Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1994), 9. 35. Foucault, 'What Is . . .', 128. 36. Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1979; reprinted New York: Plume, 1989), Preface. 37. Peter Michelson, Speaking the Unspeakable: A Poetics of Obscenity (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1993), xii. 38. Pornography can be discussed within a number of discourses. Susan Sontag describes three ways of looking at porn: as psychology, as social history, and as art; see 'The Pornographic Imagination', in The Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982), 205-33. Such distinctions seem to me useful and necessary in negotiating o n e ' s w a y r o u n d such an inflammatory discourse as pornography. I am not here interested in any moral judgement about the role of porn in society. What interests me are the ways cultural categories of form and content are broken down, appropriated, and disseminated in literature.

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39. H. Montgomery Hyde, A History of Pornography (London: Heinemann, 1964), 96. 40. See Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (1988; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 115-16, and Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981), 89-91. 41. Hyde, A History, 14. On porn in the 1860s, see ibid., chapter 4. 42. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England (1966; reprinted London: Corgi Books, 1969), 37. 43. Ashbee's collection can be found in the British Library. 44. Richard Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night 1 (16 vols.; London: Kamashastra Society, 1885-88), xvi-xvii. 45. 'The Arabian Nights', Edinburgh Review 164 (July 1886), 183. 46. Both Sir Richard's and Lady Burton's versions contain the following sentence from the Introduction: 'Then they all paired off, each with each: but the Queen, who was left alone, presently cried out in a loud voice, "Here to me, O my lord Saeed!" and then sprang with a drop-leap from one of the trees a big slobbering blackamoor with rolling eyes which showed the whites, a truly hideous sight.' Richard Burton provides a note to this sentence which Lady Burton removes: 'Debauched women prefer negroes on account of the size of their parts. I measured one man in Somali-land who, when quiescent, numbered nearly six inches. This is a characteristic of the negro race and of African animals; e.g. the horse; whereas the pure Arab, man and beast, is below the average of Europe . . .' See Richard Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night 1, 6, and compare with Lady Burton's Edition of her Husband's Arabian Nights, 'Prepared for Household Reading by Justin Huntly McCarthy, M.P.' (6 vols; London: Waterlow and Sons, 1886). 47. I have taken these characteristics from Dworkin, Michelson, Hyde and Marcus. I have also read a range of pornography from the 1850s90s. 48. See Gore Vidal, 'On Pornography', in A Thirsty Evil (London: Four Square, 1966), 117. 49. Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (London: Virago, 1992), 16. 50. The Sins of the Cities of the Plain or the Recollections of a Mary-Ann with a short essay on Sodomy and Tribadism (London and New York: Erotica Biblion Society, 1881), 7-8. The cities of the plain are the same cities that Proust alludes to in volume II of In Search of Lost Time, namely Sodom and Gommorah. 51. Ibid., 9. 52. One of Walkowitz's points is that the new urban centre was an ambiguous space where mistakes in identity were made. So, for example, middle-class women window shopping in the West End were mistaken for prostitutes loitering. Similarly, I would suggest, 'The Turkish Bath' demonstrates how mistaken identity occurs between men in the ambiguous urban space.

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53. Derek Jarman, At Your Own Risk: A Saint's Testament, Michael Christie, ed. (New York: Overlook Press, 1992), 12. My thanks to Corin Bennett, who suggested this passage to me. Macmillan's indiscretion was never proven and officially, he left owing to poor health. His biographers give no credence to the suggestion that an indiscretion with another male caused him to leave Eton. 54. An interesting comparison can be made of the way Trollope appears to appropriate Turkish bath guides in the beginning of this story which describes in detail one's movement through the baths. See Appendix A for an account of the baths from a guidebook. 55. See for example Erasmus Wilson, FRS, The Eastern, or Turkish Bath: Its History, Revival in Britain, and Application to the Purposes of Health (London: John Churchill, 1861); Charles Bartholomew, A Guide to the Turkish Bath (London: Ward, Lock and Taylor, 1869) and The Turkish Bath in Convalescence: A Popular Hand-Book for the Robust and Invalid (London: Ward, Lock and Taylor, 1869); John Le Gay Brereton, MD, A Lecture on the Action and Uses of the Turkish Bath (London: F. Guy, 1869). In addition, the subject of the baths was also debated in newspapers (especially in letters columns) and the periodicals. 56. Bartholomew, The Turkish Bath in Convalescence, 117. Bartholomew had recently opened the Turkish baths in Bristol, which he claimed were state-of-the-art and superior to the Jermyn Street Baths. 57. See Steven Marcus, 21. Marcus relies heavily on William Acton's account of male sexuality in Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1857). 58. Sins of the Cities, 124. 59. D.H. Lawrence, Pornography and Obscenity (London: Faber and Faber, 1929), 18 and 19-20. 60. Danger is one of the characteristics of porn. The sexual acts, often violent, are at the very least 'naughty' but are mostly taboo and depend on the ability to be caught in the act. The role of masturbation, then, works similarly because it was a pleasure which entailed some danger, a health risk. 61. See Arthur H. Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (1986; reprinted London and New York: Routledge, 1992), chapter 7. 62. Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication (1987), Bernard and Caroline Schutze, trans, and Sylvere Lotringer, ed. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988), 29. 63. Ibid., 57. 64. Ibid., 63. 65. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1833-34 in Eraser's Magazine; first book ed., 1836) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, World's Classics, 1987), Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor, eds. Note that an edition of Sartor Resartus was published in 1869. 66. Baudrillard, Ecstasy, 62. 67. Ibid., 63-4. 68. Ibid., 67. 69. Lawrence, Pornography, 16-17. 70. Baudrillard, Ecstasy, 64.

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71. John Sutherland (note 135 to Later Short Stories, World's Classics, 1995) suggests that Josephine (whose novel is entitled 'Not so Black as He's Painted') recalls the sensation novelist Mrs Archer Clive, 'author of Why Paul Ferroll Killed His Wife (1860) - a sensation novel devoted to showing that an uxoricide was not as black as painted', 584-5. 72. See Hyde, A History, 130 and chapter 5 generally. 73. Baudrillard, Ecstasy, 65-6. 74. This is also the potential danger of pornography - that the fantasies of sex and violence become perceived as 'real' in the user's mind. This notion is highly debatable and depends upon a number of assumptions about representation, media, and the cultural production of meaning. 75. Sins of the Cities, 19-20. 76. Jeffrey Weeks, Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality and Identity (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1991), 61-2. 77. Marcus, Other Victorians, 84. 78. The Pearl 3:17 (November 1880), 178.

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DEFINING THE FIELD Nineteenth-century periodical studies is a field of research which continues to be defined and redefined. Students and scholars of history, literature, sciences, visual arts, and more recently demarcated fields such as media and cultural studies all have found in periodicals a rich archive of literature. Certainly, they have never been neglected as a source of information, and since the late nineteenth century and the beginnings of English studies, periodicals have been mined for what their fiction, non-fiction, advertisements, and illustrations reveal about Victorian society. Numerous books have been published on specific publishing houses such as Macmillan and specific periodicals such as the Saturday Review and the Fortnightly Review, and these works are important for their contribution to our understanding of press history and the development of the institutions around periodicals. Furthermore, books about individual editors and publishers are plentiful, which also add to our knowledge about the field of periodical studies, and such work continues to be significant and important. A great deal of archival work remains for literary historians and others; however, such studies do not represent all that can or should be studied in relation to periodical literature. In 1971, Michael Wolff 'charted the golden stream' of Victorian periodicals and argued that the usefulness of magazines and newspapers is in the ways nineteenth-century society is reflected,1 but over the past 20 years scholarship has gradually refined this early conceptualization of the field. A number of scholars of the newspaper and periodical press have brought to the field theoretical questions about the archive and our methodologies in studying it. The ways we work with the archive no longer necessarily mean that we regard periodical literature as merely reflecting society. For example, studying Victorian periodicals helps 227 10.1057/9780230288546 - Trollope and the Magazines, Mark Turner

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bring into focus the ways cultural products circulate and accumulate meanings within a social system. Raymond Williams asserts that studies of material culture get round the problem of deciding what constitutes the 'real' in an economy of reflection because in materialism, the reflection is 'not independent but itself a material function'. 2 Similarly, Tony Bennett insists that to view the media as a mirror-image reflecting reality is to imply 'that the media are secondary and derivative, somehow less real than the "real" they reflect, existing above society and passively mirroring it rather than forming an active and integral part of if.3 It is within such studies of material culture and the nineteenth-century media that I locate my own interests in the field. But the methodological difficulty remains: how to study periodical literature in history. While ambitious archival research has enormously enriched and grounded the study of periodicals - the Wellesley Index and Waterloo projects, most obviously - less critical analysis of the archive has followed than might be expected, and recently a number of scholars have argued for the need to produce theoretically based methodological projects for studying Victorian periodicals. Lyn Pykett maintains that any number of theoretical practices (structural, poststructural, Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic) provide ways of interpreting the empirical studies already amassed. 4 In a special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review in 1989, the guest editors argue that valuable as archival work is (and it is undeniably important), the entire textual base can never be known, and they, too, indicate a number of theoretical possibilities for studying the periodical press. 5 One problem is that bibliographical work can only ever offer a partial representation of the field of study. John Sutherland estimates that there were about 3500 Victorian novelists, and believes that 'some bio-bibliographical profile (dates of birth, death, career details, marital status, total number of novels published) can be readily retrieved for about 1200 Victorian novelists'. But most have 'sunk forever without a trace'. 6 Still, what we do recover can only expand our knowledge of periodicals and the ways literature is produced, distributed and consumed. Furthermore, bio-bibliographical research and critical examination of the archive are not exclusive or opposed, rather complementary and interrelated. In studying Trollope in the 1860s, I have tried to combine elements from both of these approaches. I have considered serials within the periodical, taking account of the particular cultural for-

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mations of the periodicals, with their own manifestos and places in history. This necessarily has led me to research the histories of individual titles, editors, contributors; it places my work at the intersection of literary and cultural criticism.7 Raymond Williams has argued persuasively that 'the most central and practical element in cultural analysis is what also marks the most significant cultural theory: the exploration and specification of distinguishable cultural formations'. 8 The cultural formation around periodicals includes the contributions, contributors, editors, publishers, advertisers, distributors, and consumers which represent the sociology of the periodical text. Simply stated, in reading Trollope's serials and other contributions, I have tried not to focus on the serial part in isolation from the (often shifting) discursive contexts. Furthermore, it is important to link the discourses of the serial and the periodical to discourses in other texts outside the periodical - to contextualize not only the serial within the periodical, but also the periodical within a broader popular literary culture. In my work, I have concentrated on particular discourses of gender to the exclusion of others, such as race and class. My work offers a cultural critique of the periodicals, and assesses how gendered discourses around, for example, domesticity and manliness are constructed in the interaction between serial, periodical, and middle-class discourse generally. My readings of the periodicals are not the only readings; rather, I have tried to establish ways in which cultural discourses are constructed and reverberate in the complex network of the periodical press. In considering this network, it has been useful to employ Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the 'field of cultural production' to signal that my work on serials and periodicals, while textually based, depends on recognizing a larger system, a sociology of texts which requires consideration of the production and consumption of these cultural artefacts. 9 Within the field of periodicals, particularities such as serial literature and anonymous authorship open up significant theoretical and material questions. However, I have tried to indicate how the fields of literature and culture do not exist apart from other fields such as politics and economics, rather that periodical literature has its own sets of material conditions, of 'concrete social situations governed by a set of objective social relations'. 10 The institutions around the periodical text - how the editors and publishers control the texts or how advertisements construct and sell the texts - provide a site for fruitful cultural critique.

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(1) a system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group; (2) a system of illusory beliefs - false ideas or false consciousness - which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge; (3) the general process of the production of meanings and ideas. 11 'Ideology' as I have related it to the periodical press is a combination of definitions (1) and (2) - it is both a system of beliefs and the production of meaning within that system. John Frow argues in his Marxism and Eiterary History that 'if the ideological is not to be ontologized, it should be regarded as a state of discourse or of semiotic systems in relation to the class struggle'. 12 Frow privileges one ideology (class struggle) over other ideologies (such as gender and race), but his point about ideology and ontology is important. The ideologies which intersect in the cultural formations of the periodicals studied below are connected to a community of readers with shared knowledge, but ideologies are produced and debated within the periodicals, too. Ideology, as I have used it, does not represent a monolithic totality (as in, say, Althusser's rigid configuration), rather a system of beliefs affirmed and contested. '"Literature" cannot exist outside a system of social and institutional relations', 13 and it is these relations which have formed one of my primary concerns.

PERIODICALS AND PLURALISM I have assumed a number of theoretical positions in the studying Trollope's serials, largely informed by post-structural theories of textuality. While post-structural critiques are common in many areas of English studies, the field of periodical studies has generally resisted attempts to theorize the press, and only recently has substantial theoretical work on periodicals appeared. 14 Within the interdisciplinary field of study, comprising scholars from a range of parent disciplines, debates about the use of textual and cultural theories are lively.15

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Within a sociology of texts or culture, I have been interested in how meanings are constructed, and in discussing ideology within the periodicals, I have taken my lead from Williams. He distinguishes three versions of the concept of ideology:

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Periodicals, by nature collectives of different voices, require that some concept of plurality be accepted in critical interpretation. A broad concept of intertextuality has been useful in understanding how cultural discourses intersect with discourses in Trollope's serializations, either in specific serial parts or more widely in public discourses. Relating the concept of intertextuality to periodical literature problematizes traditional approaches in the field of English, not least because the centrality of the book and the author as the foci for research is called into question. It is not until relatively recently that the early twentieth-century work of Mikhail Bakhtin has been discovered by literary critics. His theories of the ways language(s) operate within and between texts have underpinned my readings of periodicals. In the Dialogic Imagination, translated into English in 1981, Bakhtin's notion of social heteroglossia is articulated in his discussion of the dialogic form of the novel. Bakhtin's translators have defined 'heteroglossia' in the following way: At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions - social, historical, meterological, physiological - that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve. 16 The principle of heteroglossia insists that every text is in dialogue with any number of other texts, posing a severe challenge to formalist criticism, which focuses on the single text in a vacuum. Bakhtin asserts: The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue. After all, the utterance arises out of this dialogue as a continuation of it and as a rejoinder to it - it does not approach the object from the sidelines. 17 The single utterance, then, leads inevitably to a whole network

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of other utterances; the single voice is always already polyglot. Bakhtin finds the ultimate expression of heteroglossia in the novel, where any number of languages or discourses intersect, but he contends that 'the dialogic orientation of discourse is a phenomenon that is, of course, a property of any discourse'. 18 One result of heteroglossia is that the text opens up to any number of possible meanings: 'between the word and its object, between the word and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic environment of other, alien words about the same object, the same theme, and this is an environment that it is often difficult to penetrate'. 19 The sense of excitement in the 'tension-filled interaction' of texts is what has appealed to literary critics, especially of the novel, in recent years. 20 Bakhtin virtually celebrates cacophony and dissonance, which has been incorporated as a tenet of post-structural thinking. In the mid-1960s Julia Kristeva, following Bakhtin, coined the term 'intertextuality', referring to the ways texts or discourses or languages intersect: . . . each work (text) is an intersection of words (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read. In Bakhtin's work, these two axes, which he calls dialogue and ambivalence, are not clearly distinguished. Yet, what appears as a lack of rigour is in fact an insight first introduced into literary theory by Bakhtin: any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double.21 Kristeva's rearticulation of Bakhtin became important especially for Marxist critics in the 1960s and 1970s because of 'the politically subversive nature of celebrating dialogism/intertextuality': Kristevan intertextuality suggests, in line with marxist sociology, that meaning is not given nor produced by a transcendental ego. Indeed the transcendental ego is itself an effect produced in a social context. 22 Traditional categories in formalist and stylistic criticism are challenged by the assumption that literature is 'a segment of social discourse stratified into numerous contending ideological dimen-

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sions: the text is part of the social text, an arena of struggle.' 23 Meaning, then, requires interpretation of discourses, not merely the comprehension of inherent textual structures and forms. Intertextuality does not require us exclusively to find sources, to identify allusions, to discover influences on writers. If the purpose of intertextual readings is to provide possible (not final) discursive readings, then the concept of 'the intertext is not a real and causative source but a theoretical construct formed by and serving the purposes of a reading'. 24 My assertion that intertextuality operates at the site of periodical literature is also buttressed theoretically by the work of Roland Barthes. Barthes's S/Z, translated into English in 1974, demonstrates how a multiplicity of readings and meanings intersect within a given text. His conceptualization of the text as plural, layered with multiple meanings, is crucial for the way I discuss serializations and periodicals. In a section on 'interpretation', Barthes asks us to posit the image of a triumphant plural, unimpoverished by any constraint of representation (of imitation). In this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable (meaning here is never subject to a principle of determination, unless by throwing dice); the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language. 25 There are a number of positions here which illustrate important principles of post-structural thinking: a refusal to accept the structural Saussurian linguistic binary (signifier/signified); a refusal to define the 'beginning' or origins of a text; an assertion that texts are plural, bursting with competing and perhaps contradictory discourses; a contention that texts are intersected by other texts; a declaration that texts are infinite in their meanings. 26 Such assertions seem ideally suited for a study of Victorian periodicals for several reasons. For example, as indicated above, periodicals are by their very nature multi-textual, or plural. Periodical texts

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have no single originating author (although there is an editor function), rather a number of authors whose identities may or may not be known. Furthermore, periodicals are seemingly infinite in continuing in time: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually - the periodical text continually proceeds, containing a prehistory and projecting futurity (this is especially significant in serialization). Finally, periodicals present numerous ways of reading: one can start in the middle, at the end, wherever, and not ever finish the periodical; other literary commodities such as the book, conversely, present generally one way of reading, cover to cover, in which we all participate similarly. In this sense, reading periodicals can be liberating, presenting as it does the freedom for the reader to roam, to wander textually - a pleasure of the periodical text. Barthes's notion of the text as a methodological field27 is also fertile in considering periodicals. His conception makes a distinction between the work, something like a fixed object as in a book, and the Text, a limitless field of meanings and interpretations: The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination. 28 Barthes's theory of plurality challenges us to consider the numerous (indeed, endless) ways in which texts can be read. Periodicals are particularly suited for such a conceptualization because everything about a periodical resists traditional definitions and categories of genre and authorship. Periodicals are unruly and difficult to pin down for critics partly because of the choices we must make in delimiting the text (the single issue, a volume, an entire run, etc.). Barthes's notion of plurality is complemented by an understanding generally of deconstruction. Barbara Johnson, introducing Derrida's Dissemination, explains that the deconstruction of a text does not proceed by random doubt or generalized scepticism, but by the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text itself. If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not meaning but

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In my study, I have tried to tease out potential significations of gendered discourse from a pluralist text, but not to present these as the final readings of the texts. The i n h e r e n t playfulness of D e r r i d a ' s w r i t i n g a n d his deconstructive practice has led some deconstructive critics to focus on Derrida's 'dizzy, exuberant side'. 30 And what many critics object to is the lack of discipline in some deconstructive practice; if it is all about textual play, then why bother? Derrida's recent work, Spectres of Marx, is an attempt to merge (perhaps to make peace between?) Marxist thinking and deconstruction, but that mediation constructs a ghostly, non-material version of Marxism. Certainly, a worry for materialist criticism is that both Barthes's and Derrida's seemingly ruleless practices lead one away from cultural specificity. How is social change accommodated and identified in a boundless textuality? How are shifts in material culture registered? Where, in short, is the politics? Raymond Williams worries that in accepting blindly a multiplicity of writing, 'the generalizing and connecting impulse is so strong that we lose sight of real specificities and distinctions of practice', and other Marxist critics reiterate Williams's concerns. 31 However, plurality need not necessarily remove the text from cultural, public discourse. The plurality of the text does not exist apart from history, but within it. Michel Foucault provides a useful intervention in thinking about the relation between plurality and materiality because of the way he discusses discourses around particular institutions such as the hospital and the prison. Foucault historicizes discourses allowing for multiple circulating discourses anchored in history. 32 The link between institutions and discourse provides a common ground between the plural intertext and culture. Vincent Leitch argues that 'another name for difference is instituting. "There is nothing outside the text" means there is no escaping institutions.' 33 Following Foucault, Leitch contends that 'we can theorize "literature" as a social category of discourse variously defined in different places and different times with varying interests and outcomes'. 34 Language is constrained by institutions. In writing about periodicals, it is useful to move freely from textual criticism to material criticism in what might be seen as theoretical eclecticism; however,

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the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. 29

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such turns allow for the cultural location of discourse, which bridges the gap between materialism and post-structural plurality. The sorts of institutions which I have identified as significant include formations such as the gentleman's club, the home, and the circulating library. Throughout my discussion of periodicals I have wished to indicate how the cultural formation of the men's club impinges upon the construction of contents within the periodicals. The club demarcates gendered boundaries which are upheld within the formation of the periodicals, as, for example, in the non-fiction of the Fortnightly Review or the Cornhill. The club, a social configuration of which Trollope and most of the other male writers I discussed were a part, also defines a number of gendered relationships - of publisher to contributor (in An Editor's Tales) and of MPs to Parliament (in Phineas Finn). The home is the institution which largely constructs the middle-class family magazine, and the identification of domestic fiction with the home determines the boundaries of discourse in Cornhill serials. The configuration of the middle-class shilling monthly (at least those numerous publications founded in the 1860s in Cornhill's wake) as a domestic commodity is also linked to the ways censorship is defined by circulating libraries, and links up with gendered discourses about public and private spaces. I would argue, then, that readings of the serials and the periodicals generally need to take into account the discourses around institutions which determine the construction of the text.

THE LIMITS OF GENRE In considering the periodical as text, notions of genre in traditional literary studies seem unhelpful. How can periodicals be classified generically? What is most obvious about the form of Victorian magazines I have studied is that in terms of genre they are often hybrid: a mix of serial fiction, short stories, poetry, illustrations, travel articles, and other forms of non-fiction. In a discipline which has often relied heavily on studying a taxonomy of genre, the periodical has no place, hence the tendency to take contributions from the periodical without attention to the periodical itself. One result of this method has been to study the novel as a book but not as a serial. Foucault, in the Archaeology of Knowledge, automatically decentres traditional literary studies (which has privileged

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beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.. . . The book is not simply the object that one holds in one's hands . . ,35 Foucault has, in a sense, redefined the book by placing it in a potentially endlessly referential cultural formation. And, interestingly, his description of the book could also be that of a periodical contribution: a text that exists even physically within a system of other sentences, other texts, other periodicals. One of Foucault's challenges is to conceptualize literary studies without predetermined notions of genre which are also linked to physical form. Raymond Williams argues that theories of genre impose rules which limit our understanding of how texts operate within a sociocultural context. He asserts that to presume that 'there are still things a novel "can" or "cannot" do' amounts to 'the reduction of classification to absurdity'. 36 More significant for cultural studies is a recognition of the historical specificity of forms: for example, how does form in the nineteenth century determine cultural valuing? Categories of genre lose significance in post-structural thinking because often generic forms overlap and coexist (most obviously in the periodical text); if one accepts a notion of the plural intertext, rigid generic boundaries break down. The interrogation of genre is also related to questions of authority in texts. 37 The authority of the author has often been used to determine possible readings of texts, and the question of the extent of the author as a determinant of texts runs throughout my chapters. In debates about the role of the author, from the New Critics to Barthes and Foucault in the late 1960s, notions of the author as an individual intervening and controlling the text have been reconsidered. In magazines, of course, there is no single author, so to look to an author as the producer of meaning is often not an option. Mid-nineteenth-century periodical authorship is collective, and its contributors are often anonymous. Of the four periodicals which have formed the basis of my chapters, only the Fortnightly Review was signed (and then not always).

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novels as books) by opening up the category of literature to interdisciplinary and more encompassing methodological approaches. 'The frontiers of the book', Foucault writes, 'are never clear-cuf:

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Anonymous writing - the absence of the author - is at the centre of mid-Victorian periodical texts, so constructing the presence of the 'author' is an act of remapping and needs to be refigured. In my chapter on An Editor's Tales, I tried to consider how the author function is perhaps replaced by an editor function, but there are other ways in which authority for texts is established. Bourdieu, for example, starts from the premise that even individual authors do not inherently maintain authority over their own texts. 'Who creates the "creator"?' Bourdieu asks. This shift in emphasis forces us to determine 'what authorizes the author, what creates the authority with which authors authorize'. 38 This is a question which arose in considering Trollope, who attempted to forge a second anonymous literary identity at the same time as advocating public, signed journalism in the Fortnightly in the middle 1860s. The question of authorship here becomes one of image in an increasingly mass culture. In reading Victorian periodicals, I have merged a number of strands of recent poststructuralist and materialist criticism, in order to demonstrate how studying literature within a cultural framework of institutions and material conditions opens up new readings of serial fiction especially. I have assumed that each periodical presents a distinct cultural formation, with its own particularities, within a general field of literature and culture. My discussion of gender is best conceptualized as one of many circulating discourses within culture broadly and within the plural text. Linking discourses within the periodical texts to other cultural texts assumes that intertextuality operates within the textual field of methodology. Finally, my readings of the texts are available but not definitive. Generally, I am most anxious to question why it is that periodical literature has been largely ignored in English studies, and how it is that we might study periodicals in creative and productive ways. Underlining my work is a call to examine why particular forms of Victorian literature (especially popular forms) remain a neglected field of research.

Notes 1. Michael Wolff, 'Charting the Golden Stream: Thoughts on a Directory of Victorian Periodicals', Victorian Periodicals Newsletter 13 (1971), 23-38. For a recent overview of the Victorian periodical studies, see

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238

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

239

Rosemary T. Van Arsdel, Introduction, Nineteenth-Century Prose 24:1 (Spring 1997), 1-6. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977; reprinted Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 95. Tony Bennett, 'Media, "Reality", "Signification"', in Culture, Society and the Media, Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran, and Janet Woollacott, eds (London: Routledge, 1982), 287. Lyn Pykett, 'Reading the Periodical Press: Text and Context', in Investigating Victorian Journalism, Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden, eds (London: Macmillan, 1990), 3-18. Laurel Brake and Anne Humpherys, 'Critical Theory and Periodical Research', Victorian Periodicals Review 12:3 (Fall 1989), 94-5. John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (London: Macmillan, 1995), 152 and 153. Raymond Williams writes that 'literary theory cannot be separated from cultural theory, though it may be distinguished within it. This is the central challenge of any social theory of culture', Marxism and Literature, 145. The merging of literary with cultural criticism is, of course, contentious partly because of fears that disciplines are collapsing in the wake of professionalized Cultural Studies departments. I do not share this fear, and believe that there is a valid space for textually based cultural criticism within a broad notion of English studies. Raymond Williams, 'The Uses of Cultural Theory', New Left Review 158 (July/August 1986), 29. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, Randal Johnson, ed. (London: Polity Press, 1993). Ibid., 6. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 55. John Frow, Marxism and Literary History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 61. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Nineteenth Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 123. See A.J. Parry, 'The Intellectuals and the Middle Class Periodical Press: Theory, Method and Case Study', Journal of Newspaper and Periodical History 4:3 (Autumn 1988), 18-32; Ros Ballaster, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer, and Sandra Hebron, Women's Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman's Magazine (London: Macmillan, 1991); Aled Gruffyd Jones, Press, Politics and Society: A History of Journalism in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993); the special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review, Brake and Humpherys, eds; and Laurel Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1994). I do not presume that all other aspects of literary studies accept post-structural theories wholeheartedly, rather that the argument of whether literary theory is valid at all is generally no longer waged. In periodical studies, such arguments are still hotly debated. At the 1992 conference of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, debates about the validity of using literary and cultural theory in

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Conclusion

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Trollope and the Magazines the field were spirited. A measure of change may be seen in the 1995 conference in Edinburgh which used theoretical questions about media and identity as its theme. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans, and Michael Holquist, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 428. There is a glossary of Bakhtin's terms at the back of the book. Ibid., 277. Ibid., 279. Ibid., 276. Ibid., 279. Bakhtin champions the novel as dialogic, but argues that poetry is monologic and restrictive, an assertion with which I do not agree. Julia Kristeva, 'Word, Dialogue and Novel' (1966), in The Kristeva Reader, Toril Moi, ed. (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 37. Michael Worton and Judith Still, eds, Intertextuality: Theories and Practices (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), Introduction, 17. Vincent B. Leitch, Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 56. John Frow, 'Intertextuality and Ontology', in Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, Worton and Still, eds., 46. Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, Richard Miller, trans. (1974; reprinted New York: Hill and Wang, Noonday Press, 1993), 6. See Leitch, Cultural Criticism, xiii. For an introduction to post-structural thinking, see also Robert Young, ed., Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). See Roland Barthes, 'From Work To Text', in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), especially 156-7. Ibid., 159. Barbara Johnson, Translator's Introduction to Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (1972; London: Athlone Press, 1981), xiv. Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (revised edition, London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 91. Norris is especially thinking of applications of Derrida by the Yale critics (excepting de Man). Williams, Marxism and Literature, 145. Norris writes that Terry Eagleton has 'recognized more clearly that an open-ended free play of rhetorical transcoding - with the ideal of an infinitely 'plural' text - is resistant to the purposes of Marxist criticism', Deconstruction, 79. Edward Said attempts this with varying success in Orientalism (1978; reprinted London: Penguin Books, 1991). Leitch, Cultural Criticism, 144. Ibid., 57. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, A.M. Sheridan Smith, trans. (1972; reprint, London: Routledge, 1991), 23. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 181. See Leitch, Cultural Criticism, 73: 'What poststructuralism does, then, is to question the assured status and authority ascribed to discursive genres, not their existence nor their necessity.' Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 76 and 77.

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Works published while Trollope was editor of Saint Pauls or which began serialization during this period. This does not include cheap editions. British Sports and Pastimes (ed.) (Virtue, 1868) 1 vol., 10s. 6d. [Trollope contributed the 'Preface' and one article.] Linda Tressel (anon.) (Blackwood, 1868) 2 vols., 12s. [Previously serialized in Blackwood's Magazine.] Phineas Finn (Virtue, 1869) 2 vols., 25s. [Previously serialized in Saint Pauls.] He Knew He Was Right (Strahan, 1869) 2 vols., 21s. [Previously published as weekly part-issues at 6d. each.] Did He Steal It? [Privately published version of The Last Chronicle of Barset.] An Editor's Tales (Strahan, 1870) 1 vol., 12s. [Previously serialized in Saint Pauls.] The Vicar of Bullhampton (Bradbury, Evans, 1870) 1 vol., 14s. [Previously published as monthly part-issue at Is. each with final double issue at 2s. 6d.] Commentaries of Caesar (Blackwood, 1870) 1 vol., 2s. 6d. Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite (Hurst and Blackett, 1871) 1 vol., 10s. 6d. [Previously serialized in Macmillan's.] Ralph the Heir (Hurst and Blackett, 1871) 3 vols., 31s. 6d. [Previously published in 19 monthly part issues at 6d. each and as a monthly supplement to Saint Pauls.] Source: Richard Mullen, Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in His World (London: Duckworth, 1990).

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Appendix A

A sketch from The Pearl 3:17 (November 1880), 178-9: The Editor of the Standard is a good natured fellow, ever ready to attend to the wants of his customers, more especially, when they happen to be good looking members of the fair sex. The following conversation, which recently took place in the office of the Standard, fully carries out our assertion: Lady. - Is the Editor in? Editor. - Yes, madam, what can I do for you? Lady. - I desire an article inserted, and should like you to put it in for me. Editor. - Certainly, with pleasure, if you will first show it to me, so that I may see, what it is like. Lady. - I wish a situation as a wet nurse, and should like to get a good healthy boy. Editor prepares this advertisement, and shows it to the lady who likes the look of it, and wishes it to be put in at once, and asks the price. Editor. - How often shall you want it put in? Lady. - Well, I cannot tell! That will depend, whether it is taking or not; but what will you charge for inserting it three times? Editor. - One dollar for putting it in three times. Lady. - Oh! How dear! You might do it for me for less! Editor. - No, madam, we have so many ladies to oblige, that is our lowest price for inserting three times such an article as you ask for. Lady. - Well, suppose you do not get me a baby in three times, how much will you charge me for three times more? Editor. - Why, madam, if you can manage to keep the affair standing after that, for one dollar more, I will put it in as often as you like, till I get you a child; that is, provided the ink continues to flow.

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Appendix B

A project on Victorian periodicals carries with it certain bibliographical problems. For the sake of usefulness and clarity, I have not listed each individual article and review cited or mentioned. References in the footnotes will direct the reader to those sources. The following bibliography is divided into four sections: special collections I have cited or consulted; periodicals cited or consulted; nineteenth-century books and articles cited or consulted, which are important sources for studying middleclass periodicals at mid-century; twentieth-century books and articles cited, consulted, or which are useful for the study of Victorian periodicals. I. Special Collections Arents Collections of Books in Parts and Associated Literature, New York Public Library Positivist Papers, ADD MS, British Library The Trollope Papers, MSS Don.c.9, Bodleian Library. II. Periodicals Cited or Consulted Argosy Art Journal Athenaeum Author's Note Book and Literary Gossip Bachelors' Buttons Bachelors' Papers Belgravia Bentley's Miscellany Blackwood's Magazine British Evangelist British and Foreign Quarterly Review Broadway Cassell's Illustrated Family Paper Celebrities of the Day: British and Foreign Christian Guest Christian Observer Churchman's Family Magazine Contemporary Review Cornhill Magazine Edinburgh Christian Magazine Edinburgh Review English Woman's Journal Englishman's Register

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Bibliography

Bibliography

Family Friend Family Magazine Family Sunday Book Family Treasury of Sunday Reading Fortnightly Review Eraser's Magazine Gentleman's Magazine Good Words Graphic Household Words Illustrated London News Leader Leisure Hour Literary Gazette Literary Times London Review London Society Macmillan's Magazine National Review New and Monthly Magazine Nineteenth Century North British Review Our Celebrities: A Portrait Gallery Pall Mall Gazette Patriot Pearl Publishers' Circular Punch Quarterly Review Quiver Reader Record Robin Goodfellow Rose, the Shamrock, and the Thistle St. James Saint Pauls Magazine Saturday Review Spectator Temple Bar Times Tinsley's Westminster Review Writer and the Reader III. Selected Nineteenth-Century Sources The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon. Printed for the Nihilists. Moscow: 1881. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. J. Dover Wilson, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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[Austin, Alfred.] 'Our Novels - The Fast School', Temple Bar 29 (May 1870): 177-94. [ ]. 'Our Novels - The Sensational School', Temple Bar 29 (June 1870): 410-24. [ ]. 'Our Novels - The Simple School', Temple Bar 29 (July 1870): 488-503. Bartholomew, Charles. A Guide to the Turkish Bath. London: Ward, Lock and Taylor, 1869. . The Turkish Bath in Convalescence: A Popular Hand-Book for the Robust and Invalid. London: Ward, Lock and Taylor, 1869. Beesly, E.S., J.H. Bridges, and Richard Congreve. Religion of Humanity, Republic of the West: Papers on the War between France and Germany. London: Edward Truelove, 1870. Brereton, John Le Gay, M.D. A Lecture on the Action and Uses of the Turkish Bath. London: F. Guy, 1869. Brookes, John. Manliness: Hints to Young Men. London: James Blackwood, 1859. Bulwer, Edward Lytton. England and the English. 2 vols. London: Bentley, 1833. Burton, Richard. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. 16 vols. London: Kamashastra Society, 1885-88. Caird, John, DD. Christian Manliness, 'A Sermon preached before the University of Glasgow'. Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1871. Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, World's Classics, 1987. Comte, Auguste. Correspondance generale et confessions, 1846-48. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1981. . A General View of Positivism. J.H. Bridges, trans. London: Trubner, 1865. Congreve, Richard. The Propagation of the Religion of Humanity: A Sermon preached at South Fields, Wandsworth. London: John Chapman, 1860. The Cornhill Gallery. London: Smith, Elder, 1865. [Dallas, E.S.] 'Anthony Trollope', The Times (23 May 1859): 12. [ ]. 'Popular Literature - The Periodical Press, Part V, Blackwood's Magazine 85 (January 1859): 96-112. [ ]. 'Popular Literature - The Periodical Press, Part II', Blackwood's Magazine 85 (February 1859): 180-95. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. J.W. Burrow, ed. London: Penguin Classics, 1985. An Exposure of the 'Record' Newspaper in its treatment of 'Good Words'. London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., 1863. Gaskell, Elizabeth. CranfordlCousin Phillis. Peter Keating, ed. London: Penguin Books, 1986. 'Good Words': The Theology of Its Editor, and of Some of Its Contributors. London: The Record office, 1863. [Greg, W.R.] 'Why Are Women Redundant?' National Review 14 (April 1862): 434-60. Hope, A.R. A Book About Boys. Edinburgh: W.P. Nimmo, 1868. Hughes, Thomas. The Manliness of Christ. London: Macmillan, 1879.

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Bibliography

Bibliography

. Tom Brown's Schooldays. Andrew Sanders, ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, World's Classics, 1989. International Policy: Essays on the Foreign Relations of England. London: Chapman and Hall, 1866. Kinnear, John Boyd. Principles of Reform. London: Smith, Elder, 1865. The Ladies' Tickler; or the Adventures of Lady Lovepost and the Audacious Llarry. London: Printed for the Booksellers, 1866. Lewes, George Henry. The Biographical History of Philosophy. 2 vols. London: John W. Parker and Son, 1857. The Lives of Boulton and Park. Extraordinary Revelations and Men in Petticoats. London: 5 Houghton Street, 1870. McCarthy, Justin Huntly, MP. Lady Burton's Edition of her Husband's Arabian Nights. 6 vols. London: Waterlow and Sons, 1886. MacLeod, Revd Donald. Memoir of Norman MacLeod. DD. 2 vols. London: Dalby, Isbister and Co., 1876. Martineau, Harriet. Harriet Martineau's Autobiography. 3 vols. London: Smith, Elder, 1877. Mill, John Stuart. Auguste Comte and Positivism. London: Trubner and Co., 1865. Moore, George. Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals. London: Vizetelly, 1885. . 'A New Censorship of Literature', Pall Mall Gazette 40 (10 December 1884): 1-2. The New Epicurean or the Delights of Sex Facetiously and Philosophically Considered in Graphic Letters Addressed to Young Ladies of Quality: 1740. London: [no publisher,] 1865. Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, World's Classics, 1986. Payn, James. Some Literary Recollections. London: Smith, Elder, 1884. Porter, Mrs. Gerald. Annals of a Publishing House: John Blackwood. (vol. 3 of Margaret Oliphant's William Blackwood and His Sons: Their Magazine and Friends). Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1898. Positivist Articles, Reviews, and Letters Reprinted from the Bengalee. Calcutta: Bengalee Press, 1870. The Reformer's Year-Book and Political Annual 1867. London: William Freeman, 1867. The Rules and Regulations, with an Alphabetical List of the Members of THE REFORM CLUB with Dates of Entrance. Westminster: Thomas Brettel, 1866. Ruskin, John. Sesame and Lilies. London: Smith, Elder, 1865. Saintsbury, George. A History of Nineteenth Century Literature. London: Macmillan, 1896. Sampson, Henry. A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times. London: Chatto and Windus, 1874. The Sins of the Cities of the Plain or the Recollections of a Mary-Ann with a Short Essay on Sodomy and Tribadism. London and New York: The Erotica Biblion Society, 1881. Smiles, Samuel. Self-Help. London: John Murray, 1866.

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247

Smith, William. Advertise. How? When? Where? London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1863. Spielmann, M.H. The History of 'Punch'. London: Cassell, 1895. Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn. The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D. 2 vols. London: B. Fellows, 1844. Stephen, Leslie. The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen. London: Smith, Elder, 1895. . Studies of a Biographer. 4 vols. London: Duckworth, 1898. Thackeray, William Makepeace. The Book of Snobs. John Sutherland, ed. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978. Timbs, John. Clubs and Clublife in London with anecdotes of its famous coffee houses, hostelries, and taverns, from the seventeenth century to the present time. London: John Camden Hotten, 1872. Trollope, Anthony. An Autobiography. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, World's Classics, 1989. . Barchester Towers. Robin Gilmour, ed. London: Penguin Books, 1985. . The Belton Estate. John Halperin, ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, World's Classics, 1991. . Clergymen of the Church of England. London: Chapman and Hall, 1866. . The Complete Short Stories, Vol. 1: Editors and Writers. Betty Breyer. London: William Pickering, 1990. . Early Short Stories. John Sutherland, ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, World's Classics, 1994. . An Editor's Tales. London: Penguin Books, 1993. . Framley Parsonage. London: Dent, Everyman's Library, 1978. . The Last Chronicle of Barset. Peter Fairclough, ed. London: Penguin Books, 1986. . Later Short Stories. John Sutherland, ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, World's Classics, 1995. . Mary Gresley, or An Editor's Tales. London: Chapman and Hall, 1871. . Miss Mackenzie. A.OJ. Cockshut, ed. Oxford University Press, World's Classics, 1990. . Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel. Robert Tracy, ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, World's Classics, 1991. . Phineas Finn: The Irish Member. John Sutherland, ed. London: Penguin Books, 1985. . Rachel Ray. P.D. Edwards, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, World's Classics, 1990. . The Small House at Allington. James R. Kincaid, ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, World's Classics, 1986. . The Warden. Robin Gilmour, ed. London: Penguin Books, 1988. 'Walter'. My Secret Life. Vols. 1-4. London: Arrow Books, 1994. Webster, Augusta. Portraits. London: Macmillan, 1870. Welland, John. Norman MacLeod. Edinburgh and London: Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier, Famous Scots Series, 1897. Wilson, Erasmus, FRS. The Eastern, or Turkish Bath: Its History, Revival in Britain, and Application to the Purposes of Health. London: John Churchill, 1861.

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Adams, James Eli. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. . 'Gentleman, Dandy, Priest: Manliness and Social Authority in Pater's Aestheticism', ELH 59 (1992): 441-66. Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. John Cumming, trans. 1972; reprinted London: Verso, 1992. Altholz, Josef. The Religious Press in Britain, 1760-1900. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800-1900. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1957. Anderson, Patricia. The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790-1860. 1991; reprinted Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Annan, Noel. Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Ashton, Rosemary. G. H. Lewes: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. . Versatile Victorian: Selected Writings of George Henry Lewes. London: Bristol Old Classics Press, 1992. Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans, and Michael Holquist, ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Baldick, Robert. The Duel: A History of Duelling. London: Chapman and Hall, 1965. Ballaster, Ros, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer, and Sandra Hebron. Women's Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman's Magazine. London: Macmillan, 1991. Bareham, Tony, ed. Anthony Trollope. London: Vision, 1980. Barrickman, Richard, Susan McDonald, and Myra Stark. Corrupt Relations: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins and the Victorian Sexual System. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. Stephen Heath, trans, and ed. London: Fontana, 1977. . S/Z: An Essay. Richard Miller, trans. 1970; reprinted New York: Hill and Wang, Noonday Press, 1993. Baudrillard, Jean. The Ecstacy of Communication. Bernard and Caroline Schutze, trans, and Sylvere Lotringer, ed. 1987; reprinted New York: Semiotext(e), 1988. Bennett, Tony. 'Media, "Reality", Signification', in Culture, Society and the Media. Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran, and Janet

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Woollacott, eds. London: Routledge, 1982: 287-308. Best, Geoffrey. Mid-Victorian Britain 1851-75. 1971; reprinted London: Fontana, 1985. Bevington, Merle Mowbray. The Saturday Review 1855-1868: Representative Educated Opinion in Victorian England. N e w York: Columbia University Press, 1941. Bishop, Edward. ' R e c o v e r i n g Modernism: Format and Function in Little Magazines', in Modernist Writers and the Marketplace. Ian Willison, Warrick Gould, and Warren Chernaik, eds. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1996: 287-319. Blake, Andrew. Reading Victorian Fiction: The Cultural Context and Ideological Content of the Nineteenth-Century Novel. London: Macmillan, 1989. Boone, Joseph A. and Michael Cadden, eds. Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Randal Johnson, ed. Oxford: Polity Press, 1993. Boyd, Kelly. 'Knowing Your Place: The Tensions of Manliness in Boys' Story Papers, 1918-39', in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800. Michael Roper and John Tosh, eds. London: Routledge, 1991: 145-67. Brake, Laurel. Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century. London: Macmillan, 1994. . 'Theories of Formation. The Nineteenth Century: vol. 1, No. 1, March 1877. Monthly. 2/6', Victorian Periodicals Review 25:1 (Spring 1992): 16-21. . '"The Trepidation of the Spheres": The Serial and the Book in the 19th Century', in Serials and Their Readers. Michael Harris and Robin Myers, eds. Winchester: St. Paul's Bibliographies, 1993: 83-101. . 'The "Wicked Westminster", the Fortnightly, and Walter Pater's Renaissance , in Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995: 289- 305. Aled Jones and Lionel Madden, eds. Investigating Victorian Journalism. London: Macmillan, 1990. and Anne Humpherys. 'Critical Theory and Periodical Research', Victorian Periodicals Review 12:3 (Fall 1989): 94-5. Chadwick, Owen. The Victorian Church. 2 vols. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1966. Clawson, Mary Ann. Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Cockshut, A.O.J. Anthony Trollope: A Critical Study. 1955; reprinted London: Collins, 1968. Colaiaco, James A. James Fitzjames Stephen and the Crisis of Victorian Thought. London: Macmillan, 1983. Collini, Stefan. '"Manly Fellows": Fawcett, Stephen and the Liberal Temper', in The Blind Victorian: Henry Fawcett and British Liberalism. Lawrence Goldman, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989: 41-59. . Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 18501930. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991.

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Adorno, Theodor 59, 78 advertising 84-5, 126, 229 and periodicals 80, 122 and Rachel Ray 72, 79 and Saint Pauls 142-3, 147 aestheticism 151-2, 166 All the Year Round 169 anonymity 92, 229, 238 and signature 4, 59, 81, 93, 121-4, 130-4, 147 as definitive of journalism 38-9, 93 authors' resistance to 129 see also authorship, celebrity, journalism Anstie, Francis E. 14, 25, 30, 36-7 appearance vs. reality 210-11 apRoberts, Ruth 2 Argosy, The 124, 176 Armstrong, Nancy 17, 22 Arnold, Matthew 14, 124, 125 Culture and Anarchy 148, 151, 154 Arnold, Thomas 64, 153 and ideas of inclusive journalism 68 Ashbee, Henry Spenser 19 Ashton, Rosemary 96 Athenaeum, The 85, 109, 185, 191 authority and cultural value 131-4, 237 and editors 68, 81, 183, 193 and periodical text 194-6, 237 and publishing houses 122 see also editors, periodicals authorship 6, 229, 234 and author function 183, 185, 189, 194, 221 and control of image 129 and cultural capital 132-4 and gendered cultural production 8, 218

and signature 121-2 R. Barthes on 192-94, 233-4 collective 122-3, 237 M. Foucault on 194-5 professionalization of 185-9, 218 see also anonymity, editors, journalism Author's Note Book and Literary Gossip, The 128-9 bachelorism and male anxieties 119-21 and male pleasure 116-19 in The Belton Estate 115-21 in The Small House at Allington 20, 115 Bachelorism Portrayed 119 Bachelors' Buttons 117-18 Bachelors' Papers 118-19 Bachelor's Pocket Book for 1851 118 Bagehot, Walter 96 Bakhtin, Mikhail 2, 15-17, 231-2 ballot 148, 158, 162-3, 181n. Barthes, Roland 2, 192-3, 196, 233-4, 237 Baudelaire, Charles 203 Baudrillard, Jean 209-13 Beesly, E.S. 94, 97, 101 Belgravia 144 Bell, Robert 187 Bentley's Miscellany 121 Bernhardt, Sarah 128 Bishop, Edward 132 Blackwood, John 130-1 Blackwood's Magazine 12, 15, 25, 38, 39, 102, 123, 131, 142, 144, 145, 184 Boulton and Park scandal 152, 200 Bourdieu, Pierre 86, 131-4, 229, 238 259

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Index

Index

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 51, 74, 128, 144 Aurora Floyd 30 Lady Audley's Secret 114, 213 Only a Clod 104 see also sensation fiction Brake, Laurel 39, 81, 122-3, 124, 196 Bridges, J.H. 97, 99, 101 A General View of Positivism 97, 98, 100 The Unity of Comte's Life and Doctrine 99 Religion of Humanity, Republic of the West 101-2 Bright, John 164 British Evangelist and Christian Magazine 67 Brookes, John 152 Manliness: Hints to Young Men 154 Brown, Hugh Stowell 153-4, 170 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 11 Bulwer, Edward Lytton 186 England and the English 93 Burton, Richard Arabian Nights 199-200 Byron, George Gordon 124, 126 Caird, John 72, 153, 155 Caledonian Press 28 Cameron, Andrew 52 capital economic and symbolic 131-2 see also cultural value Carlyle, Thomas Sartor Resartus 210, 219, 220 Cassell, John 67 Cassell's Illustrated Family Paper 67 Celebrities: A Portrait Gallery 128 Celebrities of the Day 128 celebrity and commodification 126-7 and image 125-6, 133-4 and journalism 92, 124 and lionism 124-5 rise of 124-34 star-audience relationship 125

Trollope as 130-4 see also anonymity, journalism censorship 11, 49, 50, 236 Chadwick, Owen 71 Chalmers, Thomas 63 Chambers' Edinburgh Journal 127, 193 Chapman and Hall 74, 94, 101, 108, 190 Chapman, Edward 94 Chapman, Frederic 94 Chapman, John 97 Christian Guest 67-8 Christian Observer 72, 84 and Good Words 75 Church of Scotland disruption 63 circulating libraries 5, 12-13, 48, 49, 50, 76, 78, 107, 236 see also Mudie, Charles, Mudie's Circulating Library Clawson, Mary Ann 39 Cobbe, Frances Power 102, 103, 105, 111 'What Shall We Do with Our Old Maids?' 21-2 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 153 Collini, Stefan 35 Collins, Wilkie 74 Comte, Auguste and hybrid journalism 105-6 and Lewes 97-8 position on women 98 Positivism and Fortnightly Review 96-102 translations of 97 Catechisme 97 Cours de la philosophic positive 97, 99 Discours 97, 98 Congreve, Richard 97, 99, 100-1 Contagious Diseases Acts 198 Contemporary Review 39, 80, 81, 100, 108, 124 copyright 185-6 Cornhill Magazine 48, 59, 68, 84, 86, 92, 94, 108, 125, 145, 148, 151, 155, 183, 193, 194, 209, 236

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and and and and and and and and and and and and and and

anonymity 38-9 censorship 11 contents 14, 25 contributors 25-6, 95 controversy 10-15 cultural formation 39 domestic ideology 4 gendered space 4, 39 gentlemanly tone 10 intertextuality 7, 15-24 male readership 8, 31-41 male subjects 12 non-fiction 7, 10-12, 25-41 relation to Good Words 68-70, 76, 80 and women readership 12, 37-8 see also Trollope: The Small House at Allington, Thackeray cosmetics 37-8 Couper, WJ. 62 Cross, Nigel 35, 186 cultural materialism 3, 228, 238 cultural production 6, 228-9 and gender 8-9 cultural value 131-4, 237 culture industry 9, 59 Dallas, E.S. 10 Dalziel Brothers 84, 85 Darwin, Charles 128, 150 Davies, Emily 104 deconstruction 2, 234-5 Dellamora, Richard 100-1, 152 Dennis, John 104 Derrida, Jaques 234-5 desire see homoeroticism, seduction Dial, The 132 Dickens, Charles 121, 129, 186, 187 All the Year Round 169 and celebrity 126-7, 210 David Copper field 188 Household Words 68 Pickwick Papers 126 Sketches by Boz 126 domesticity 17, 23, 236

261

see also domestic fiction, fallen woman, marriage, women domestic fiction 14, 17, 78, 172, 229 in Cornhill 17-41 see also realism, sensation fiction Dorcas societies 51-2 Draper, Eliza 209 Duff-Gordon, Lucy 102 duelling 168-70 Dworkin, Andrea 198 Eagleton, Terry 24 Economist, The 24 Edinburgh Christian Magazine 62-8 Edinburgh Review 27, 96-7, 102, 103, 121, 199-200 editors and authority 68, 81-4, 142, 183, 184, 194, 229, 238 and editor function 183, 188-9, 194, 221, 238 and editorial 'we' 123, 193, 200 and framing device of 219-21 and gender of 189, 197 and male sexual fantasy 196-219 see also authorship, authority, periodicals Edwards, PD. 52 Elfenbein, Andrew 124 Eliot, George 96, 102, 104, 110 and Positivism 96, 99-100 and Rachel Ray 77 Daniel Deronda 99 Middlemarch 160 Spanish Gypsy, The 99 Romola 14, 24, 25, 30-1, 99 Eliot, T.S. 132 Ellerton, Richard 111 Englishman's Register 64 English Woman's Journal 27 Englishwoman's Review of Social and Industrial Questions 104 erotica 198 see also pornography, sexual literature Essays and Reviews 72

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Index

Index

Evangelicalism and Alexander Strahan 80 and Church of Scotland 63 and Evangelical Alliance 64 and rejection of Rachel Ray 71-6, 85 depiction of in Rachel Ray 51-4 see also religious periodicals Faithfull, Emily and female emigration 21, 44n. and Victoria Press 27 fallen woman in The Belton Estate 113-15 in An Editor's Tales 216-7 in Rachel Ray 56 see also sensationalism, sexuality Family Friend 66, 67 Family Magazine 66 family magazines 236 and family reading 4, 176 and middle-class market 5 and religious market 66-7 and shilling monthlies 12 see also periodicals, religious periodicals Family Sunday Book 67 Family Treasury of Sunday Reading 52, 67 Farrar, Frederic William Eric, or Little by Little 151 Fawcett, Millicent 104, 105 feminism 105-6, 112, 228 and criticism 2 and gender studies 150 see also gender fetishism 210, 219 Field, Kate 192 flaneur 203 formalism 231, 232 Fortnightly Review 4, 87, 141, 144, 145, 146, 147, 151, 227, 236, 237 and absence of women 102-6, 113 and anonymous journalism 39, 92-3, 121-3 and circulation figures 108

and cultural formation 93-106 and experimentalism 93 and hybridity 4, 105-6, 108 and law 110-11 and liberalism 93-4, 100 and marriage 115-21 and Positivism 4, 96-102 and property 110-11 and proprietors of 94 and prospectus of 93 see also Trollope: The Belton Estate, G.H. Lewes Foster, Roy 164 Foucault, Michel 2, 16, 50, 185, 194-5, 196, 235, 236-7 Franco-Prussian War 101-2 Eraser's Magazine 21, 25, 29-30, 125-6, 144 Freud, Sigmund 163 Froude, J.A. 187 Frow, John 230 Gaskell, Elizabeth 25 Ruth 114 gay culture 152 see also homoeroticism, homosociality Gay, Peter 152, 168 genre criticism 236-8 gentlemen's clubs 239 and homosociality 101 Reform Club 101 see also periodicals (cultural formations of) Gladstone, William 128, 158 Good Words 4, 29, 48, 145 and advertisement 80 and Christian Guest 67-8 and Christian Observer 75 and circulation figures 70, 80 and commercial pressures 59-62, 80 and Cornhill 4, 70, 76, 79 and format changes 59-62 and identity shifts 80-7 and popularity of 48, 80 and prospectus of 68 and signed journalism 59 as religious weekly 58-9

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see also Evangelicalism, MacLeod, Norman, Trollope: Rachel Ray, Record, religious periodicals Graphic 149 Greenwell, Dora 72 Greenwood, Frederick 26 Margaret Denzil's History 14, 30, 76 Greg, W.R. 'Why Are Women Redundant?' 20-2, 23-4 Griest, Guinivere 49, 50 Grub Street 187 Guepes, Les 40 Guild of Literature and Art 186 Guthrie, Thomas 52 Haight, Gordon 96 Hall, John 10, 131 Halperin, John 2 Hamer, Mary 2-3 Hare, Thomas 111 Harrison, Frederic 94, 96, 97, 101, 110-11 Hassell, Elizabeth J. 102 Hellenism 151-2 heteroglossia 231-2 Hill, Octavia 102 Hilton, Boyd 151 Holland, H.W. 18, 22-4 homosexuality 152, 154 and cruising 201, 203, 204, 210 and An Editor's Tales 183 and homophobia 154 and pornography 203-4 and 'The Turkish Bath' 201, 204 see also gay culture, homoeroticism, homosociality, sexuality homosociality (and male bonding) 101, 116, 155-6, 166, 201, 207 see also gay culture, homosexuality, masculinity homoeroticism and male desire 151-2, 202, 221 Hope, A.R. 151

263

Horkheimer, Max 59, 78 Household Words 68, 170 Hughes, Thomas 153 Tom Brown's Schooldays 150-1, 154, 170 Hugo, Victor 26-7 Hunt, Leigh 125 Huxley, Leonard 11 Huxley, T.H. 128 hybridity (in periodicals) 26, 67, 176, 236 and Fortnightly Review 92, 105-6, 146 Hyde, H. Montgomery 198 ideology 230 Illustrated London News 74, 77, 129, 191, 195, 201 illustration 67, 81, 84 imperialism 152, 156, 170 see also orientalism individualism 156 inheritance see property intertextuality 7, 231-3 in Cornhill 15-17 in Saint Pauls 148-9, 175, 231-3 Ireland and duelling 170 and Irishness in Phineas Finn 149; 161-2, 164-5 Fenianism 171 Irish Question 148, 150, 165, 171 see also Trollope: Phineas Finn James, Henry 203 Jarman, Derek 204 Jay, Elisabeth 71-2 Jermyn Street Turkish Baths 201-2, 204 see also homosexuality (cruising), 'The Turkish Bath' Johnson, Barbara 234-5 Johnson, Samuel 185 journalism and anonymity 38-9, 121-4 and effeminacy 39-40

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264

Index

Kama Sutra 199 Karr, Alphonse 40 Keddie, Henrietta see Tytler, Sarah Kent, Christopher 100, 101 Kincaid, James 2, 19-20 Kingsley, Charles 72, 153 Klein, Melanie 160, 163 Knowles, James 80 Kristeva, Julia 15-16, 232 Ladies' Tickler 220 Landon, Letitia 125 Lawley, Francis 155-6 Lawrence, D.H. 207, 212 Leader 96, 99 Leighton, Frederic 128 Leisure Hour, The 64, 66 Leitch, Vincent 235 Lewes, G.H. 14, 35-6, 37-8 and Comte 97-8 and ideas for Fortnightly 94 and hybridity 105-6 and serial fiction 107-8 and women contributors 102-6 Biographical History of Philosophy 99 Problems of Life and Mind 99 see also Fortnightly Review literary lionism 124-5 see also celebrity literary production 185-6, 187-8, 221 and abortion images 215, 216 and sexual metaphors 206-7 see also cultural production

Literary Times 73, 76 London Review 109 Lowell, James Russell 185 Lowenthal, Leo 126 Ludlow, John Malcolm 104 M'Lachlan, Jessie and female crime 23, 30, 45n. MacLeod, Norman 48, 52, 57 and Christian Guest 67-8 and Christian Observer 75 and Church of Scotland Disruption 63 and Edinburgh Christian Magazine 62-8 and editing 68, 86 and Evangelicals 64 and Sunday reading 62-3, 85 approaches Trollope for Good Words 70 attacked by Record 72 commitment to new religious reading 79, 86-7 editorials for Good Words 58 rejection of Rachel Ray 71-6, 85 see also Trollope: Good Words, Rachel Ray McMaster, Juliet 2 Macmillan's Magazine 15, 25, 38, 102, 103, 117, 122, 148 male cultural formation of 95 madness and discourse of health 205-7 manliness 229 and boys 150-1 and chivalry 168-9 and Englishness 156 and journalism 40 and imperialism 152 and individualism 156-7 and male aggression 155-71, 173 and manly activities 153-4 and physicality 154 and public speaking 162-6 and sport 154-5, 167 Christian 153 discourse of in periodicals 169-70

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Journalism - continued and gender 188 and male bonding 34-5 and middle-class anxieties 27-8 and Positivism 99 and professionalization of 26, 185-9 secular vs. religious 58-76 women in 102-5 see also anonymity, celebrity, gender, New Journalism, periodicals

in 19th century 149, 150-7 see also homosociality, masculinity Marcus, Steven 198-9, 220 marriage and female oppression 159-60, 165-6 and female power 159-60, 165-6 and male anxiety 115-21 see also bachelorism, Trollope: The Belton Estate, Rachel Ray, The Small House at Allington, women Martineau, Harriet 103 and lionism 124-5 Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, The 97 Marx, Karl 127 Marxism 2, 228, 230, 232 masculinity 150 and generations 158 and male anxiety 157, 163, 176 and 19th-century manliness 151-7 and psychoanalysis 160-1, 161-2, 163 and speech 162-7 and urban subjectivity 203 and violence 166-71, 173 see also gender, homosexuality, manliness mass communications 210-11 see also mass culture mass culture 59, 62, 238 and celebrity 126, 210 and mass communications 210-11 and reproducibility 78 incompatibility with religious reading 76 masturbation 206-7 Maurer, Oscar 123, 124 Mayhew, Henry 22 media history 3 and media theory 133-4 Mensur 168

265

Meredith, George 94 Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The 108 Vittoria 108 Metaphysical Society 39, 101 Michelson, Peter 198 middle classes and feminism in 105-6 and masculinity 153 and readership 145-6 and social anxieties 148, 170-1 virtues of 36-7 Mill, J.S. 104 and Comte 99, 100 Millais, John Everett 183 intended illustrator for Rachel Ray 71 Milnes, Monkton 198 Moore, George and circulating libraries 12-13 Literature at Nurse 51, 199 Morison, James Cotter 94 Morley, John 96, 97 and anonymous journalism 123 and Positivism 100 and women contributors in Fortnightly 103-4 Mozley, Anne 102 Mudie, Charles 12-13 and censorship 49-50 see also circulating libraries, Mudie's Circulating Library Mudie's Circulating Library 12, 21 see also circulating libraries Mullen, Richard 192, 241 Mulock, Dinah 70 Nardin, Jane 54 National Review 21 Nelson, Claudia 150-1 New and Monthly Magazine 93 New Criticism 237 New Journalism 93, 124, 127 see also journalism new historicism 2 Newspaper Press Fund 187 Nineteenth Century 39, 80, 81, 101

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Index

Norton, Caroline

102, 125

Obscene Publications Act (of 1857) 50-1, 198 Oliphant, Margaret 102, 142 O'Neil, Henry Nelson 147 orientalism 201 see also imperialism Pall Mall Gazette 12-13, 26, 36, 129, 145 Pankhurst, R.M. 104 Parkes, Bessie Rayner 111 Pater, Walter Renaissance 155 'Winkelmann' 151 see also aestheticism, gay culture Patriot 75-6 Payn, James 193 periodicals and books 234, 236-7 and collective authorship 122-3, 231-3 and critical theory 5-6 and cultural value 132-4 and experimentalism in Fortnightly 93-6 and gendered space 25-6, 40-1 and genre 236-8 and media theory 133-4, 210 and multiplicity 193-4, 233-4, 237 and publishing networks 184-5 and reading 15-17, 92, 106, 183-4, 234 as field of study 3, 5, 227 gendered cultural formations of 35, 39, 94-6, 133, 183, 229, 238 methodology for studying 7, 227-38 see also anonymity, authorship, editors, gender, hybridity, journalism, serial fiction personality Victorian cult of 92 see also celebrity Pearl 200, 221, 242

Petronius Satyr icon 200 Polhemus, Robert 2, 51 politics electoral reform 111 in Cornhill 31-4 see also ballot, property, Reform Bill, suffrage, women Poovey, Mary 17, 126-7, 18 Pope, Alexander 185 popular literature 48, 74, 124, 229 and Evangelicalism 72-6, 86 and women readers 147 see also mass culture pornography 50, 184, 196-201, 203, 207, 211, 212, 213, 219-21 see also erotica Positivism 4, 92 and Comte 96 and cultural formation of Fortnightly 94, 100-2 and higher journalism 99, 100 and homosociality 101 and politics 101-2 and Positivist Society 94 see also Comte, Auguste, Lewes, G.H., Positivist Review Positivist Review 100 poststructuralism 2, 16, 228, 230-8 Proctor, Adelaide 72 property and bachelorism 115 and Reform Bill debates 111 and women 110-13 prostitution 118-19, 197 by men 202-4 see also Sins of the Cities of the Plains psychoanalysis 160-3, 228 Publishers' Circular 39, 80, 122, 188, 189 Punch 120, 126, 158, 163, 166, 171 male cultural formation of 95 Pykett, Lyn 228 Quarterly Review 27, 121 and sensation fiction 74, 76

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Index

266

Quiver

67

Reade, Charles 50 reading and children's periodicals 151, 161 and family circle 36, 176 and male readerships 145-6, 171-2, 197, 199, 221 and periodicals 15-17 and popular literature 125 and pornography 197 and the Sabbath 81, 87 and shared knowledge 34 and textual authority 194 realism 77, 78, 107-8 see also domestic fiction, sensation fiction Record 72, 79, 85 Reform Bill (and Act of 1867) 104, 111, 145, 148, 150, 157, 158, 169, 170 religious periodicals 48, 52, 58, 62-3 and religious reading 64-6 and secular market 66-7, 72-6, 78-9, 86 see also Evangelicalism, Good Words, family magazines Religious Tract Society 64, 66, 153 Revue des Deux Mondes 93, 108 Ritchie, Anne 14, 25 Roper, Michael 158 Rose, Marie Pauline (Baroness Blaze de Bury) 142 Rose, the Shamrock, and the Thistle, The 28 on sensation fiction 74-5 Royal Literary Fund 186 Ruskin, John 11, 17, 38-9 Rutherford, Jonathan 157, 162, 163, 166 Saint Pauls Magazine 4-5, 141 after Trollope 147 and anonymity 177n. and imperialism 152 and intertextuality 148-9, 175

267

and manliness 152 and reformism 148-9 and social change 157 and sports 155-6, 167 and urban masculinity and women 147 bid for male readers 5, 144, 161 circulation 142 commercial pressures 146, 183 cultural formation of 141-4, 183, 221 maleness of 145-6, 175-6, 221 prospectus 146 Trollope and 142-3 see also Trollope: An Editor's Tales, Phineas Finn, Ralph the Heir Saintsbury, George 123, 124 Sala, G.A. 187 Saturday Review 21, 23, 26, 30, 78, 93-4, 191, 227 Saussure, Ferdinand de 233 Schmitz, Leonora 102 secrets 211-14 seduction 209-10 and secrecy 211-12 Segal, Lynne 154, 160-1 sensation fiction 29-30, 51, 72-6, 85, 107, 113 see also domestic fiction, realism, sensationalism sensationalism and Cornhill 29-31 and Evangelicalism 72 and Rachel Ray 56, 77-8 and Trollope 72, 77 sexuality and aestheticism 151-2 and fantasy 183, 211, 213-15, 219 and gay culture 152 and medical discourse 206-7 and sado-masochism 213-14 and seduction 208-13 and social control 198 and transgression 113-15, 151, 200, 217-18 and violence 215 and voyeurism 210, 219

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Index

Index

sexuality - continued see also bachelorism, gender, homosexuality sexual literature 196-201 see also erotica, pornography, sexuality Shillingsburg, Peter 186, 187-8 Shiman, Lilian 28 Sell, Henry 84-5 see also advertising Sins of the Cities of the Plains 203, 207, 219-20 see also homosexuality, pornography, prostitution Slater, Michael 118 Smiles, Samuel Self-help 153, 156 Smith, George 8, 10, 14, 26, 36, 39, 95, 130, 132 society and social reform 26-7 see also politics, Reform Bill Spalding and Hodge 79-80 Spectator 21 speech and masculinity 162-7 see also Trollope: Phineas Finn Spence, Catherine Helen 102 sports 155-6, 167 Srebrnik, Patricia 70, 79, 86 Stanley, Arthur P 72 stars 124-5 see also celebrity Stephen, Fitzjames 23, 25-8, 31-5 Stephen, Leslie 12, 154-5, 187, 196 Sterne, Laurence 209 Strahan, Alexander 59, 70, 74, 78-9, 86, 147, 172 and Cornhill 78-80 and Evangelicals 80 moves to change identity of Good Words 81-4 see also Good Words structuralism 228 suffrage 104, 111, 148 Sunday at Home 64, 66 Sunday Magazine 80, 84, 86 Sutherland, John 158, 172, 174, 192, 228

Swain, Joseph 84 Swanwick, Anna 111 Taylor, Helen 112-13 temperance and temperance hall movement 28-9 as middle-class virtue 36 in Rachel Ray 56-7 Temple Bar 40, 144, 176 Tennyson, Alfred 95, 128, 187 In Memoriam 101 Thackeray, William Makepeace 8, 25, 49, 68, 186, 187, 194, 209 editorial policy at Cornhill 10-15, 49-50 Denis Duval 14 'Mahogany Tree' 95 Roundabout Papers 11, 38 Thatcher, Margaret 26-7 Thomas, Donald 50, 51 Tinsley's 144 Times (London) 10, 21, 27, 30, 80 Tosh, John 158 Tractarians 154 Tracy, Robert 2 transvestism 151 Trelawny, Sir John 159 Trollope, Anthony and anonymity 130-4, 184 and author function 195-6 and celebrity status 129-30, 185 and Evangelicals 51, 72 and literary output 184-5 and Newspaper Press Fund and patriarchy 110 and politics 94, 144-5, 159, 165, 171 and readers 5 and serialization 9-10 and society journalism 128 and Victorian values 1-2 and writing as a male profession 8-9, 185-6 and writing methods 8-9 as manly 155 as periodicals writer 145

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Index

Last Chronicle of Barset, The 20, 141, 148 Linda Tressel 131, 142 'Mary Gresley' 189, 201, 207-12, 214, 215 Miss Mackenzie 108, 114, 131 'Mrs Brumby' 189, 215, 217-18 'Mrs General Talboys' 49 Nina Balatka 130-2, 184 North America 10 'On Anonymous Journalism' 123 Orley Farm 8, 10, 75 Palliser novels 141, 149-50 'Panjandrum, The' 189, 193, 210, 215, 217 Phineas Finn 145, 155, 173, 183, 221, 236 and cultural identity 161-2, 164-5 and dominance of English culture 149 and Irish Question 148, 150, 171 and male aggression 166-71 and manliness 151 and marriage 159-60, 165-6 and masculinity 150, 152, 153 and subjectivity 157, 161, 162 and Trollope's Liberalism 145 and young men 153 as Bildungsroman 149-50, 175 critiques party politics 158-9 defines tone of Saint Pauls homosociality in 156 on women and politics 159-60 Phineas's independence 156 Phineas's Irishness 164, 175-6 Phineas's maturation 157-66 psychoanalytic reading of 160-1 Phineas Redux 149, 160 Rachel Ray 4, 48, 108, 114, 131 and cultural discourses of 57 and Evangelicals 51-4 and field of cultural production 86 and ideal womanhood 54 and realism 78 and secularism 56

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as sensation writer 73-6, 77 critical studies of 2 earnings 8 invited to edit Saint Pauls 141 on the clergy 53-4, 74 on copyright 185-6 on educative nature of fiction 9, 57 on hunting 167 popularity 1, 5, 86 relations with Cornhill 10-15 resigns from Post Office 141 writing methods 8-9 Trollope, Anthony, works Autobiography 8, 9, 10, 11, 19, 21, 57, 106, 141, 171, 172, 191-2 Barchester novels 131, 141 Barchester Towers 54, 217 Belton Estate, The 4, 5, 130, 131, 145, 150, 160, 213 and bachelorism 115-17, 120-1 and fallen women 113-15 and political discourses 111 and sensationalism 107-8 and women readers 4 and women's issues 106-15 as inaugural serial 92, 107 British Sports and Pastimes 156 Can You Forgive Her? 10, 109, 114 Clergymen of the Church of England 54 An Editor's Tales (see also individual titles) 183-4, 194, 236, 238 and author-function 195-6 and professional writing 188 as pornography 198 biographical readings of 192 publishing history of 189-91 reviews of 191 secrets in 211-14 sexual nature of 192, 196-219 Framley Parsonage 5, 8, 10, 11, 20, 92 Hunting Sketches 129-30 'Josephine de Montmorenci' 189, 193, 201, 205, 210, 213-15

269

270

Index

Trollope Society 1, 190 Tuchman, Gaye 8-9, 189 Tudor, Andrew 125 Tulloch, John 72, 97 Turkish baths

in medical treatment 206 see also Jermyn Street Turkish Baths Tytler, Sarah 70 Verney, Frances 102 Victoria Magazine 104 Victoria Press 27, 189 Victoria, Queen 152 Victorian Periodicals Review 228 Victorian values 1-2 Virtue, James 80, 141, 172, 183 voyeurism 210, 219 see also sexuality Walkowitz, Judith 203 'Walter' My Life 220 Waterloo Directory 228 Webster, Augusta 56 Weeks, Jeffrey 23, 151 Wellesley Index 3, 25, 102, 228 Westminster Review 34, 104, 105, 111, 112, 124 Who's Who 127 Wiener, Joel 128 Wilberforce, Samuel 154 Williams, Raymond 110, 228, 229, 230, 235, 237 Wilson, Catherine and female crime 23, 29, 30, 45n Winnicott, D.W 160-2 Wolff, Michael 227 Wolfreys, Julian 165 women and crime 23, 29, 30, 45n. and employment 111-13 and friendships 113-14 and journalism 102-5, 189 and male fantasy 211, 213-15 and middle-class feminism 104-5 and politics 159-60 and Positivism 98 and property 110-13 and serial fiction 106-15 and sexual activeness 213 and sexual objectification 207-19

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Trollope, Anthony, works - continued and sensationalism 74, 77-8 and social pretension 52-3 personal responsibility in 54-5 rejection of 49-57, 71-2, 85 reviews of 77-8 Trollope approached by MacLeod 70 women and property in 55 Ralph the Heir 221 and old men 174 and young men 173 male discourse of 172-6 Trollope's dislike of 172 Small House at Allington, The 4, 70, 76, 109, 115, 150 and intextextuality 15-24 courtship plot in 18-20 domestic ideology 18-20, 23-4 serialization of 8, 10, 13-15, 48 'The Spotted Dog' 189, 191, 192, 215, 216-17 Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson, The 8, 10 Tales of All Countries 10 'Turkish Bath, The' 189, 191, 193, 201-7, 210, 214 'Two Generals, The' 85 Vicar of Bullhampton, The 56, 115 'Widow's Mite, The' 70-1, 72, 79, 80, 85 (selected editions of stories by Trollope) Editors and Writers 190 Mary Gresley and An Editor's Tales 190 Parson's Daughter and Other Stories, The 190 Spotted Dog and Other Stories, The 190

and sexual power 211-12 and social control of 198 and suffrage 104 and transgressive sexuality 217-18 and women's issues 102-21 as readers 147 see also domesticity, feminism, gender, marriage, sexuality, Woman Question Woman Question 27, 28, 150 and The Small House at Allington, The 21-4 and The Belton Estate 109-10, 120-1 see also bachelorism, marriage, women Woman's Own 26

271

Wood, Mrs. Henry 144 East Lynne 85 Oswald Cray 85 Wordsworth, William 125 working-classes 148 and middle-class philanthropy 28-9 and periodical readership 48 and workers' rights 175 construction of by middle classes 36-7 depictions of 170-71 World 128 Wright, T.R. 99, 100 Yates, Edmund 128, 144 Yonge, Charlotte 102

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Index