The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction After the Invention of the News

The Novelty of Newspapers

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THE NOVELTY OF NEWSPAPERS Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News

Matthew Rubery

1 2009

3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rubery, Matthew. The novelty of newspapers : Victorian fiction after the invention of the news / Matthew Rubery. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-536926-7 1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Newspapers in literature. 3. Journalism and literature— Great Britain—History—19th century. 4. British newspapers—History— 19th century. 5. Press—Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Title. II. Title: Victorian fiction after the invention of the news. PR878.N49R83 2009 823⬘.809—dc22 2008049530

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For the One-Winged Dove

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Acknowledgments

J

ournalists and scholars alike are only as good as their sources, and I have many to thank here. My fi rst debt is to Elaine Scarry, without whom this project would have been lost at sea. The second is to Leah Price for guidance and encouragement in equal measures. I am grateful to both for their intellectual generosity at every stage of this project. This book could not have been written without the generous support of many colleagues. At Harvard, I’d like to thank Isobel Armstrong, Homi Bhabha, Lawrence Buell, Philip Fisher, Erik Gray, Robert Kiely, Jesse Matz, John Picker, and members of the British Literature Colloquium, including Susan Chambers, Sophie Gee, Debra Gettleman, Anna Henchman, Julia Lee, Jason Puskar, and Jeffrey Severs. The NineteenthCentury Literature Reading Group at Birkbeck was a source of support and amusement during my time in London thanks to the company of Phillipa Bennett, Laura Coffey, Holly Furneaux, Laurie Garrison, Jim Mussell, and Anne Schwan. Laurel Brake deserves special mention for sharing her encyclopaedic knowledge of the press with me on numerous occasions. A year at the University of Pennsylvania gave me the chance to discuss my work with Rachel Buurma, Stuart Curran, James English, Michael Gamer, and Wendy Steiner. I’m grateful to my colleagues here at Leeds who welcomed me from the outset and contributed to this project in various ways, especially Bridget Bennett, Hamilton Carroll, Samuel Durrant, Denis Flannery, Alfred Hiatt, David Higgins, Robert Jones, Ananya Kabir, David Lindley, Katherine Mullin, Brendon Nicholls, Francis O’Gorman, Julia Reid, Jane Rickard, Richard Salmon, and John Whale. This project has benefited from the counsel of many others along the way: Annika Bautz, Keith Carrabine, Stephen Donovan, Susan Griffi n, Mark Hampton, Linda Hughes, Anne Humpherys, Hazel Hutchinson, Seth Koven, Graham Law, Barbara Leckie, Dallas Liddle, Andrew Maunder, Andrew Miller, Josephine McDonagh, and David Paroissien.

I am especially grateful to Peter McDonald for his support in bringing this project to completion. David Robinson, Wendy Madar, and Matthew Lassiter were great company during its last months. I would like to acknowledge Oxford University Press and its anonymous readers for the editorial care given to my manuscript. I’d also like to thank Victoria Riley for her patience during the fi nal months of this project. This project received generous support from a Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship from Harvard University; an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania; the British Academy; the Arts & Humanities Research Council; the University of Leeds; and the Oregon State University Center for the Humanities. Some of the material in this book fi rst appeared in scholarly journals. Chapter 4 includes material published as “Wishing to Be Interviewed in Henry James’s The Reverberator” in the Henry James Review 28 (2007): 57–72 and “Unspoken Intimacy in Henry James’s ‘The Papers’ ” in Nineteenth-Century Literature 61 (2006): 343–67. Chapter 5 appeared in a slightly modified form as “Joseph Conrad’s ‘Wild Story of a Journalist’ ” in ELH 71 (2004): 751–74. I am grateful to the Johns Hopkins University Press and the University of California Press for allowing me to include them here. Finally, I owe my greatest thanks to my family for never asking me to talk about my research: Michael, Kathleen, Rebecca, and Christopher Rubery. It is thanks to their support over the years that this book can now take its place alongside the unreadable and the not read, as Oscar Wilde once described journalism and literature.

viii

Acknowledgments

Contents

Introduction: The Age of Newspapers

3

Part I The Front Page 1. The Shipping Intelligence: Shipwrecks and Secret Tears from Dickens to Stoker 23 2. The Personal Advertisements: Advertisements, Agony Columns, and Sensation Novels of the 1860s 47 Part II The Inner Pages 3. The Leading Article: The Whispering Conscience in Trollope’s Palliser Novels 83 4. The Personal Interview: Wishing to Be Interviewed in Henry James 109 5. The Foreign Correspondence: Joseph Conrad’s “Wild Story of a Journalist” 141 Conclusion: “The Back Page” Notes

169

Bibliography Index

223

201

159

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The Novelty of Newspapers

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Introduction The Age of Newspapers

There is one species of literature which everybody reads—the daily paper. —“A Scribbler’s Apology” (1883)

N

ewspapers have come a long way since the days when horseback was the fastest means of delivery. A mounted courier might reach speeds of up to twelve miles per hour on a clear afternoon before the arrival of the train and telegraph ensured the rapid transmission of intelligence to readers everywhere. “Then the Times in the north was fresh two days after date!” recalled one journalist of the era before the railways.1 The most common reaction among those who witnessed the newspaper boom taking place throughout the nineteenth century was sheer astonishment at how quickly news had become an essential part of everyday life. Scottish journalist Alexander Innes Shand observed how the interval between issues had already shrunk during his lifetime to what Victorians felt to be their own version of today’s twenty-four-hour news cycle: There was a time when the tiny London “News-letter” was very patiently expected in the provinces, reaching its destination in days or weeks, according to circumstances. The delay of a few days up or down went for nothing; and it was just as well, when coaches or stage-waggons were continually coming to grief, and a rainfall or a snowstorm might make the roads impassable. When the sheet arrived at last, it was leisurely spelled through, and deliberately passed on, since copies were few and far between, and the subscription to it an extravagance of rank and position. Now each of the quick morningtrains drops its bundles of damp letterpress at every station. . . . Travel where you will on the iron network, you can never lag many hours behind the times.2

3

Or the “Times” for that matter: contemporaneity was the watchword of over 150 newspapers to use this title as a way of drawing in readers across Britain. In more ways than one, the phrase was a sign of the times in which audiences lived and most likely read about events in newsprint along with the thousands of other readers performing the same daily ritual. Leonard Courtney of the Daily Telegraph exaggerated only a little in warning of “newspaperised” citizens at the turn of the century: “Morning papers, evening papers, mid-week papers, week-end papers, magazines, containing newspaper articles a little prolonged, at home, in the club, in the railway carriage, or tramcar, they are always reading or talking of what they have just read.”3 The transition from Shand’s patient provincial reader to Courtney’s newspaperized urban commuter suggests at the outset that this was an age covered in and by newsprint. From the province to the metropolis, the newspaper went in a remarkably short span of time from being an item few could afford to an item few could afford to be without. It bears repeating: “you can never lag many hours behind the times.” How the arrival of the daily paper affected a society formerly accustomed to slower rhythms of publication—weekly, monthly, quarterly, and even annual—will be the concern of this book. What we think of as the age of the novel was thought of by John Stuart Mill as “the age of newspapers.”4 This book proposes that the transformation of news during the nineteenth century profoundly influenced literary narrative in ways that have yet to be recognized. The English novel during the era of the commercial press drew on news as a rival practice of realistic representation and as an authoritative form of public knowledge. Mary Braddon, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Reade, Bram Stoker, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and many other novelists all used narrative conventions borrowed from the press in their fiction. This study identifies five of these conventions—the shipping intelligence, personal advertisements, leading articles, personal interviews, and foreign correspondence—in order to show how concretely journalism influenced the novel at this time. The conventions singled out by this book illustrate how the novel’s own formal devices in many instances have been shaped in response to competing media. As we will see, these categories of the newspaper in turn changed the way novelists thought about formal aspects of their craft including voice, aesthetic distance, and, in some cases, the very grounds for realism. This book thereby challenges the assumed divide between the period’s literature and journalism, with all of its implications for the production of an idea of culture and of hierarchies of reading, by demonstrating how the newspaper was integral to the Victorian novel’s development—what this book calls “the novelty of newspapers.”

Newspapers in Different Voices Historians have made the case that our current understanding of news is a legacy of the nineteenth century. The invention of news as an explicitly

4

Introduction

commercial commodity—that is, impersonal information sold for the purposes of commerce, communication, or pleasure—marked a departure from the partisan press of an earlier era. Lucy Brown claims that the news as we understand it today was a “creation” of nineteenth-century England, and Michael Schudson argues that the American penny press of the 1830s “invented” the modern concept of news.5 Newspapers themselves had existed since the seventeenth century, and arguably well before then, but with contents unlikely to be considered news at all by modern readers. Formerly understood as romance or political commentary, news at this time acquired its status as “cheap, value-free information” designed to reach the broadest possible audience.6 Not until proprietors valued making profits over political points were nonpolitical forms of news used to increase circulation. Consequently, editorial staffs for the fi rst time began appealing to the taste of the general reader who was not interested solely in politics. The Sunday papers in Britain, like the penny press in the United States, in this regard anticipated the movement of later commercial papers toward ever more entertaining formats for news presentation.7 The newspaper industry underwent the long transition from political to commercial organ over the course of the nineteenth century. Prior to the 1830s, most newspapers were published weekly or less often, purchased largely by the elites, and identified with an explicit political stance. Early newspapers were overtly partisan if not outright mouthpieces for political parties, a status that would not change until advertising revenue enabled papers to evade party control. These are the partisan newspapers satirized by Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), in which the electors of Eatanswill watch the Blue party Gazette and Buff party Independent fi ll their columns with condemnations of the rival candidate: “Fine newspapers they were. Such leading articles, and such spirited attacks!”8 Press historians have identified the replacement of ministerial subsidies with advertising revenue in the 1830s as a crucial step in the transition from party control to editorial independence, or, as one Whiggish observer put it, “from the cold shade of official patronage into an atmosphere of independence and freedom.”9 Although the actual degree of independence achieved by the press is matter for debate, commercial newspapers increasingly pursued large readerships for sales income and, more important, to attract advertisers. Editorial opinion began to appear in a section set apart from the news once political affi liation was no longer considered by proprietors to be the most effective form of marketing. One anonymous editor’s pamphlet Journalism (1831) looked forward to the benefits of nonpartisan content in the years to come: “But the newspaper, sought and read for the sake of its news, will fi nd the way to thousands, hundreds of thousands, who would turn with disgust from the fi rst view of the party journal, party tract, or party pamphlet.”10 Even highly politicized papers were less likely to admit to formal party alliances. The Times famously declared its sovereignty through an editorial in 1834 announcing the paper’s refusal “to wait for a dole of daily intelligence at public

The Age of Newspapers

5

offices.”11 The actual measure of this editorial license is less important than the fact that papers thought it necessary to compete for readers by establishing their independence. The single most important factor driving the growth of the commercial press was the repeal of the “taxes on knowledge” designed to restrict circulation for political reasons. The removal of these taxes between 1836 and 1861 enabled proprietors to lower prices, increase size, and publish issues with greater frequency. Although numerous other factors such as improved technology, increased literacy, and urban growth contributed to the expansion, newspapers nevertheless remained out of reach for most readers until the repeal of duties made them genuinely affordable. Sociologist Paul Starr describes the sharp decline in cost at this time as an “information price revolution” whose effect on newspaper circulation anticipates the coming of modern media enterprise.12 No paper had a daily circulation of more than five thousand readers at the beginning of the century. The Times, Morning Herald, True Briton, Public Ledger, and Morning Post all maintained average circulations under seven thousand even at the height of the Napoleonic wars. By contrast, penny dailies such as the Daily Telegraph were able to reach sales of more than one hundred thousand almost overnight after the repeal of the stamp duty in 1855, and the halfpenny Daily Mail reached nearly a million readers during the Second Boer War in 1901.13 This was more than the combined circulation of all six of the leading daily papers in Britain at the mid-century. Cost was always more of an obstacle than literacy when it came to selling newspapers. One anonymous contributor to the British Quarterly Review credited the repeal of the stamp duty with ushering in “an age when journalism may be said to be as universal as air or light.”14 Victorians were consequently among the fi rst to live within a mass media environment at a time when reading the newspaper was just becoming a part of daily life.15 No longer was this pastime confi ned to those who could “do the Police in different voices” in the manner of Dickens’s talented reader of the newspaper, Mr. Sloppy.16 News reading at the beginning of the century had been a largely communal activity by which a single issue was estimated to reach upwards of twenty readers through coffeehouses and public assemblies. In 1816, for example, William Cobbett addressed the audience of the Weekly Political Register as “readers or hearers”17 (see figure I.1). Private reading would have been out of reach for all but the wealthiest individuals until the repeal of the stamp duty ushered in a century-long process by which the listening public became a reading public. As the literary episodes gathered by this book demonstrate, the decline of collective reading profoundly influenced the pace, sequence, and attention of the individual reader. Whereas G. A. Sala complained that early newspapers were written solely for the “governing classes,” few members of the general public could be found without a basic familiarity with the day’s news once reduced prices made it accessible to all classes18 (see figure I.2). Addresses to “the nation” or “the people” were little more than

6

Introduction

Figure I.1. An image of communal reading of the newspaper common at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Titled “Tap-Room Politicians. Settling the Affairs of the Nation.” Published by Laurie & Whittle, July 1795. © Trustees of the British Museum.

rhetorical flourishes until the emergence of a genuinely national press read by a substantial number of people across the country independent of class, gender, and geography. By the 1870s, the formerly luxurious newspaper had already become “a necessary of life” in the eyes of one observer for the British Quarterly Review.19 The purchase of a daily newspaper for private reading would become customary for the fi rst time in history when the number of purchasers of daily newspapers nearly quadrupled between 1880 and 1914.20 The habit had spread to such an extent by 1900 that A. E. Fletcher of the Daily Chronicle could plausibly complain, “The mass of the English people now, I am afraid, read nothing but newspapers.”21 Fletcher’s complaint has become a familiar refrain in the anxious debates concerning the influence of the press over a mass audience that have carried over from the nineteenth century into our own time.22 In fact, it would be difficult to understand debates over the influence of the media in the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries without fi rst understanding how this debate emerged in the nineteenth century in relation to the newspaper press.23 Unlike the partisan press with which the era began, the commercial press valued nonpolitical forms of news in order to reach the largest

The Age of Newspapers

7

Figure I.2. Amateur photographer J. W. Evans’s prize-winning photograph “A Bit of News,” showing a Wolverhampton farmer reading the newspaper. Published by Hazell, Watson & Viney in London, 1893. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (1757.b.20, 16). possible market. Walter Benjamin accused the press of replacing politics with curiosity as a “lure” with which to bring in as many bodies as possible for potential advertisers.24 Papers competed for these new readers through a wide range of miscellaneous items or “bric-à-brac,”

8

Introduction

as George Eliot described the interests of one journalist in Middlemarch (1871–72).25 This commercial orientation was evident in the shift from the eighteenth-century newspaper’s emphasis on foreign intelligence, parliamentary reporting, and political commentary to the broadly accessible omnium gatherum. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine described the press of the previous century as almost unrecognizable by comparison: “Reader, this was but a hundred and forty years ago. Compare the meagre dingy little sheet with a London daily paper of 1852, and marvel at the greatness of the improvement in so short a time—an improvement less notable even in size and type and general appearance, than in the nature and ability of the contents.”26 We should be suspicious of a journalist insisting on the superiority of his own era, but it was true that newspapers had changed substantially in both form and content. The papers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were as far apart as the “broad-wheel wagon” and the “railway steam carriage,” according to another journalist whose metaphors arose from the means of distribution associated with the different eras.27 Bibliographer Stanley Morison has observed that early newspapers resembled the book designed for linear, consecutive reading rather than for the casual, inattentive reading appropriate to the heterogeneous page.28 The paragraph or “par,” which would become the constituent unit of news journalism by the century’s end, was increasingly used to satisfy the demand for content ordered in brief, readable portions. Use of the crosshead to break up the closely printed columns of newsprint inherited from the era of high taxation likewise improved the versatility of papers for new readers including urban commuters. The newspaper was still developing a consistent “look” by which readers would become accustomed to a particular title. To this end, the commercial press introduced features such as explanatory headlines, personal interviews, descriptive sketches, serialized fiction, and, eventually, photography.29 Readers came to expect these features to appear at regular intervals. In other words, news reading was becoming a habit.

A Nation of News Readers Great Britain’s transformation into a “reading nation” in which virtually everyone read books, magazines, and newspapers to some extent profoundly altered the individual citizen’s relation to public life.30 The term “journalism” fi rst entered the English language through an article written by Gibbons Merle for the Westminster Review in 1833. It was a sorely needed replacement for the inadequate phrase “newspaper-writing,” which gave little sense of how influential commercial print had come to be in forming national consciousness.31 As Benedict Anderson has shown, the press brought individuals together through concurrent acts of reading that enabled them to conceive of themselves as a national body. The novel was a formal prerequisite for imagining the nation, according to Anderson’s argument, which in turn emphasizes how closely the

The Age of Newspapers

9

newspaper resembled the novel in its reliance on the literary conventions of time and space.32 Nor were these print communities strictly virtual since readers communicated with one another through advertisements, correspondence, and, after coming up for air, conversations about newsworthy events. Advised by her father to read the newspapers constantly, Maria Edgeworth described their value to authors for this very reason: “How much the circulation of newspapers as well as books contribute to give subjects of conversation in common to people in the most distant parts of different countries.”33 Reading the news was already for Edgeworth an act of virtual participation in an expanding public sphere to which most men and women had only limited access.34 The conversations taking place in the columns of the newspaper made it feel for many readers “as if the penny post sent letters open that all might be read by all,” in the words of Joseph Cowen, editor of the Newcastle Chronicle.35 The rapid expansion of the commercial press from the 1830s onward, far from eliminating communal bonds as many feared, instead provided a forum in which citizens compensated for the disappearance of face-to-face contact by forging deep attachments to one another through print. Instead of replacing vivâ voce discussion, newspapers dramatically expanded its scale.36 A number of writers responded to the growing influence of journalism by attacking its commercial or subliterary qualities. The commercial success of the newspaper industry invited skeptical accounts from Matthew Arnold, F. R. Leavis, Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams, and others proposing the decline of a privileged sphere of high seriousness, general intellectuals, and public involvement. Jürgen Habermas notably identified the newspaper press as essential to the formation of a public sphere in which a self-conscious public was able to exchange ideas. Yet Habermas perceived a slow decline during the nineteenth century from a disinterested press discussing civic issues toward a commercial enterprise interested only in profits.37 Hence the founding of Alfred Harmsworth’s Daily Mail in 1896 has repeatedly been blamed for encouraging a style closer to “skimming,” as Q. D. Leavis and others have charged, than to the sustained attention necessary for substantive deliberation.38 Not only were newspaper audiences not reading between the lines, they were not reading the lines at all. The earliest dismissals of the press anticipate the outright hostility toward journalism that would become an explicit motif of modernist authors such as T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Ezra Pound at the turn of the century. Ironically, the most intense attacks on the press were made during the very decades in which its influence was increasingly diminished by competition from other media including radio, fi lm, and television. The assumption that material produced for a large market is inevitably of inferior quality, however, overlooks compensatory gains in readership that have become the focus of recent cultural studies interested in how people make sense of news media as part of their everyday lives. Narratives of press decline rely too heavily on the projection of an

10

Introduction

undifferentiated public that would be better understood in terms of competing readerships or counterpublics.39 Resentment against the commercial success of the press has obscured how valuable newspapers were as a source of thematic and formal innovation for Victorian novelists. The devaluation of periodical writing by twentieth-century measures has tended to reinforce, rather than to scrutinize and call into question, the division between journalism and literature arising at the close of the nineteenth century.40 Studies showing affi nities between the two forms have done so largely in terms of subject matter alone by revealing how novelists exploited causes célèbres in thinly disguised retellings of adultery, divorce, and other scandals found in the press. Insofar as links have been made, scholarship has considered the most obvious or conventional connections: serial publication of novels within periodicals, newspaper items as historical background, or biographical details of authors qua journalists. Christian Johnstone’s complaint that periodical writing was regarded as the “et-cetera” of literature in 1833 may be said to persist to this day in the minds of many literary critics influenced by modernist ideas of what qualifies as literature.41 However, recent work on Victorian print culture (a field comprising book history, periodical research, and media studies) has renewed interest in the relation of ephemeral texts to other literary genres.42 Work in this interdisciplinary field approaches journalism as a subject worthy of examination in its own right rather than as mere source material. Its fi ndings offer a reminder that the anachronistic divide between journalism and literature would have made little sense at a time when much of the prose written by Victorian novelists bore some relationship to the periodical press in terms of style, subject, or source. “The journalism of one day becomes the classic literature of the next,” as a contributor to Macmillan’s insisted at the turn of the century.43 What has not been sufficiently examined is the extent to which the novel emerged out of this highly competitive literary economy pitting the two forms against each other for attention and profit. While the commercial press was displacing forums for political discussion, it was at the same time creating new ways of communicating that did not go unnoticed by the period’s novelists. The narrative conventions inherited from Victorian journalism have become such standard features of realism to this day that it is easy to forget how controversial many of them once were for readers of a different era. We need look no further for evidence of this transformation in the period’s print culture than its literary imprint left to us by novelists who struggled to read and be read amid the surge of newsprint. The novel had long rivaled the newspaper’s ability to absorb disparate materials into a single narrative, and mimicking the competition was one of the primary tactics by which novelists sought to keep their work from becoming yesterday’s news. Novelists used newspapers in a variety of ways: retelling events reported by the press; reproducing journalistic voices, styles, and features; the pastiche of news items through headlines and quotations; recording the process of news production; and, most dramatically,

The Age of Newspapers

11

portraying the individual reader’s reaction to the news. Paratextual markings such as headlines were just one of the many ways in which novelists played upon audience expectations by introducing competing layers of verisimilitude into the fictional narrative. The perceived need from within the literary sphere to distinguish between factual and fictional writing arose in part from the mutual dependence on narrative in its most fundamental sense as a way of telling a story. Journalists sound suspiciously like fiction writers when using the word “story” to describe their own craft of assembling facta bruta into intelligible narrative, a point emphasized by nineteenth-century novelists who display the methods of news production as one way of calling into question its uncritical reception by audiences. Journalistic wisdom holds that there is always a story behind the story, but novelists are the ones who bear out this claim. The very distinction between “journalist” and “novelist” would have made little sense to a generation of writers who had always moved seamlessly between these different categories. The entire body of work of a crossover author such as Dickens might be classified as journalism according to one recent study.44 Hard Times in particular combines the functions of novel and newspaper by encouraging its audience to read the fictional narrative in dialogue with the nonfictional contents of Household Words, the weekly magazine in which it fi rst appeared in serial instalments.45 This dual understanding of the novel’s generic status urges audiences to restore the novel to its original journalistic milieu in order to understand the extratextual implications of narrative events. Yet the relationship between the news and the novel is even more complex than parallel reading allows since the news is not merely supplemental in many Victorian novels but rather a constitutive element of the narrative itself. Competition with other media affected the form of the novel at a number of intertextual levels, from the inclusion of topical material to the imitation of news formats. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin have argued that such acts of “remediation,” the representation of one medium in another—here, the representation of the newspaper in the novel—always critique and refashion competing media.46 In this sense, the news was integral to the novel’s development in its provision of narrative elements that were ultimately transformed into an altogether different enterprise. Victorian novelists drew upon the news both as a means of formal innovation and as a countertext against which to define their own fictional discourse in a way familiar to us from twentieth-century fiction. The influence of the news is pronounced over fictional narrative of all lengths (short stories, novellas, triple-deckers), although it is the self-conscious genre of the novel whose identity was most at stake once the two media came into direct competition. The influence of the commercial press over the Victorian novel is dramatically apparent in fictional scenes of newspaper reading that bring British residents into contact with distant events, from a terrible shipwreck amid the East Indian seas to a trading company’s conduct along the banks of the Congo River. These scenes indicate the close relationship between Victorian journalism, on the one hand, and literary representation of the news reader,

12

Introduction

on the other. Attention to the newspaper reader on the part of novelists was one way of tapping into the reader’s changing relationship with the outside world. The presumed discrepancy between factual and fictional realms is evident in a letter Thackeray once wrote to Trollope regarding the first issue of the Cornhill: “One of our chief objects in this magazine is the getting out of novel spinning, and back into the world.”47 The scenes of reading marshaled together by this book, not to mention Thackeray’s own novels, confirm that the two spheres were not as distinct as Thackeray’s letter might lead us to believe. As we will see, reading the news is less about interiority in these scenes than about interaction with the outside world, a key factor in making the Victorian novel a genuinely cosmopolitan form. We might encounter in the pages of a Victorian novel a verbatim news report, a narrator’s paraphrase of this report, or even a dramatized scene of reading in which a character apprehends the report before our eyes. Each of these scenarios entails an appropriate orientation from the novel’s own reader. At one pole, a facsimile of the news story bids the audience’s familiarity with newspaper conventions to supply a character’s reaction in the absence of authorial commentary; at the other pole, we are bystanders before a spectacle in which access to a newspaper’s content emerges solely from the theatrical response of its imagined reader. No matter where one stands along this spectrum, the newspaper’s significance arises in each instance from its reception. What all novelistic representations recorded by this book share is an interest in capturing how the supposedly impersonal news can directly affect the emotional lives of its readers. Such scenes emphasize the markedly individual ways in which readers proceed through the newspaper according to self-interest rather than sensible layout. The personalization of news distinguished by this book takes place along two trajectories. First, private becomes public when newspaper publicity brings personal matters to the attention of a large audience (e.g., an indiscretion, an affair, a hidden past). Such is the mortifying case when Mr. Harding fi nds his supervision of a Barchester almshouse denounced by the Jupiter in Trollope’s The Warden (1855). Second, public becomes private when information available to everyone has special relevance for an isolated reader (e.g., politics, crime, accidents). We see a dramatic instance of this when Richard Phillotson discovers the headline “Strange suicide of a stone-mason’s children” concerning his estranged wife in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895).48 The pastiche of news sheds its initial resemblance to epistolary form in the latter instance since we are not privy to a private communication made public but rather to a public communication made private. The emphasis in both examples is on the reader’s response to personal information discovered in the pages of the supposedly impersonal press. Consider for a moment what a departure the newspaper reader is from the Romantic tradition of the novel reader, typically an impressionable child such as David Copperfield or Jane Eyre whose state of absorption is noteworthy for its inattentiveness to the surrounding environment. As Garrett Stewart has noted, the metatextual scene imparts credibility to

The Age of Newspapers

13

the imagined world of the novel at the very moment in which a character is absent from that world through the introspective act of reading.49 More so than any other textual device, the newspaper effectively brings into contact ordinarily separate spheres. This is grotesquely evident in the case of one elderly newspaper reader who consulted a physician because “for several mornings past, she had not been able to relish her murders.”50 There was no more plausible way for novelists to bring British residents into contact with distant events—say, a husband learning of his wife’s death in a trainwreck at Cammère—while adhering to the strictures of realism. The newspaper departs from the venerable tradition of literary solitude by bringing readers into contact with the most documentary of narrative forms. Richard Altick recognized as much in suggesting that Victorian authors used topical references drawn from the pages of the press to create an effect of contemporaneity shared among the novel’s audience.51 Scenes of reading thus generate empathy not only for the novel’s characters but also toward its other readers. If possession of a novel implies an unbridgeable aesthetic experience varying in intensity from one reader to the next, a newspaper in hand suggests a reassuring affi liation among fellow recipients who may have digested the identical contents that very morning. The novel has never been as successful in becoming reading for the breakfast table. This is not to say that novelists overlook how reading the news could at the same time set individuals apart from other members of the print community. On the contrary, novelists grasp the unique intimacy potentially available through the press, not to mention—and this is where novels and newspapers come together in their representation of the reading event— how novelistic the newspaper could be in eliciting a cathartic response. The diversity of news readers was no longer adequately represented by the patriarchal bore hidden behind a copy of The Times in his favorite armchair who had by this point become a stock figure of domestic fiction. The episodes of reading gathered together by this book instead capture the unexpectedly personal responses evoked by the supposedly impersonal newspaper among a wide range of readers: from the trauma caused by a lover’s reported suicide to the vicarious gratification felt during a celebrity interview; from the distress at fi nding one’s behavior the subject of unflattering editorial commentary to the apprehension of distant cultures through the foreign correspondence. The exhilarating range of reactions to information fi rst encountered in the newspaper will be taken up by the remainder of this book. The chapters to follow identify the ways in which Victorian novelists made use of the methods of the press, in the words of one newspaper editor, to strike the reader right between the eyes.

A Newspaperized World The chapters of this book distinguish five newspaper categories—the shipping intelligence, personal advertisement, leading article, personal

14

Introduction

interview, and foreign correspondence—that shaped the novel in key ways. These chapters have been arranged to meet the reader’s eye in the same sequence as would have met the eye of a newspaper reader in the nineteenth century. Unlike modern newspapers whose headlines announce the day’s feature stories, the typical layout of a daily newspaper from the nineteenth century consisted of advertisements on the front and back pages, in between which one found the editorial columns, correspondence, and news reports. Part I considers the newspaper’s front page, which was devoted exclusively to advertisements in most papers until the end of the century. Not news but rather a list of births, marriages, and deaths occupied the fi rst column of The Times until as late as 1966. Personal advertisements catering to a wide variety of individual needs shared the columns on the front page with a much less personal type of information, the shipping timetables. Chapter 1 on the shipping news and chapter 2 on the agony column show how novelists used these very different front-page standards to dramatic effect. Part II turns to the newspaper’s inner pages, which enclosed features typically associated with newspapers today. Hence chapters 3, 4, and 5 examine in turn the leading article, the personal interview, and the foreign correspondence as taken up and transformed by the Victorian novel. Finally, the concluding section of this book models itself after the newspaper’s back page, which printed advertisements for a range of public assemblies bringing disparate sections of the community together. Chapter 1 brings to our attention just how effective the shipping news was in exciting and distressing audiences already familiar with the widespread press coverage of ships lost at sea. Nowhere is the borrowing from newspapers by novelists so clear as in the case of shipwrecks, the most frequently reported disaster in the Victorian press. Novelists used this wildly popular feature drawn from the pages of Lloyd’s List to show the impact news had on domestic life. Although the shipping news has often been regarded as an exclusively male interest of sailors, merchants, and investors, this section of the newspaper was read with equal fervor by domestic women separated by the sea from loved ones. We know this through a remarkable sequence of parallel scenes across the nineteenth-century novel in which the revelation of private love takes place at the moment when the newspaper ensures that the heroine’s admiration will be shared by all of England. To take one dramatic example, Esther Summerson is scarcely able to read the account of Dr. Woodcourt’s shipwreck through her tears in Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53). As we will see, novelists as different as Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Charlotte Yonge all recognized the counterintuitive way in which public media enabled the expression of private feeling, a response strikingly evident on dramatic occasions such as the loss of a ship at sea. Such scenes vividly illustrate a new approach to understanding catastrophe in Victorian fiction. The reader who checked the shipping timetables on one day might search those same columns for far more personal kinds of information

The Age of Newspapers

15

on another day. Chapter 2 looks at the reading communities formed through the wants, services, and even liaisons dangereuses advertised on the newspaper’s front page. Its second column came to be known in the late nineteenth century as the “agony column” for its emphasis on personal distress, ranging from pathetic tales of runaway husbands to plaintive cries for attention from lonely hearts. Imagine coming across the following appeal on the front page of The Times in 1864: “MINE OWN HUSBAND.—For God’s sake COME BACK, and forgive me for any unkind word. You know my love: and, believe me, this absence is more than I can bear.—December 15—A.M.”52 Not all of these advertisements sought a return to grace, however. One was just as likely to come across less conciliatory declarations of grief such as the following: “HOW CRUEL. Why have you dragged me by fair words to further misery? Instead of keeping your long-promised engagement, you are off. Let the world judge between us. God forgive you.”53 Such heartfelt pleas did not escape the attention of the school of sensation novelists, who were quick to capitalize on the criminal possibilities of the most interactive section of the newspaper through an improbable number of phony marriage announcements, misreported obituaries, and unanswered missing persons inquiries among their fictional narratives. The newspaper itself acts as a form of doubling in these novels, giving illegitimate characters the opportunity to reenter society in best sellers including Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–60), Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861), and Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). More than any other work, Braddon’s novel illustrates how the newspaper could be used to begin a second life such as the one fashioned by Lady Audley after officially ending her previous identity with a forged obituary. The misuse of advertisements in these novels taps into the at once stimulating and disturbing implications of anonymity in modern life brought within everyone’s reach through the daily press. As this chapter demonstrates, audiences were not just reading about other people’s lives in the newspaper. They were using the newspaper to change their own. Chapters 3 and 4 carry us from the newspaper’s front page to its inner pages by examining two of the most controversial forms of publicity associated with the Victorian press: the leading article and the personal interview. The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of the journalist as both professional and fictional persona even though this profession would have to wait until the next century to lose its stigma as what Max Weber called a “pariah caste.”54 Use of the anonymous editorial “We” to convey the authority of the publication instead of the individual was criticized by a number of writers distressed by the growing influence of the leading article throughout the nineteenth century. The premier newspaper’s reputation as “the Thunderer” at mid-century offers just one indication of the force as well as the sheer volume of its editorial opinion. This chapter examines how Trollope’s Palliser series, from Can You Forgive Her? (1864–65) to The Duke’s Children (1879–80), challenged the impersonal authority of the newspaper by representing the journalist in

16

Introduction

propria persona, or by showing the speaker behind the anonymous voice of the leading article—what George Lewes called the “mask” concealing editorialists such as Quintus Slide from their audiences.55 Trollope’s novels ensured that publicity was applied to the one group otherwise safe from it: the journalists themselves. If too little was known about the journalist, too much was known about nearly everybody else following the fi rst uses of the personal interview among the United States in the 1860s. The English press did not adopt the practice of interviewing until the 1880s, when All the Year Round complained of a “plague of interviewing” spreading from America.56 No longer limited in meaning to a conversation between two people, the term “interview” acquired its familiar modern meaning as a conversation directed toward an absent third party. Henry James, for whom journalism had always been an invasion of privacy, wrote in his notebooks at this time of “the devouring publicity of life, the extinction of all sense between public and private” associated with the new methods of personal journalism.57 Yet James’s novels address people’s unexpected willingness to share their most intimate experiences with the journalist in a way that ran counter to the author’s own preference for impersonal narration. The best example of this peculiarly modern type is the character Selah Tarrant, of whom we are told, “The wish of his soul was that he might be interviewed.”58 The discussion of James’s The Reverberator (1888) and “The Papers” (1903) in chapter 4 suggests that the interview may be a problem whose implications reach well beyond the limited interaction with the journalist to all conversation involving the selective disclosure of information with an unseen audience in mind. Joseph Conrad undoubtedly shared his acquaintance James’s reservations about living in a “newspaperized world.”59 The closing chapter investigates the deep kinship between Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1898–99) and foreign correspondent Henry Stanley’s dispatches describing the search for Dr. Livingstone in the New York Herald and the London Daily Telegraph. Stanley’s correspondence about Africa led Conrad to distrust the newspaper as a mode of discourse and to ask how accurately readers can know events when not present, like Marlow, as a witness. The relevance of the press to this fictional narrative is evident in a 1902 letter from Conrad describing Heart of Darkness as a “wild story of a journalist who becomes manager of a station in the interior and makes himself worshipped by a tribe of savages.”60 This context gives new meaning to the fact that Kurtz writes about his “moral ideas” in the newspapers and that the oracular phrase “Live rightly, die, die . . .” is an excerpt from Kurtz’s journalism comparable in its mystifying rhetoric to the more famous words “The horror! The horror!”61 Hence Conrad’s “wild story of a journalist” is as concerned with the media through which Kurtz represents his experience in the Belgian Congo as with that experience itself, for it is the newspaper that brings Kurtz’s voice out of Africa. This book proceeds by way of a series of case studies illustrating the reciprocal relationship between the novel and the news. There is

The Age of Newspapers

17

a chronological thrust to its sequence of chapters at the same time, it should be said, since the key conventions identified by this book emerge at successive moments in history. Namely, the shipping news arising in the eighteenth century fi rst reaches a general audience in the 1840s and 1850s following the initial repeal of the taxes on the newspaper press. The title of the agony column emerges in the 1860s along with the penny press, and Trollope’s series of novels responding to the influence of the leading article in the 1860s and 1870s appears at a time when newspapers reached more readers than at any previous point in history. The press begins to use interviewing on a regular basis in Britain in the 1880s, and a number of papers refrain from recognizing the foreign correspondent with a named byline as the paper’s “own correspondent” until the 1890s. This chronology explains why the scope of this study is devoted to Victorian fiction as opposed to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. The Victorian period notably shares its boundaries with two key dates in the history of British journalism. The beginning of Victoria’s reign coincides with the removal of the fi rst taxes restricting the press to coterie audiences and comes to an end in the year in which the fi rst daily paper reached a regular circulation of over one million readers. In other words, the Victorian novel and the commercial press are siblings in both formal and chronological terms. This reciprocity was in many ways more obvious to the Victorians than it is to us, who often discount the commerce between newspapers and novels in making anachronistic aesthetic judgments.62 This traffic went in both directions, of course, although it is the influence of newspapers on fictional narratives that is the focus of this book. A central premise of this book is that many of the questions asked by today’s media studies were fi rst asked by the Victorians. Journalists of the nineteenth century raised the very question underpinning these chapters—“what is news?”—that continues to preoccupy editorial staffs in their efforts to reach “the million,” that mythic number of readers initially sought by the Victorian press and long ago surpassed by modern media enterprise.63 Victorian writers were the fi rst to describe the commodity of news less as an established thing in itself than as an imagined product still coming into being. Early parliamentary attempts to defi ne news as a taxable commodity bordered on the comic in their failure to formulate a defi nition broad enough to encompass all news publications while precise enough to include only news publications. The Select Committee on Newspaper Stamps in 1851, for example, conceded at one point in the deliberations that “a thing so undefi nable as public news” was not a fit subject for taxation.64 Subsequent debates over the cultural status of news carried out in periodicals including the Westminster Review, Quarterly Review, and Blackwood’s Magazine provide crucial antecedents to twentieth-century conceptions of the social construction of news proposed by thinkers as different in their outlooks as Walter Lippmann and Pierre Bourdieu.65 Nor should the novel’s pivotal role in the ongoing debate over what counts as news be forgotten since both media provide

18

Introduction

competing models of storytelling. Hence this book returns our attention to the time when the public were fi rst becoming newspaper readers as seen from the perspective of our own time, in which, with the advent of digital technology, we are allegedly ceasing to be newspaper readers any longer. Let us now turn to the newspaper’s front page.

The Age of Newspapers

19

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PART I

The Front Page

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1 The Shipping Intelligence Shipwrecks and Secret Tears from Dickens to Stoker

I

n Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53), Esther Summerson fi rst learns of Allan Woodcourt’s shipwreck through the newspapers. Not a word of their mutual affection has been spoken prior to Woodcourt’s departure for China; instead he leaves behind a mute bouquet of flowers, dried and preserved in a favorite book by Esther, who later admits, “Nobody knew this, not even Ada.”1 Esther reveals the romantic feelings she has hidden from her closest friend only after news of a “terrible shipwreck” in the East Indian seas. A clipping of the news story from Miss Flite’s bag of documents allows Esther to read about Woodcourt’s heroic rescue reported in papers across the country: And I did read all the noble history; though very slowly and imperfectly then, for my eyes were so dimmed that I could not see the words, and I cried so much that I was many times obliged to lay down the long account she had cut out of the newspaper. I felt so triumphant ever to have known the man who had done such generous and gallant deeds; I felt such glowing exultation in his renown; I so admired and loved what he had done; that I envied the storm-worn people who had fallen at his feet and blessed him as their preserver. I could myself have kneeled down then, so far away, and blessed him, in my rapture that he should be so truly good and brave. I felt that no one—mother, sister, wife—could honor him more than I. I did, indeed! (556) Esther reads the supposedly impersonal news report as the most intimate narrative, one scarcely legible through her tears. Now, we would expect a character as guarded as Esther to make her feelings for Woodcourt known through a discreet word to Ada Clare or even through a fi rst-person aside to the novel’s audience. Instead we get one of the most public scenes of disclosure imaginable. Esther’s self-consciousness is lost at the very

23

moment when every other reader of the newspaper is sure to share her admiration for the “gallant” hero. Only after reading the news report does Esther take the audience into her confidence with the following confession: “And now I must part with the little secret I have thus far tried to keep. I had thought, sometimes, that Mr Woodcourt loved me; and that if he had been richer, he would perhaps have told me that he loved me, before he went away” (557). Coming moments after the exuberant reaction to the shipwreck, Esther’s little secret is hardly a revelation. Victorian novelists repeatedly fashioned scenes in which an indifferent public comes to share a heroine’s love after reading about a shipwreck in the newspapers. Esther’s response to the shipping news is one of a sequence of parallel scenes in which the revelation of private love, by a heroine who feels certain that no one else will share her feelings, takes place at the very moment when the newspaper ensures that the heroine’s admiration will be shared by all of England. A public incapable of various kinds of empathy would almost certainly have been susceptible to the strong feelings aroused by disasters at sea, as was Shakespeare’s Miranda while watching a shipwreck involving passengers she had never met: “O, I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer!”2 The hero’s sudden transformation into a celebrated public figure by the shipping news enables the heroine to declare formerly hidden feelings in a way no less remarkable. Until that precarious moment, the heroine imagines those around her to be incapable of comprehending her inner life, but so widespread was public empathy for shipwrecks reported in the newspapers that the heroine at last was assured of the compassion necessary to express her hidden feelings. As unique as her case may be, Esther Summerson was in reading the newspaper performing the same act as countless other readers across the country. Although the shipping news has often been regarded as an exclusively male interest of sailors, merchants, and investors, this section of the newspaper was read with equal fervor by domestic women separated from loved ones by the sea3 (see figure 1.1). These women readers of the shipping news formed an unlikely interpretive community that illustrates the unexpectedly personal ways in which the newspaper was being read at this time.4 Novelists as different as Dickens, Jane Austen, Charlotte Yonge, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker all recognized the counterintuitive way in which public media could enable the expression of private feeling, a response strikingly evident on dramatic occasions such as the loss of a ship at sea. The impersonal shipping intelligence on such occasions could be the newspaper’s most affective narrative. The novels gathered together by this chapter confi rm as much in fictional scenes of wives, lovers, and secret admirers reading about shipwrecked men from whom they have been separated, or, in the cases of women such as Esther, for whom they have been unable to acknowledge their affection at all. The sections to follow show how this unspoken intimacy fi nds its voice in the heroine’s reading of the newspaper, which often served as the only acceptable means of remaining in contact with the distant hero until involvement in a shipwreck turned him into a public figure.

24

The Front Page

Figure 1.1. The male readership of Lloyd’s Merchants’ Room at the Royal Exchange. From the Illustrated London News (7 October 1854): 333. © Illustrated London News / Mary Evans Picture Library.

The Latest Shipping Intelligence The nineteenth century had none of the twentieth century’s confidence in unsinkable vessels. Long before publicity surrounding the Titanic— Henry Adams confessed to feeling a “delightful shudder” following news of that wreck—disasters at sea were recorded in broadsides, chapbooks, magazines, and, with increasing prominence, newspapers.5 Many shipwrecks fi rst known to nineteenth-century audiences through the press are still known to us today. One wreck is especially familiar to modern audiences through Géricault’s famous painting The Raft of the Medusa (1819), which takes as its subject an accident with which few news readers at the time would have been unacquainted. In 1816, the French frigate La Méduse struck a reef off the West African coast. Life boats could accommodate only 250 of the 400 people aboard the ship. The captain and senior officers seized the boats before abandoning those left behind to an overcrowded raft built from lashed masts and beams. The majority of these passengers died from illness, starvation, and a violent mutiny. Desperate survivors at one point devoured a butterfly that landed on the mast, according to Dickens’s description of the scene for Household Words: “Upon this raft, every conceivable and inconceivable

The Shipping Intelligence

25

horror, possible under the circumstances, took place.”6 Over one hundred passengers boarded the raft. The number of survivors dwindled to thirty after four days; twenty-seven after one week; and just fi fteen after two weeks at sea. Notoriously, survivors shoved sick passengers overboard in order to preserve rations before ultimately resorting to cannibalism. The scandalous story became known to the public through a survivor’s account published in the Journal des Débats, dispatches reported in the Moniteur Universel, and reports printed in The Times.7 Géricault’s painting—entered in the Salon of 1819 catalogue as “Scène de Naufrage” (“Scene of Shipwreck”)—was shown in London to the general public for six months in 1820. This sensational wreck by itself, however, gives little indication of the vast number of shipwrecks occurring each year. Nowhere were shipping accidents more visible than in the pages of the daily press, in which shipwrecks were the most regularly reported disaster for most of the nineteenth century. In The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Joseph Conrad recalls how he still followed former ships in the newspapers years after retirement: “Often I turn with melancholy eagerness to the space reserved in the newspapers under the general heading of ‘Shipping Intelligence.’ I meet there the names of ships I have known. Every year some of these names disappear—the names of old friends.”8 Reading through the categories “Wrecks and Casualties,” “Overdue,” and “Missing” leads Conrad to speculate about what happened to these lost ships. In his words: “The unholy fascination of dread dwells in the thought of the last moments of a ship reported as ‘missing’ in the columns of the Shipping Gazette.”9 The shipping news, which began as a fi nancial service to investors before obtaining official status with the publication of Lloyd’s List in the late seventeenth century, was by Conrad’s time attracting audiences interested less in lost profits than in lost lives. It was as if audiences compensated for the objectivity of the shipping news by projecting an increasingly affective private response to its reports. The commercial press succeeded in converting the shipping intelligence into an item of national interest at a time when a genuinely national press was only just beginning to emerge. Now anybody could read about a wreck in all the major papers, sold on the street by news vendors trying to capture the crowd’s attention with cries of “terrible shipwreck!” The newspaper’s shipping intelligence began at a coffeehouse according to the well-known story of Lloyd’s of London.10 (The fi rm’s connection to Dickens began in 1827 when Lloyd’s awarded the sum of ten guineas to his father for a series of articles on marine insurance.) In the late seventeenth century, Lloyd’s Coffee House was a meeting place for mariners, merchants, speculators, and ship owners to conduct business and to gather the latest intelligence from London’s waterfront community—often little more than chance sightings passed from ship to ship by “speaking,” or exchanging information across decks while at sea. In 1734, Lloyd’s began assembling information about voyages, vessels, crews, stock prices, and other miscellaneous items into a regular news-sheet. Scarcely an issue of Lloyd’s List after the eighteenth century fails to report ships sunk, lost,

26

The Front Page

or damaged. Casualty reports became more extensive every year in “The Marine List,” a collection of telegrams from correspondents located in various ports around the world. In 1801, Lloyd’s List was a single sheet describing wrecks with disquieting brevity in dispatches such as this one: “The Lighthorse, Dresser, from Baltimore to Bremen, is wrecked near Solway Firth.”11 The correspondent provides no additional commentary about the causes or consequences of the wreck. The following correspondence from 1823 shows how much the shipping reports had already expanded by that time: Aberdeen, 7th Jan.: The gale is now over, but never do I remember one that lasted so long at SE.—The Elizabeth of Boston, and the Russian Ship Eolus, from Gamla Carlby to Lisbon, are all on pieces on the coast; the Crew of the latter except one, are saved, they having come on shore on part of her deck. The Elizabeth’s Crew it is feared are lost, as the sea has been dreadful.12 This report moves beyond the mere name of the vessel to give a brief narrative displaying what historian Michael Harris calls the “compressed force” typical of early shipping correspondence.13 The correspondent’s memories of past gales and concerns for the missing crew reveal a distinctly personal voice in comparison with the spare description of the Lighthorse. What began as brief dispatches in the trade papers eventually grew into detailed narratives spanning several columns in the popular papers. Correspondents were given the opportunity to “grow eloquent upon the state of the wind” in such dispatches, as one contemporary observed.14 It was not long before the commercial dailies made Lloyd’s correspondence available to general audiences under the regular headings “Shipping News” or “Shipping Intelligence.” Nineteenth-century newspapers listed front-page advertisements for departing vessels and maintained regular columns for Lloyd’s correspondence. The papers offered commentary about a number of accidents mentioned only briefly in the statistical charts, and particularly severe accidents were often supplemented by eyewitness statements, survivor testimonies, judicial inquiries, and editorial commentary. The graphic weeklies even provided illustrations of major shipwrecks (see figure 1.2). Coverage of an especially severe storm extended across several sections of the newspaper at once. Hence readers could follow the great storm of October 1842 through the “Ship News” column of The Times, stacking wreck upon wreck in eighteen cities across Britain and other parts of the world: BRIDLINGTON, Oct. 25.—The Ellen and Ann, of Berwick, is wrecked on Sherringham Shoal; crew saved. HULL, Oct. 26.—The Fanny, bound to St. Petersburgh, is aground on the Holm Sand, but expected off if the weather moderates. YARMOUTH, Oct. 26.—The Don, from Stockton to London, struck on Newcombe Sand last night, and sank; crew saved.15

The Shipping Intelligence

27

Figure 1.2. The emigrant ship John wrecked on the Manacles off the coast of Cornwall. From the Illustrated London News (19 May 1855): 476. © Illustrated London News / Mary Evans Picture Library.

Readers not satisfied with this list could learn more about individual wrecks by proceeding to the eyewitness letter titled “Shipwreck, and Strange Story of the Survivors” or “The Late Dreadful Storm,” which is little more than a narrative version of the above list guiding readers through the details of each wreck.16 Here we fi nd the personal stories not mentioned by the impersonal list, including the “truly miraculous” survival of a Dundee schooner’s twelve passengers rescued by a lifeline thrown from the beach.17 As one might expect from a section of the newspaper originally conceived as a service to investors, the last line of this otherwise sentimental story records the vessel’s insurance value at eight hundred pounds. Not even the insurance industry’s scrupulous accuracy in documenting accidents could eliminate the mystique of a ship lost at sea, however. The ambivalent voice of the shipping news combined disinterested factual description with thrilling human interest stories, and it is precisely this tension that shows up again in the use of the shipping news by novelists. Storms, thunder, and lightning were an effective way to provoke audiences no matter what the genre. George Eliot confi rmed as much in one letter written after a trip to the theater: “But to my mind it is execrable moral taste to have a storm and shipwreck with all its horrors on the stage. I could only scream and cover my eyes.”18 The impersonal voice of the newspaper press, a mode of narration equally suited to the sobriety of marine insurance corporations as to the sensationalism of police courts, in no way diminished the shipwreck “with all its horrors.” In

28

The Front Page

fact, shipwreck journalism owed much of its broad appeal to the tension between the two discourses. Writing about the shipping industry is an important category of the “fi nancial journalism” identified by Mary Poovey as a new style of writing in the British press during the 1840s noteworthy for its organization of numerical information into narrative forms taken from contemporary fiction.19 Newspaper statistics allowed for the unfl inching assessment of damage to the cargo while at the same time its narrative permitted readers to indulge in the emotional trauma of a wreck. Unlike notoriously unreliable survivor narratives, the stories in the newspaper were likely to be told from the outside perspective of a reporter able to draw upon the testimony of expert witnesses. George Landow describes how shipwreck imagery from the late eighteenth century onward underwent a transition from a Christian to post-Christian framework of interpretation marked by the attribution of responsibility to external forces rather than to the fallen individual: “One might say that whereas the traditional shipwreck takes place in the presence of God, it is precisely the point of the modern one that it occurs in His absence.”20 The newspaper’s detachment discouraged a tendency to allegorize the meaning of catastrophe in divine terms, instead inviting readers to suspend moral judgment and appreciate the sheer spectacle of the shipwreck.21 John Fowles has argued that this critical distance is in fact a prerequisite for the public’s fascination with catastrophe.22 The peculiarly distanced consumption of news thus changed the way readers responded to accidents at sea. The visibility, if not the vividness, of the shipping news made even distant readers feel as if shipwrecks directly affected their lives. Reports in The Times and the Illustrated London News of a tremendous storm off the English coast, for example, inspired Gerard Manley Hopkins to write his famous shipwreck poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland” in 1875. Hopkins was at St. Beuno’s College, Wales, high on a hillside overlooking the valley of the Clwyd, when he read about the Deutschland foundering upon the sands of the Kentish Knock.23 Hopkins did not actually see the event but read about it in the newspapers, as the poem’s speaker reminds us: Away in the loveable west, On a pastoral forehead of Wales, I was under a roof here, I was at rest, And they the prey of the gales.24 The poem’s intensity makes it easy for us to forget the speaker’s location until Hopkins refers to his own safety back in Wales. Hans Blumenberg suggests that the empathy called forth by a shipwreck narrative often makes spectators forgetful of their own distance from the event: Only after the fact is one assured that the spectator position with regard to the most dreadful disaster has not been abandoned and can be maintained. The spectator’s participation in the experience is

The Shipping Intelligence

29

assumed to be so intensive that it is as though he has to be reminded that he is not personally involved; to this extent, the reader’s surprise is the artificial correlate of the author’s pretended intensity of experience.25 Hopkins may not witness the event, but he is an intensely involved reader. Afterward, he wrote to his mother asking for more news clippings of the Deutschland disaster, about which he writes, “It made a deep impression on me, more than any other wreck or accident I ever heard of.”26 Hopkins later referred to sections of his shipwreck poems as “mere Lloyd’s Shipping Intelligence” unless properly read, but, as his own response demonstrates, the shipping news itself could be intensely moving, even for a reader miles away from the wreck.27 Newspaper readers could see for themselves that casualties were increasing alongside growth in the shipping trade. William Wordsworth, for example, was just one among hundreds of mourners when his brother’s ship The Earl of Abergavenny sank in Weymouth Bay in 1805.28 All the Year Round estimated that nearly a thousand ships were lost off the coast of Britain every year, and in 1858, the Quarterly Review calculated this number to be nearly a third of shipwrecks throughout the world.29 The port of Tyne alone lost 272 ships in one four-year stretch.30 The newspaper’s shipping intelligence reflected Britain’s status at this time as the world’s principal maritime nation. Shipping companies based in Britain operated nearly half of the world’s carrying capacity at sea after 1850. Ships switched from carrying luxury goods to mass goods for much of the population. International trade affected the everyday lives of greater numbers of people during this period than at any previous point in history, according to historian R. H. Thornton.31 More people than ever before were in daily contact with the shipping industry, either through commerce, print, or the products they used in everyday life, and they were aware of the increase in maritime casualties as a serious issue. Parliament appointed the fi rst Select Committee on Shipwrecks in 1836 in response to an increase in the number of accidents during the preceding decades. This report estimated shipwrecks to be responsible for over two million pounds of damage and the loss of nearly a thousand lives each year. The committee identified ten principal causes: inappropriate design, defective construction, deficient repair, inadequate equipment, excessive loads, imperfect charts, negligent insurance, insufficient harbors, incompetency, and drunkenness.32 However, recommendations for improved professional standards were not acted on for decades, leaving conditions until then much the same as they had been a century earlier. Numerous journalists followed Samuel Plimsoll’s lead in condemning “slop-built” ships, “coffi n-ships,” and “sea-coffi ns,” overinsured vessels whose loss was more profitable for the owners than safe arrival.33 Parliamentary measures may have reduced the risk of losing one’s life at sea throughout the century, but increasingly visible press headlines made it feel otherwise.

30

The Front Page

Why Victorian Heroines Read the Shipping News The Edinburgh Review noticed the intimate connection between newspapers and shipwrecks as early as 1835: “Every one who reads the newspapers—and who does not?—has every now and then his feelings painfully touched by accounts of shipwrecks.”34 As the previous sections indicate, the shipping news had become a popular feature in trade newspapers such as Lloyd’s List as well as most metropolitan dailies by the nineteenth century. The Times regularly reprinted the “Latest Shipping Intelligence” with detailed subcategories announcing “Home Sailings,” “Foreign Arrivals,” and “Wrecks and Casualties.” Exceptional wrecks appeared in a column of their own under the crosshead “Disasters at Sea.” The Illustrated London News began publishing an annual list of shipping casualties at the mid-century, and one journalist recalled in 1874 that when the survivors of the Cospatrick shipwreck arrived at Plymouth, “nearly all the newspapers in England seemed to be eager to be the fi rst to interview them.”35 The thrilling stories reported in the shipping news reached far beyond London financial circles. Even the rural characters in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) had their feelings painfully touched by chapel-members’ prayers about “shipwracks in the newspaper.”36 Fictional adaptations of the shipping news show how attentive novelists had become toward this journalistic genre with which their own narratives were often in competition.37 Unlike earlier tales of adventure, nineteenth-century novels show as much interest in the familiarity as in the singularity of shipwrecks, consumed as they were on an almost daily basis through the press. A number of Victorian novelists depart from conventional fi rst- or third-person narration used in classic shipwreck stories such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). Instead, these authors use the shipping news directly within their novels, a style of literary pastiche incorporating the news story verbatim, headlines and all, into the fictional narrative or even presenting characters in the act of reading newspaper accounts of a wreck. These novels remove the shipping intelligence from newsprint’s miscellany by resituating it within dramatic scenes showing its impact on individual lives. Pronounced physical reactions—shock, shudders, gasps, and tears—emphasize that these are not generic readers but rather individuals who fi nd their lives instantly and irrevocably altered by the intelligence reported in the daily paper. No document could more effectively excite and distress audiences already familiar with press coverage of ships lost at sea. The broad appeal of disasters at sea is apparent in a sequence of heroines who are among the shipping intelligence’s most devoted readers. Close attention to nineteenth-century fiction suggests that domestic women with limited opportunities to enter public life read the shipping columns for news of loved ones at sea with whom they had little contact outside the pages of the newspaper. Many readers with no fi nancial investment in the shipping industry were nonetheless emotionally

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invested in the safety of its ships, whose status could be followed on a regular basis in the newspaper without need to leave home or, in the cases examined here, to make known an otherwise hidden affection. Unlike the male readers who scan the shipping news for commercial opportunity in Stevenson’s The Wrecker (1892), women readers such as Mina Murray in Dracula (1897) invariably care solely for the ship’s passengers. Mina, who pastes into her journal shipwreck articles cut from the Whitby Dailygraph, reads the shipping news with thoughts about the homeward voyage of her fiancé Jonathan Harker, who has written only a single line announcing his departure from Castle Dracula.38 Like other prospective widows, Mina can do little besides read the shipping news for consolation that her lover was not aboard the shipwrecked Demeter: “Somehow I felt glad that Jonathan was not on the sea last night, but on land. But, oh, is he on land or sea? Where is he, and how? I am getting fearfully anxious about him. If I only knew what to do, and could do anything!”39 Mina’s anxiety has reached the point where even a newspaper article not mentioning her fiancé’s name has value as part of a desperate process of elimination. The shipping news reached a small number of women readers even before the repeal of the taxes on the press made this intelligence available to audiences across the nation. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1817), Anne Elliot has contact with Captain Frederick Wentworth for years through navy lists and newspapers alone. In what may be the novel’s most romantic gesture, she follows his movements through the press despite the lapse of correspondence between them after a rejected marriage proposal. Social decorum, family pressure, and personal regret prevent Anne from telling anyone, even her confidante Lady Russell, of her enduring affection for Captain Wentworth. The newspaper’s naval intelligence publicly confirms the merit Anne had seen in Wentworth all along. However, she does not know how close she came to reading about Captain Wentworth’s death at sea in 1807 until he tells the drawing room audience about a powerful gale at Plymouth that forced him to abandon his vessel: “Four-and-twenty hours later, and I should only have been a gallant Captain Wentworth, in a small paragraph at one corner of the newspapers; and being lost in only a sloop, nobody would have thought about me.”40 Wentworth knows that the attentive Miss Musgroves will hotly deny the complaint even if he is unaware of how deeply the image affects Anne, who would certainly have come across this minor intelligence in her determined search for information about her former admirer. Captain Wentworth’s hypothetical death indicates how emotionally charged such reading could be, even when it concerns “only a sloop.” Anne does not read about his shipwreck in the newspapers, however, saving her from having to express the emotion that she, unlike the Miss Musgroves, is able to conceal at the mention of its possibility: “Anne’s shudderings were to herself, alone: but the Miss Musgroves could be as open as they were sincere, in their exclamations of pity and horror.”41 As strange as it may sound, a disaster at sea might have been the best possible outcome for these distant lovers. Reading about Wentworth’s

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narrow escape would have elicited from Anne feelings that remain suppressed for eight long years without the stimulus of a shipwreck. The rapid expansion of the commercial press from the 1830s onward, far from eliminating the communal bonds of Austen’s tightly knit community as many feared, instead provided a forum in which citizens compensated for the disappearance of face-to-face contact by forging deep attachments to one another through print. Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities” arising through print capitalism suggests just how impassioned these attachments could be.42 Novels and newspapers accustomed readers to a sense of time and space that would eventually enable their collective investment in an idea of nationhood. As Anderson described it: “Behind Jane Austen’s English social space was the ticking of thousands of inaudible, coordinated clocks.”43 Anderson’s emblematic figure for this new sense of national space is the newspaper reader, who follows the news along with countless other unseen readers.44 If Franco Moretti is right in suggesting that Austen’s heroines were among the fi rst to discover a sense of “relative distance,” one that is measurable and to some degree subject to the observer’s control, then their sentimental interpretation of the very separation implied by the newspaper offers one of the most compelling explanations for the proximity of the marriage listings to the shipping intelligence on the front page.45 In the case of readers such as Anne, the simultaneous reception of the shipping news mattered as much as the press’s sympathetic identification with shipwreck victims. Anne’s familiarity with naval officers she has never met in person represents one kind of national affi nity with fellow citizens. We might be tempted to take Anne’s intimate knowledge of naval vessels gathered from the newspapers as a sign of budding nationalistic fervor were it not probable that she would follow any ship manned by Captain Wentworth, be it English, American, or, difficult as it may be to conceive, French. Thus it was not merely the “Englishness” of shipwreck victims that drew sympathy, although compassion for England’s shipwrecks did generate widespread enthusiasm for tales of heroism that could be subsumed by novelists into ostensibly apolitical tales of courtship. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) illustrates how difficult it could be for most people separated by the sea to maintain any sort of contact. Much of the material for this novel was drawn from Gaskell’s experience in Whitby nearly four decades before Stoker’s use of this same seaside town as the setting for the shipwreck in Dracula. Gaskell’s novel is set in the whaling town of Monkshaven in the 1790s during the Napoleonic Wars. The Monkshaven whalers spend six months of every year in the Greenland seas “as if dead from all news of those they loved.”46 The women remain on shore without knowing whether their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons are alive or dead until the ships return half a year later to resolve their questions: “Whose bones had been left to blacken on the gray and terrible icebergs? Who lay still until the sea should give up its dead? Who were those who should come back to Monkshaven never, no, never more?” (23). Even the memorials in the Monkshaven churchyard

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reflect the uncertainty surrounding deaths abroad with provisional epitaphs including “Supposed to have perished in the Greenland seas” (63). The absence of reliable information about loved ones at sea explains the almost compulsive behavior of those left behind who console themselves by “gazin’, gazin’ nor’ards over t’ sea,” in Daniel Robson’s words (53). Sylvia Robson’s engagement to Charley Kinraid, the specksioneer or chief harpooner of a whaling boat, places her in a similar position of dependency on the whaling boats as the other women in Monkshaven. The engagement is to be kept secret until Kinraid earns a sufficient income from his next whaling expedition aboard the Urania. The two lovers will not be able to communicate during the ship’s absence. Kinraid even warns Sylvia beforehand that there will be “ne’er a chance of a letter reaching yo’ just to tell yo’ once again how I love yo’, and to bid yo’ not forget yo’r true love” (182). The heroine’s isolation is painfully apparent when her cousin Philip Hepburn lies about witnessing Kinraid’s unlawful impressment into naval service in order to pressure Sylvia into marriage against her wishes. Philip’s gambit relies on the fact that the specksioneer will be out of contact for years if not killed in service. The Robson family’s geographic isolation on a Yorkshire farm is what enables this precursor of the Enoch Arden plot to take place at all. Not knowing her fiancé’s fate is almost intolerable for the heroine. Gazing out to sea for some glimmer of recognition becomes Sylvia’s most characteristic pose even after her marriage to Philip. Sylvia’s isolation suggests how valuable the shipping news will be to a later generation of women once the newspaper press expands to reach provincial readers. Otherwise Sylvia perceives only one way to find out what happened: “Oh! if I were but dead that I might know all!” (296). The disparity between Anne Elliott and Sylvia Robson in terms of class and geography explains the relevance of the restricted circulation of the press prior to the Victorian period. Whereas Anne has regular access to naval intelligence, Sylvia has little exposure to reading material other than the Old Testament. The isolated Yorkshire farm’s only contact with the press comes when Philip Hepburn reads aloud a weekly paper from York to the Robson family. The contrasting reception given to the paper’s contents by father and daughter illustrates two very different ways of reading the news. Daniel enjoys listening to reports of the war against the French despite having little understanding of the dispute. Bell and Sylvia prefer domestic matters closer to home: “the stealing of a few apples out of a Scarborough garden that they knew, was of far more interest to them than all the battles of Nelson and the North” (92). The two imagined communities differ in scale between Daniel’s “John Bullish” interest in Britain and Sylvia’s interest in Yorkshire (92). The extent of Sylvia’s interest in affairs of state is clear enough when she falls asleep in the middle of Philip’s reading. The abstract events reported by the newspaper fail to draw in Sylvia as effectively as an actual shipwreck later in the novel brings the community together in an attempt to rescue the victims. Gaskell’s historical novel depicts an era in which small circulations and a preponderance of foreign intelligence limit the capacity of the press to act as a virtual

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community on behalf of its readership. Sylvia’s distinctly personal interest in the impersonal news is shown instead when Kinraid’s marriage announcement appears in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The matrimonial intelligence delivers, in Sylvia’s words, “a shake in my heart” that enables her to recognize for the fi rst time the public image of Kinraid of which she had long been warned (429). Even a barely literate reader could be an effective close reader on such occasions. Sylvia’s reception of the news offers a rare glimpse into the interior life of a heroine who has seldom spoken to anyone about her secret engagement. This brief exposure to the marriage announcements suggests the force such intelligence would have in the decades to come for other women with access to the press. Charlotte Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) offers a stark contrast to the preceding narratives by showing how effective news of a disaster at sea could be in reconciling two wrongfully separated lovers. Amabel Edmonstone has been forbidden by her parents to communicate with her fiancé, Guy Morville, whose character has been called into question by the unfounded allegations of his cousin Philip Edmonstone. Guy does not recover his reputation until a heroic rescue at Redclyffe’s Shag Stone reef wins him the esteem of the entire community. However, it is not clear how the news will affect Amabel’s family at Hollywell until she comes across a description of the shipwreck in the newspaper under the heading “Redclyffe Bay.” This allows her to reestablish contact in an entirely permissible way despite the interdiction given by her parents. Amabel’s reaction to the news under the watchful eyes of her brother Charles is markedly different from the restraint shown by Anne Elliot: She pointed to the place, gave the paper into his hand, and burst into tears, the gush of triumphant feeling. Not one was shed because she was divided from the hero of the shipwreck; they were pure unselfish tears of joy, exultation, and thankfulness. Charles read the history, and she listened in silence; then looked it over again with him, and betrayed how thoroughly she had been taught the whole geography of Redclyffe Bay.47 Amabel is no longer divided from the hero of the shipwreck once the newspaper brings her back into contact with him. Yonge’s narrator even intercedes at this point in the narrative to clarify that the heroine’s tears are the somatic expression of sympathy rather than indulgent self-pity.48 She does not speak Guy’s name but only points to it in print, allowing the newspaper to say what she has been trying to tell her family all along. The news story fashions Guy into a public figure no longer susceptible to injurious private allegations. More important, this public approval conferred by the press eventually leads to the reconciliation of the two families once Amabel’s father is convinced of Guy’s character after reading the report. Charles even writes to ask for further details of Guy’s “gallant” conduct— the very term used by Captain Wentworth to express the public’s delight in reading about naval heroes.

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While the plots of Austen and Yonge use shipwrecks to great romantic effect, the deaths of James Steerforth in Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) and Paul Emanuel in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) offer vivid reminders of how improbable it was for shipwrecks outside the pages of the newspaper to end in marriage. David has little idea when he witnesses a wreck off the coast of Yarmouth that the red-capped figure astride the mast is his childhood friend Steerforth.49 Unlike the public figures valorized in the shipping news, Steerforth does not redeem himself by an act of heroism for Emily Peggotty but dies along with his would-be rescuer Ham. The sight of Steerforth lying on the shore evokes a schoolboy memory available only to David, whose private grief sets him apart from the crowd of mariners watching the wreck. David’s case is exceptional in that he witnesses the wreck fi rsthand, unlike the vast majority of readers who had little chance of encountering a wreck outside newsprint. David’s exposure to the tragedy resolves the Steerforth relationship in a way that would almost have been enviable to Lucy Snowe, whose narrative ends with resignation to an uncertain widowhood. Lucy Snowe’s grief is all the more poignant for her awareness of the union lost when Paul Emanuel disappears in a seven-day storm that sinks ships across the Atlantic. As Brontë acknowledged in a letter to her publisher, marriage and drowning are “the fearful alternatives” for Lucy, who concludes the tale without disclosing Paul’s fate.50 Unlike David, who witnesses Steerforth’s death, she can only assume that Paul has drowned. Lucy evokes the figure of the isolated widow gazing out to sea that had become a familiar motif of Romantic women poets and would later figure so prominently in Sylvia’s Lovers and Tennyson’s Enoch Arden (1864). With no confirmation of Paul’s death, however, Lucy leaves optimistic readers to imagine the ensuing marriage should Paul survive the shipwreck: “Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of rescue from peril, the wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return. Let them picture union and a happy succeeding life.”51 Lucy recognizes the consolation marriage provides after crisis, as shown by this sequence of imagined emotional states, though she leaves to others the happy union of which she can only dream. In fact, catastrophe leading to marriage is the unexpected pattern found among Victorian novels in which heroines read about shipwrecked lovers. Marriage inevitably follows the crisis of shipwreck with the promise of stability and happy union—the “joy born again fresh out of great terror” that Lucy Snowe, as she looks out to sea, can only imagine sharing with Paul Emanuel. Optimistic readers should hope that she will one day read about him in the newspaper.

Shipwreck Spine Shipwreck narratives become elements of the courtship plot in the Victorian novel in a way that would have been unthinkable for railway accidents, that other category of spectacular disasters covering the pages

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of the press from the mid-century. Railway accidents were perceived to be exceptionally severe even though shipwrecks accounted for more casualties each year. Wolfgang Schivelbusch attributes this difference in perception to the nature of the “technological accident,” suggesting that people were not yet accustomed to thinking about the potential risks (derailment, collision, explosion) of train travel.52 At least one passenger quoted by the Illustrated London News made a distinction between railway accidents and those involving earlier modes of transport: “If . . . you gets comfortably capsized in a ditch by the roadside, there you are! but if you gets blown up by an engine, run into a cutting, or off an embankment, where are you?”53 A leading article in The Times reported that more than half of all casualties resulting from railway accidents in 1851 were the result of collisions.54 As technology became more efficient, so did the severity of its accidents. Preindustrial accidents were associated primarily with natural events (storms or icebergs, for instance) infl icted from the outside; industrial accidents associated with the steam engine arose primarily from internal threats whereby the apparatus destroyed itself by means of its own power. The literary tradition of associating ships with organic wind power persisted long after the transition to steam had been made, but the railway from its inception was seen as a machine. Two additional distinctions help explain the contrasting reception given to disasters on land and at sea. First, shipwrecks generally affected professional sailors instead of passengers. By contrast, the toppling of a Shrewsbury and Hereford Railway car into a frozen lake was taken by The Times as a sign that the hazards of travel were no longer limited to tradesmen: What incidents these to make us shiver at our Christmas fi resides! In the heart of this comfortable country, and in the great highway of all the world, with no more thought of danger than as we sit at church or walk in the Strand, we suddenly fi nd ourselves in situations more dreadful than any encountered by soldier, by sailor, by miner, or Arctic discoverer.55 Shipwrecks generally took place away from public view, where victims could literally disappear beneath the waves, sometimes leaving behind no trace that a wreck had taken place at all. Not so for train wrecks, whose risks were all too conspicuous. It was the proximity of a railway accident in Abergele that most worried the Saturday Review: “Few of us know anything of mines and powder-mills and ships foundering at sea. These things are but as distant tales and impersonal histories to most people. But we are all railway travellers.”56 In this sense, the Victorians were not all maritime travelers—even if vicarious readers of the shipping news from Esther Summerson to Mina Harker might disagree. Second, survivors gave little indication of suffering from any serious aftereffects following a shipwreck. The fi rst medical discourse explicitly concerned with trauma, previously described only as a “nervous

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condition,” arose from the study of railway accidents, not shipwrecks. One passenger whose train derailed near Oxford in 1858 complained at the inquest of seeing the ghostly faces of fellow passengers while trying to work, and Charles Dickens famously suffered from “sudden vague rushes of terror” after the derailment of his train outside Staplehurst in 1865.57 In the 1860s, Thomas Buzzard, William Camps, and John Erichsen examined victims who suffered from a variety of physical disorders despite not having received physical injuries in the collision—a condition originally diagnosed as “railway spine.”58 Although all three agreed that the violence of rail collision exceeded that of previous types of accidents, the violence of the impact was less responsible for the shock than its unexpectedness. In 1875, Erichsen proposed a distinction between accidents in which passengers were able to brace themselves for impact and train collisions in which passengers were caught by surprise: “It must be remembered that railway accidents have this peculiarity, that they come upon the sufferers instantaneously without warning, or with but a few seconds for preparation, and that the utter helplessness of a human being in the midst of the great masses in motion renders these accidents peculiarly terrible.”59 The protracted approach to a shipwreck presumably enabled passengers to anticipate danger and prepare for its impact, whereas the crash of the train came without warning. The suddenness of this impact has particular relevance for disaster narratives since it eliminates one of the genre’s most popular conventions: a hero. The speed and severity of railway accidents remove the consolatory role played by heroic rescue in the aftermath of a shipwreck. The technological accident takes away the very chance to control one’s own fate, for there is little room for individual daring among the wreckage of the railway (see figure 1.3). Nicholas Daly has argued that the industrial accident happens in “machine time,” a pace too rapid for human intervention, and it is telling that the railway rescue in its iconic image—the hero delivering to safety an incapacitated victim lying on the rail tracks—happens moments before the accident, whereas shipwreck heroics take place after impact, during the vessel’s slow capsize or foundering upon the rocks.60 The temporary disappearance of passengers “lost at sea” or “missing” even provided the perfect narrative delay for romantic complications to develop. To see the difference between the two types of accident, one has only to contrast the account of Woodcourt’s heroism in Bleak House with railway accidents reported by the press in Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861) and Mary Braddon’s John Marchmont’s Legacy (1863). Lady Isabel Vane and Edward Arundel survive railway accidents only to emerge unrecognizable to those who knew them, physically and psychologically altered by the experience in a way that does not seem to have affected their shipwreck counterparts—at least there was no equivalent “shipwreck spine” described by Victorian novelists. By contrast, Vane’s and Arundel’s rail accidents both end marriages. They are survivors in the modern, technological sense of the term, traumatized and alienated from sympathetic readers who have given them up for dead. There is none of the optimism

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Figure 1.3. The removal of casualties from the burning wreckage of a railway disaster at Thorpe. Subtitled “Extricating the Dead and Wounded.” From the Illustrated London News (19 September 1874): 261. © Illustrated London News / Mary Evans Picture Library. in these narratives held forth to readers by Lucy Snowe. It would have been absurd for novelists to show a widow gazing across the fields while wondering about the fate of a trainwrecked lover.

Secret Tears for Ships Lost at Sea The style of reading the newspaper aloud associated largely with male society is given a twist more appropriate to the reading of sentimental fiction by Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846–48). Florence Dombey, Captain Edward Cuttle, Solomon Gills, and Susan Nipper all read the newspaper’s shipping intelligence for news of Walter Gay, sent to Barbados to fi ll a vacancy left by the death of a junior clerk. Walter’s ship is not heard of

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after departing for the West Indies: Uncle Sol sees that the Son and Heir has not been “spoken” by the shipping list, and James Carker fi nds out that Lloyd’s has given up the Son and Heir for lost. The long silence is not brought to an end until Mr. Toots reads aloud the newspaper’s shipping intelligence: “There can be no doubt that all surmises as to the fate of the missing vessel, the Son and Heir, port of London, bound for Barbados, are now set at rest for ever; that she broke up in the last hurricane; and that every soul on board perished.”61 Skipping over the insurance industry’s cargo valuations in order to get right to the personal information makes Captain Cuttle feel the “death-shock” of his hope for Walter Gay (544). Walter’s supposed death effectively brings the spectators together into what Margaret Cohen describes as a “sentimental community” organized around a spectacle inviting the sympathy of observers.62 Cuttle, Nipper, and Toots all read the shipping news with Florence’s reaction in mind, even conspiring to keep the newspaper hidden from her in order to verify its intelligence before Captain Cuttle decides that someone must break the news to her: “They don’t romance, you see, on such pints” (546). Florence has to this point never spoken of the affection discountenanced by Mr. Dombey, and at least initially she grieves in silence whenever stormy weather makes her think about Walter’s ship at sea. All her tears for Walter prior to the shipwreck have been “secret tears” that, as such, fail to solicit the sympathy of those around her despite inviting compassion from the novel’s audience (588). Only Walter’s shipwreck enables Florence to break her silence and express her affection for him to her stepmother, Edith Dombey. Florence’s tears make her feelings known to everyone, preparing them for the marriage that will take place after Walter’s miraculous survival. Curiously, these cathartic reactions make it difficult to comprehend how the shipping news could ever be read without such excess of private feeling. John Carker, Manager of Dombey and Son, is easily caricatured as a villain for responding solely to the pecuniary loss of the ship: “It was accurately stated. The underwriters suffer a considerable loss. We are very sorry. No help! Such is life!” (548). His callousness toward the loss prepares the novel’s audience for his eventual death in a railway accident, which, unfortunately for him, takes place outside the newspaper’s columns. As we have seen, Victorian novels exhibit a pronounced interest in what happens when women readers are confronted by the distressing spectacle of an accident involving a loved one. In these scenes, the reception of the shipping news is a performance designed to elicit sympathy on several levels. Sentimental fiction had drawn upon fatal accidents to elicit the spectator’s sympathy since the eighteenth century; however, framing the scene as an act of reading in these later novels redirects attention from the shipwreck to its reception.63 The newspaper enables the heroine to participate in the victim’s sufferings as if she were a direct witness to events while at the same time shifting the reading audience’s interest from the accident to the heroine’s affective response. We are more interested in how Dickens’s heroines including Florence and Esther react to

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the shipwreck than in the shipwreck itself. In a moment at once voyeuristic and unwittingly exhibitionist, Esther forgets herself while watching Woodcourt—all the while receiving the most intense scrutiny from the novel’s audience—long enough to make an uncharacteristically extravagant confession of her admiration for him. Spectators such as Miss Flite or Captain Cuttle model our own sympathetic stance toward the bereaved, demonstrating that what is fi nally at stake is our sympathy not for the hero but for the heroine. The figure of the woman reader apprehending a shipwreck through the newspaper is in this sense a figure for our own experience of reading a novel centered around the emotional life of the Victorian heroine: as Florence’s tears are for Walter, so ours are for Florence. The various configurations of the woman reader found among the nineteenth-century novels discussed so far bring us back to the initial question raised by Bleak House as to why its heroine would resort to the newspaper as a means of intimate contact at all. Although the teasing Ada Clare recognizes the romance between her close friend and Woodcourt early in the novel, Esther refuses to speak of it. Esther’s notorious inability to express desire forces the novel’s readers to hunt for its displaced expression in suggestively interrupted moments of speech, including understatement (“Not that I need mention it”), evasion (“why did it matter to me?”), and deliberate suppression of Ada’s comments about Woodcourt’s admiration (“But I don’t think it matters what my darling said”) (291, 470, 255).64 Esther is evidently aware of Woodcourt’s attentiveness even if this awareness is never made explicit—a frustrating maneuver for any fi rst-person narration whose effectiveness depends on the degree of intimacy established between speaker and audience. Woodcourt’s reticence is of a more conventional kind. He is kept apart from Esther by the poverty of his London practice as well as his mother’s reluctance to admit a wife of uncertain birth into the family. Matriarchs in both cases prove to be the real obstacle preventing the lovers from declaring their mutual affection. The widowed Mrs. Woodcourt expects her son to fulfi ll a family obligation by “remembering his pedigree” (292). His descent from the illustrious families of Morgan ap Kerrig and the MacCoorts of MacCoort has burdened its last representative with the duty of an appropriate marriage. As Mrs. Woodcourt pointedly tells the orphaned Esther, “He may not have money, but he always has what is much better—family, my dear” (467). Although Woodcourt himself appears motivated less by ancestral devotion (he is “fickleness itself” with the ladies, according to his mother) than by fi nancial hardship, his reluctance to speak on the matter enables Mrs. Woodcourt to harass Esther on the charged subject of family (469). By insisting that personal charms are nothing without birth, Mrs. Woodcourt suggestively, if always indirectly, delivers a warning to Esther, who feels the allusion acutely: “She talked so much about birth, that, for a moment, I half fancied, and with pain—but, what an idle fancy to suppose that she could think or care what mine was!” (292).

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Despite Esther’s dismissal, the accompanying pain indicates the shame experienced in being a disgraced orphan, as the women in her life from her godmother to Woodcourt’s mother never tire of reminding her. Their voices are a devastating counterpoint to the absent voice of her true mother, Lady Dedlock. Mrs. Woodcourt’s efforts to shame Esther into silence through veiled reminders of her birth are among the most uncomfortable scenes in the novel. Esther can neither escape the unwanted confidences of her guest at Bleak House nor change the tenor of a conversation intended to make her wince; without presumptuousness, she cannot even defend herself against the implications couched in putatively anonymous terms. Thus Esther listens to Mrs. Woodcourt recite the eulogistic Welsh poem “Mewlinnwillinwodd” (Esther’s spelling) in defense of noble birth even as it makes her “quite low-spirited” (467). Mrs. Woodcourt’s intrusive matchmaking between Esther and John Jarndyce suggests one reason why Esther is not more forthcoming about her feelings with the novel’s audience. As Esther explains, “It was curious that this should make me uncomfortable, but I think it did. I know it did. It made me for some part of that night uncomfortable. I was so ashamed of my folly, that I did not like to confess it even to Ada; and that made me more uncomfortable still” (470). Shame prevents Esther from being able to formulate a response or, never Esther’s strength, a confession. The idea of marriage to Mr. Jarndyce is not what so discomforts Esther, for she is too submissive on that point; it is rather the insinuation that marriage to an orphan—the very source of Esther’s anxiety about her place in the world—would degrade the Woodcourt family. Thus when Ada shares her secret affection for Richard Carstone, we expect a reciprocal confidence from Esther that never comes. Esther is in need of a way of confessing her feelings for Mr. Woodcourt that will not at the same time draw attention to herself when Miss Flite arrives on the scene with her priceless bag of documents. Miss Flite’s graphic description of the shipwreck is Esther’s fi rst news of Woodcourt since his departure for China: “An awful scene. Death in all shapes. Hundreds of dead and dying. Fire, storm, and darkness. Numbers of the drowning thrown upon a rock. There, and through it all, my dear physician was a hero” (555–56). In a pattern by now familiar, the dramatic news story transforms Woodcourt into a hero known throughout the country, while Esther’s tearful response both aligns her with this sympathetic community of readers and occasions her aside to the novel’s audience. The newspaper’s celebration allows Esther to praise Woodcourt along with all the other sympathetic readers, but it also enables her to declare private sentiments. England’s readers, for all their admiration and gratitude for these sudden heroes featured in the press, do not love Allan Woodcourt in the same way as Esther does, do not imagine marrying him, do not know his gentle touch, and certainly do not keep his flowers preserved in a favorite book. The very moment that brings together the reading public and the reading lover in their sympathies at the same time sets Esther’s newspaper reading apart as an act of intimacy.

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Despite its extraordinary configuration, the Romantic paradigm of the passive female reader crying over a shipwrecked husband had become so familiar in the period’s fiction by Wilkie Collins’s time that his heroine Lydia Gwilt in Armadale (1866) can only be understood as its parodic inversion. Gwilt reads in the newspaper about the shipwreck of Allan Armadale, whose murder she has arranged with the aid of former Cuban lover Captain Manuel. The use of not one but two shipwrecks is hardly surprising in Collins’s elaborately plotted novel. Collins departs from the dramatic survivor narrative used earlier in the novel, however, by presenting the climactic wreck in the form of reported news—or rather, misreported news. Unlike the premature report in Dombey and Son, this intelligence has been orchestrated in advance by Gwilt, who confi rms Armadale’s death in the newspapers before posing as his bereaved widow in order to collect the inheritance. As Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851) records, public sympathies were especially susceptible to fraudulent shipwreck victims in possession of the “shake lurk,” a forged document declaring that the bearer has suffered a shipwreck in order to obtain charitable donations.65 Gwilt in fact comes up with the idea for the inheritance swindle after hearing about a news story in which a similar impersonation succeeded until the unexpected return of the drowned man. Although Gwilt reads about Armadale’s death in the shipping news, there are no tears for this “husband” lost at sea. Unlike Esther Summerson and other heroines who read the papers to confi rm the survival of loved ones, Gwilt searches back issues of The Times for confi rmation of Allan Armadale’s death. Journal entries describe her anxious scrutiny of the news columns after reaching Turin: Not a word of news yet, either in the obituary column or in any other part of the paper. I looked carefully through each number in succession, dating from the day when Armadale’s letter was written at Messina, to this present 20th of the month—and I am certain, whatever may have happened, that nothing is known in England as yet. Patience! The newspaper is to meet me at the breakfast-table every morning till further notice—and any day now may show me what I most want to see.66 Gwilt reads without empathy, abandoning all decorum in her unabashed delight at the potential catastrophe. She struggles to control her “impatience for news” until at last discovering the intelligence: “Saturday’s newspaper has lifted the veil! Words are vain to express the panic of astonishment in which I write. I never once anticipated it—I can’t believe it or realize it now it has happened. The winds and waves themselves have turned my accomplices! The yacht has foundered at sea, and every soul on board has perished!” (702). Gwilt, a sophisticated and cynical reader of the press, upends the tradition of the passive female reader by receiving “DISASTER AT SEA” with a smile, invoking the parodic ecstasy of Lautréamont’s Maldoror as he watches a ship sink before

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his eyes: “O heaven! How can one live after tasting so many delights! It has just been my lot to witness the death-throes of several of my fellow men.”67 Whereas earlier instances of shipwreck appealed to an audience’s capacity for instant empathy, Gwilt’s inhuman response to the news— one that is blatantly at odds with that of the novel’s audience—fi rmly establishes her villainous reputation. Collins thus makes double use of the disaster report to elicit a strong emotional reaction from his audience as well as an indignant protest against Gwilt’s unsentimental response. Unfortunately for Gwilt, the news item misreports not only the cause of death but also the death itself. True to the original news story inspiring the crime, the improbable return of Allan Armadale to Thorpe-Ambrose puts an end to Gwilt’s brief mourning. Gwilt has engineered one news story only to become the victim of another. As improbable as Gwilt’s manipulation of the shipping news may seem outside the confi nes of the sensation novel, Collins’s heroine may be the one who best anticipates twentieth-century cynicism toward the mass press arising in Britain during the fi nal decades of the nineteenth century. This skepticism was partially in response to tabloid methods advocated by E. P. Davies’s The Reporter’s Hand-book (1884). This was the fi rst journalism manual to devote sections to “Storms” and “Shipwrecks,” which advise busy reporters to borrow from the following catalogue of descriptive phrases: Trough of the sea; ground swell; sloppy sea; lumpy sea; a boiling sea; vessels beating up against the wind, or in the gale; pitching and floating; rushes of the vessel; waves mountain high; billows; causing frightful havoc; chopping waters; fierce roar of the sea; surges; spray; surf; breakers; foaming billows; splashing of the waters; tempest; roaring deep; the blast; violence of the storm; boisterous weather; terrible war of the elements; vessel capsized; rolled heavily, the wind and sea continually bearing her down to her gunwales; swamped; grounded; stranded; foundered; went down; lurched; came to pieces; heeled over; listed to the port side and went over; howling of the storm; waterlogged; tottering; cargo shifting; cut to the water’s edge; settling down.68 Davies’s handbook reveals why the shipping news might be selfconsciously taken up by the novel as well as why the novel’s own style went back into the production of the shipping news. Throughout the century, most if not all shipwreck reporting relied on a melodramatic vocabulary indistinguishable on many occasions from those found in fictional works such as Dracula, whose account of a shipwreck taken from a Whitby newspaper provides the camouflage behind which Dracula passes into England unseen. The use of shipwrecks to exemplify the manufactured sentimentality of the mass press would be left to twentieth-century works including Arnold Bennett’s The Card (1911) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Such skepticism toward reporting was less

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common on the part of earlier authors, however, who used the shipping news as a means of drawing attention to the reader’s emotional response to disaster. Sentimental episodes of women reading about shipwrecks in the newspaper show how popular the shipping news had come to be since the one-line descriptions found among early issues of Lloyd’s List. The deep attachments experienced through newsprint suggest how innovative readers had come to be in inventing ways to keep in contact through presumably impersonal media. Even the shipping intelligence, once thought of as communicating little more than coordinates and cargo value, could convey astonishing amounts of personal information when followed by a passionate reader. Victorian novelists demonstrate this in especially dramatic fashion by repeatedly using the shipping news for their own romantic plots. Although the press reported shipwreck casualties on a daily basis, the protagonist rarely dies in fictionalized news reports; he is instead transformed into a public figure celebrated all over England. As Miss Flite says of Woodcourt’s heroism reported by the press: “The whole country rings with it” (556). A shipwreck may seem a counterintuitive way of bringing two lovers together, but a disaster could be the most effective way—what the heroine might feel to be the only way—to disrupt everyday life with the threat of permanent rupture. The Victorian novel shows how a disaster at sea was the best thing that could happen to a secret romance. A shipwreck overcomes all obstacles keeping the two lovers apart and demonstrates how, through the imagined community of the newspaper, lovers paradoxically could be brought closest togeher when farthest apart. A very different kind of romance between distant lovers will be taken up by the following chapter’s attention to another section of the newspaper’s front page, the personal advertisements.

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2 The Personal Advertisements Advertisements, Agony Columns, and Sensation Novels of the 1860s

W

hen Bret Harte set out to parody the authors of sensation fiction in Sensation Novels Condensed (1871), he began the Wilkie Collins imitation “No Title” with what appears to be an unsensational event: “The following advertisement appeared in the Times of the 17th of June, 1845.”1 One might expect the story to open with a wink-wink allusion to the scandale du jour in the daily papers, as numerous sensation novels were known to have done in borrowing thinly disguised plots from the crime pages or as Punch’s parody of the genre had done in promising readers “carefully selected Horrors of every kind, from the English and Foreign newspapers.”2 Instead, Harte’s tale begins with three conventional advertisements under the headings “Wanted,” “To Let,” and “Missing.”3 This hardly constitutes an assault on the reader’s nerves in the same way as the opening scene of The Woman in White (1859–60), in which Anne Catherick’s hand on Walter Hartright’s shoulder delivers a shock felt straight through to the novel’s audience.4 Although the story’s multiple narrators never reveal the connection between these advertisements and the mysterious disappearance of an elderly gentleman—it is half-hearted satire at best—Harte’s tale nevertheless recognizes what most other accounts of the sensation novel overlook: its affi liation with other sections of the newspaper beyond the crime pages. Reviewers were right to associate sensation novels with the press but mistaken in assuming these fictional narratives to be derived solely from the news reports of madwomen, murderesses, and mésalliances that were notoriously popular in the late 1850s and 1860s. Novels supposedly based on crimes reported in the newspapers more accurately might be said to have been modeled on their least reportorial feature: the advertisements. Reviewers noticed the rapport between sensation novels and newspapers almost immediately. In a now notorious attack in the Quarterly Review of 1863, the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral Henry Mansel condemned the

47

fashionable taste for “Newspaper Novels,” fictional narratives whose plots were borrowed from the pages of the press by an opportunistic writer: Let him only keep an eye on the criminal reports of the daily newspapers, marking the cases which are honoured with the especial notice of a leading article, and become a nine-days’ wonder in the mouths of quidnuncs and gossips; and he has the outline of his story not only ready-made, but approved beforehand as of the true sensation cast. Then, before the public interest has had time to cool, let him serve up the exciting viands in a réchauffé with a proper amount of fictitious seasoning; and there emerges the criminal variety of the Newspaper Novel, a class of fiction having about the same relation to the genuine historical novel that the police reports of the “Times” have to the pages of Thucydides or Clarendon.5 Although memorable crimes from previous centuries may have been worthy subjects for artistic treatment by the hand of Shakespeare, recent crimes chosen for their freshness in the reader’s mind held no such value—a contrast in Mansel’s eyes between “the dry skeleton” of historical fiction and “the subject laid out in the dissecting-room” of sensation fiction.6 The deprecating label “Newspaper Novel” soon became synonymous with a subgenre of fiction derived from actual criminal reports or, as the derogatory term would come to be used by critics, with all varieties of sensation narrative. Nor was Mansel the only reviewer to make the connection between the period’s journalism and literature. The genre’s fondness for scandal made unflattering comparisons with the press almost an obligation for the contemporary reviews. In 1862, Times reviewer E. S. Dallas noted the fictional afterlife enjoyed by the period’s causes célèbres reported in the press.7 The Westminster Review wrote of one sensation novel, “The story has all the interest, and also the literary power of a police report,” and the North British Review described how others were “as fascinating to ill-regulated minds as police reports and divorce cases,” both staples of the popular press.8 Another reviewer dismissed Annie Thomas’s fiction with the criticism: “There may not be much Real Life in her books, but it cannot be denied that there is a good deal of ‘Bell’s Life,’ ” a cheap weekly paper devoted to sporting news.9 The Medical Critic and Psychological Journal observed how the two media had even begun to compete for readers: “Writers have not been slow to perceive that the columns of the daily papers were becoming formidable rivals to quiet novels.”10 Novelists themselves made little effort to discourage the alleged link between journalism and their fiction. The use of newspaper sources imparted to many of these fictional narratives what Richard Altick has called “the shock of actuality.”11 The very criticism used by Mansel and others to discredit the genre’s literary status was used by authors to justify its relevance, accuracy, and ultimately its realism.12 Victorian novelists accused of improbable plots had only to point to the pages of the

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daily newspaper. Here, they argued, one could fi nd events taking place every day in England that would bring a blush to the cheek of the most ingenious author. Hence Collins claimed to discover his heroine for The Woman in White while reading a news item about an escaped lunatic, and Charles Reade defended the implausible events of his novels by pointing to a notebook fi lled with the newspaper clippings from which they had been drawn.13 According to John Sutherland, the cheap periodicals such as the penny papers that flourished after the repeal of the Stamp Duty in 1855 were an essential precondition for serial publication of sensation novels.14 Although the Sunday papers may have been fi lled with lurid crime for decades, the respectable dailies did not devote as many resources to reporting criminal trials until the removal of the last newspaper taxes made it possible to reach an emerging mass audience. The Daily Telegraph became the fi rst penny daily in British history soon after, and, like many other papers, it attracted readers through the scandalous stories with which sensation novels have been linked ever since, from the murderess Madeline Smith putting arsenic in her lover’s cocoa in 1857 to the Yelverton divorce trial’s accusations of bigamy in 1861.15 Sensation novelists had every incentive to discard plots drawn from the distant lands of the past in favor of those from the nearby streets of the present, as Henry James memorably credited Mary Braddon’s novels with doing by offering readers “the England of to-day’s newspaper.”16 Novelists were not just interested in newspapers as a source of investigative reporting, though, as Victorian reviewers might lead us to believe. As the rest of this chapter will show, the attention given to historical links between fictional narratives and news reports has underestimated how interested novelists were in other, nonreportorial sections of the newspaper. The repeated use of advertisements across a wide range of sensation novels suggests that the newspaper’s contribution to the genre extends well beyond an archive of contemporary news reports. Whereas news reports promised complete narrative exposure, the compact advertisements presented a very different narrative model to novelists. Harte’s parody was right to locate the origins of Collins’s mysteries in the brief, anonymous stories encapsulated in the newspaper’s advertisements since Collins’s No Name (1862) is one of numerous sensation novels to turn on an advertisement when Captain Wragge offers to betray the novel’s heroine through a message placed in the newspaper to “An Unknown Friend.”17 This short advertisement invokes an entire novel when the response to it does not go according to plan. The recurrent use of advertisements in this and other sensation novels of the 1860s expresses the at-once exciting and disturbing possibility of anonymity offered by such institutions as the newspaper in modern life. It will come as little surprise, then, to learn that audience involvement with the newspapers went well beyond the vicarious thrill of reading. Sensation novels by Braddon, Collins, Ouida, Reade, Rhoda Broughton, Annie Thomas, and Ellen Wood confi rm that Victorians were not just reading about other people’s lives in the newspaper—they were using the newspaper to change their own.

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The Short History of a Miserable Life The births, marriages, and deaths were the fi rst items to meet a reader’s eye in many daily newspapers of the nineteenth century. The front page of The Times, for example, displayed between four and six columns of advertisements with no mention of the day’s news. Headlines did not appear on the front page of respectable newspapers until the turn of the century, when editors began adopting American-style layouts in order to increase circulation. Lord Northcliffe still refused to move the advertisements from the front page as late as 1908: “Advertisements? They are the most important news. And where would you have it if not on the front page?”18 Newspapers were never intended solely for the instruction of passive audiences. Instead, the daily paper served as a forum in which members of the community were able to conduct business, exchange information, and correspond with other readers. The advertising columns were the most interactive section of the newspaper, a meeting place as much as a marketplace for audiences. Advertisements served as an early communications network—what one editor referred to as a “literary telephone”—by bringing individuals into contact with an entire print community through various categories designated for commercial transactions as well as personal matters.19 In 1785, John Walter introduced The Times (then known as The Universal Daily Register) through the image of a community of readers brought into correspondence with one another through the advertisements: “masters who want servants—or servants masters;—traders, who wish to buy or sell goods;—the fair, whether maids or widows, who sigh for husbands and help-mates:—In a word, all sorts and sizes, denominations and descriptions of men, have nothing to do but to advertise in the Universal Register—and they will immediately hear of something to their advantage.”20 Such commercial announcements were central to a news industry whose expansion throughout the century owed more to advertising revenue than to subscription fees. What look like undifferentiated columns of advertisements to us would have been easily navigated by contemporary readers. A contributor to Chambers’s Journal pointed out at mid-century that a habitual reader would know exactly where to look for information on the front page of The Times: births, marriages, and deaths in the fi rst column; personal matters in the second column; “wants” and charitable appeals in the third and fourth columns; money requests at the bottom of the fifth column; transportation in the sixth column; miscellaneous announcements from vendors, auctioneers, and new companies in the remaining space.21 The Times went from printing an average of 150 advertisements per day at the start of the century to printing more than 2,500 by mid-century; it was not unusual for more than two-thirds of the paper on any given day to be devoted exclusively to advertisements.22 Its crowded columns led Scottish journalist Alexander Innes Shand to characterize the nineteenth century as an “advertising age” in which newspapers catered to every taste: “Do you care to know who is dead or married; to contrast the attractions

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of the various Transatlantic steam-packet companies; to know what is going forward nightly in the theatres? It is to a copy of the ‘Times’ you turn instinctively, knowing exactly where to put your fi nger on what you want.”23 One advertising manual estimated that a single advertisement placed on the front page of the Daily Telegraph at mid-century would reach over a million readers.24 Anecdotal evidence suggests that the personal advertisements may have been the most widely read section of the newspaper; Queen Victoria herself was said to have considered reading the personal advertisements a royal hobby.25 These advertisements eventually appeared in a column of their own under the heading “Personal &c.,” but for most of the century, advertisements were distinguished primarily by their position on the page. Most notably, the second column of the front page came to be known in the 1860s as the “agony column” for its tales of personal distress, ranging from pathetic appeals for runaway husbands to plaintive cries for attention from “lonely hearts.” (Not until the next century would the term be used to designate the responses of an “agony aunt” to letters from troubled readers.26) Imagine coming across the following billet-doux on the front page of The Times in 1865: “MARGUERITE à FAUST.—I am dying with grief. Oh! come back to me, oh! come back to me. We cannot be separated. Oh! come back to me.—Marguerite.”27 It is remarkable how much emotion correspondents such as Marguerite were able to convey in a few lines of newsprint. As the editorial staff of The Times wrote of the column: “In an agony we like to fi nd a paroxysm . . . what we seek is emotion, not good English.”28 All the Year Round described such advertisements as “words of love exchanged through impassable prison barriers,” and Punch as “brief stories written in the blood of breaking hearts.”29 Such cris de coeur had appeared sporadically in the newspapers for several decades but only now was the second column of the newspaper set apart by name. A series of articles appearing in Once a Week in 1873 described this column as a distinctly nineteenth-century phenomenon: That most peculiarly interesting portion of the newspapers of our own time, commonly called the “Agony Column,” is a comparatively recent invention, and is still quite a mild matter in the journals of 1833. To remark upon its progress were superfluous here, when it is truly a column in the Times every morning, and is not small in other daily papers.30 The newspaper’s formerly unnamed second column had at last received recognition as the appropriate place for advertisements of “the pathetic, appealing, interesting, remonstrating, despairing, or denouncing order.”31 Such accounts make it easy to understand the popularity of the newspaper’s front page with all types of readers. Advertisements in the agony column served a wide range of purposes, from covert notes between lovers to conspiratorial messages between criminals. “How often, in a dozen lines, do we come at the history of a

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miserable life!” remarked one journalist of the column32 (see figure 2.1). We might think of these advertisements as serial romances unfolding in the columns of the daily paper, as if an epistolary novel was being printed one passage at a time. In contrast to the factual reportage found in other sections of the paper, these compact narratives were almost entirely

Figure 2.1. Brokenhearted Adolphus attempts to save the relationship with his beloved Emily by placing an advertisement in the newspaper’s agony column. From Punch 17 (1849): 169. Illustrated by John Leech. Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library.

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suggestive. The Spectator attributed their appeal to the manner in which “one advertisement will often imply a whole romance” hinted at by its sketchy details.33 In this sense, reading the agony column was similar to peeking into someone else’s diary or eavesdropping on a conversation between strangers. A number of Victorian readers cited the following advertisement printed in The Times throughout the month of July 1850 as an especially dramatic instance whose outcome was never known: “THE ONE-WINGED DOVE must DIE unless the CRANE RETURNS to be a shield against her enemies.”34 What was to be the fate of the abandoned Dove? Readers concerned for the Dove’s welfare needed to follow the agony column on a daily basis for several months before fi nally receiving the Crane’s apology and, alas, departure that November: “The MATE of the DOVE bids a fi nal FAREWELL Adieu to the British Isles, although such a resolution cannot be accomplished without poignant grief.—W.”35 Such brief glimpses were capable of arousing audience speculation to a fever pitch that, unlike news narratives continued over a period of time, might never be resolved, no matter how persistently one scanned the columns of the newspaper for the romance’s fi nal chapter. The Crane was never heard from again. If today we can only speculate about the stories behind most advertisements, Charles Reade’s Hard Cash (1863)—his critique of the deplorable conditions inside private lunatic asylums—illustrates one set of circumstances under which two lovers would resort to a secret correspondence via the newspaper. After being committed to the Silverton Grove madhouse through a perjured legal order, Alfred Hardie is permitted to communicate with Julia Dodd through a message in the Morning Advertiser only because it appears unintelligible to his guardian Dr. Wycherly. The coded advertisement “AILEEN AROON.—DISTRUST APPEARANCES” signals to Julia that her missing fiancé is still alive through its allusion to a lyric sung during their courtship: She was sure he had written the advertisement. Who but he, out of the few that take the words of any song to heart, admired Aileen Aroon? Who but he out of the three or four people who might possibly care for that old song, had appearances to explain away? And who but he knew they took in the Morning Advertiser? She waited then for the explanation she had invited. She read the advertising column every day over and over.36 Julia’s compulsive reading of the agony column corresponds to that of the novel’s own readers, who had little chance of discovering how anonymous epistolary affairs in the newspaper were resolved outside the pages of sensation fiction. Messages that appeared unintelligible to readers such as Dr. Wycherly imply an entire novel’s worth of intrigue in the hands of the knowing novelist. Otherwise the enigmatic message presented here has significance only for Julia, who continues to scan the agony column after placing her own reply “AILEEN AROON.—I do DISTRUST

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APPEARANCES.”37 Unfortunately the personal contact enabled by the advertising columns was at the same time restricted to those columns. The newspaper ideally operated as a temporary substitute for the physical intimacy desired by the divided lovers, who, in the case of Alfred and Julia, long to speak face to face, without codes or riddles. Indeed, the most common complaint among the advertising columns was toward a correspondent’s unaccountable silence.

A Double State of Existence Readers often explained their interest in the advertisements by citing a sense of personal contact otherwise difficult to establish in impersonal metropolitan environments. “The personals,” as the front-page advertisements placed by individual subscribers tellingly came to be called, were in this sense a fundamentally modern genre appealing to widespread curiosity about the private lives of other people with whom one had only the most casual contact. Newspapers made the private lives of strangers partially accessible to voyeuristic readers from the comfort of their home, club, or coffeehouse. Many readers described it as the fi rst section of the newspaper to which they would turn each morning. “No one can read the ‘Personals’ of the city daily without seeing into much of the romance of everyday life,” wrote Joseph Belcher. “Other advertisements are addressed to the entire community, but a personal one is generally intended but for the eye of one individual, and is, therefore, framed so as to be intelligible only to that one. It is the mystery thus given to them which constitutes a particular charm.”38 Belcher makes an important distinction between the kinds of advertisements appearing by the thousands in Victorian newspapers. Commercial advertisements addressed a wide readership, assumed no prior relationship to the reader, and strove for transparency in meaning. Personal ads were the opposite in that they were addressed to a single person known by the writer, intimate in tone, and deliberately cryptic in meaning. The moving personal stories found in the agony column stood out amid the unsentimental commercial notices. Andrew Wynter recalled what it was like to encounter these “small voices” among the commercial society represented by The Times: “In the midst of all this struggle for gold, place, and position which goes on every day in this wonderful publication, outcries from the very depths of the heart, passionate tears, bursts of indignation, and heart-rending appeals, startle one as they issue from the second column of its front page.”39 A personal advertisement announcing “The assistance came too late—she died in the night” provided temporary diversion for commercial-oriented readers such as Wynter: “The reader pauses for a moment, and wonders what tragedy lies hidden in this brief space, and then relapses into the contemplation of the fierce struggle for the world’s goods which the vast mass of the advertisements represent.”40

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Not all readers moved on so quickly, however. In 1876, Ella Curtis went one step further than Belcher and Wynter when describing how personal advertisements invited one to visualize the author behind the advertisement: “Within the past three or four years, a succession of the most touching advertisements appeared in one of the daily papers, and as we read them, we could not help imagining the story of the life in which they seemed to form a striking episode.”41 For all three newspaper readers, the pleasure of the advertisements arose from a sense of vicarious participation in the lives of complete strangers from a comfortable distance. The personal advertisements offered one way of managing the isolation of urban life or even surrogate forms of intimacy for communities in which personal relationships were increasingly formed between strangers. Whereas the reach and regularity of the newspaper made it an ideal forum for communicating with strangers about matters of shared interest, this expediency was at the same time symptomatic of a society undergoing a transition throughout the long nineteenth century from Raymond Williams’s “knowable community” to Benedict Anderson’s “community in anonymity.”42 The abbreviated stories told in the agony column thus expressed at once the isolation and mobility of modern life. In fact, the relentless pleas for companionship among the newspapers motivated Punch’s satiric anti-advertisement to no one in particular: “VERY TIRED OF YOU.—Stay away. The world is wide enough for two.”43 The small advertisements appeared to conceal hidden meanings to the astute reader, who approached even the most straightforward announcement with suspicion. An unnamed contributor to Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal urged readers to be wary of assignations such as the following one arranged through the newspaper: “TO CHARLES.—Be at the pastry-cook’s at the corner of S___Street, at two. Jemima is well.— Alice.”44 Innocent as the message may seem at fi rst glance, even the most ordinary events suggest potential intrigue when printed in the agony column. Readers are likely to ask the following questions: Why go through the trouble of arranging a meeting at the pastry shop through the newspaper? What is the nature of the relationship among Charles, Alice, and Jemima? And what exactly will happen at two o’clock? The journalist proposes the following hypothetical explanation to satisfy the minds of curious readers: Charles and Jemima have been forbidden by their guardians to meet; the lady’s confidante Alice acts as go-between in placing the advertisement; the two lovers meet at the bun shop for a secret elopement; the parents are left with no choice but to relent and welcome the newlyweds into their homes. As the author demonstrates, a single advertisement could provide the plot for an entire novel, if not always one with such a happy ending. Such prurient speculation was hardly inappropriate since the most common use of the agony column was as a means of secret communication between lovers with no opportunity for direct contact. “YOU can advertise in ‘The Times’ so that only you and I know,” instructed one correspondent through the very columns in which he or she hoped to receive

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a reply.45 A message placed in the newspaper could potentially reach a sequestered sweetheart while at the same time preserving the anonymity of both parties (see figure 2.2). Discretion was especially important in the case of adulterous affairs, for the newspaper could be read safely under the eyes of a watchful guardian in a way that epistolary correspondence could not. In Ouida’s Under Two Flags (1867), for example, a husband reads “Fidelio—III—TstnegeR” on the front page of The Times without realizing that he is reading his wife’s signal for a secret tryst with her lover at a Regent Street boutique.46 Of course, an interest in the personal ads was not without risks of its own. In 1870, a witness to an Edinburgh divorce case recounted one party’s interest in the agony column as evidence of an extramarital affair: “I very often noticed that Mrs Walker read the fi rst column of the

Figure 2.2. Captain Kitefly’s personal advertisement addressed to “L. L. L.” strikes Miss Letitia Lurliety through the heart with the force of Cupid’s arrow. From Punch 3 (1842): 113. Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library.

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Scotsman. She used to read the love advertisements aloud to me, and said of some of them that she considered them very good bits. I told Mr Walker of her peculiar interest in these advertisements.”47 Lovers communicated through code names, from simple initials to endearing nicknames (e.g., Patience, Haunted Soul, Dear Old Monster), that at times generated feverish speculation about an author’s identity. A series of advertisements signed “Tichborne” in 1858, for instance, tantalized readers with the prospect of the drowned heir’s return to London. More sophisticated messages relied on elaborate codes known only to the addressee to ensure private transmission; a single issue of The Times has been known to contain one message in alphabetic (“Zanoni Yboko z jo wn m?”) and another in numeric (“30 282 5284 8 53”) cipher.48 Typically these codes were little more than prearranged letter or number transpositions easily decipherable by amateur code breakers, known on occasion to intervene in the conversation with unpleasant results. One intrusive reader exposed the cryptogram “ozye wpe ud dpp jzf wzzv le logpcefdpxpye” in the Daily Telegraph to mean “Don’t let Js see you look at advertisement.”49 The sheer variety of advertisements—from the informative births, marriages, and deaths to more cryptic tales of woe—invited a wide and at times confl icting range of responses from readers. Mixed messages were a particular problem for subscribers who used the scope of the newspaper to reach a person of unknown whereabouts. Law fi rms sought missing persons under the headings “Important Notice,” “Next of Kin,” or “Should this meet the eye of ___” with the promise of advantageous information, which might turn out to be an inheritance or might turn out to be a ruse on the part of money lenders trying to locate debtors. In Bleak House (1852–53), for example, George Rouncewell fi rst comes into contact with the money lender Grandfather Smallweed through a misleading advertisement claiming to be for the benefit of his friend Captain Hawdon. Detectives likewise used advertisements to entice suspects into custody. Private investigators such as C. F. Field, former Chief Inspector of the Detective Police, and Mr. Pollaky, who specialized in obtaining evidence for divorce courts, regularly promoted their services in the very columns used by them for the entrapment of offenders. In fact, few readers were more skilled in the use of baited advertisements than Sherlock Holmes, whose book of clippings from the agony column served as an informal archive in solving numerous cases since lawbreakers were among the most habitual employers of this clandestine means of communication. The criminal underworld investigated by Holmes was found in the most unlikely of hiding places—the newspaper’s front page (see figure 2.3). The confidence invested by readers in the newspaper as a reliable and disinterested means of communication made it especially susceptible to criminal misuse. Nowhere was this more evident than in the unregulated columns of advertisements, which were often read with the same naïve trust as the rest of the newspaper. The “small ads” provided an attractive forum for the meeting of different subcultures because they were widely

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Figure 2.3. Watson asks, “What on earth does this mean?” after reading a mysterious personal advertisement in the newspaper under the watchful eyes of Sherlock Holmes. From Conan Doyle’s “The Red-Headed League,” in The Strand 2 (1891): 192. Illustrated by Sidney Paget. Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

accessible but difficult to monitor. Unlike other sections of the newspaper, the advertising columns brought readers into potential contact with a variety of criminals. Caveat lector: money-lending schemes, counterfeit employment agencies, false trade directories, and dubious patent medicines were among the many hazards of commerce through newsprint (see figure 2.4). “Caution” notices routinely appeared among the advertisements in order to warn others about past victimizations. Sexual predators posed a particular threat to unsuspecting readers through their use of the newspaper as a medium for seduction. It was

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Figure 2.4. Two criminals compose a fraudulent “Next of Kin” advertisement for insertion in The Times. From Punch 37 (1859): 223. Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library. no coincidence that the London Female Preventive and Reformatory Institution placed regular announcements under the heading “Friendless and Fallen” alongside the other solicitations found in the agony column. As H. G. Cocks has shown, matrimonial advertisements brought together discourses of sexual danger and anxieties about women’s consumption

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in a manner that persisted well into the twentieth century.50 The ease with which women were able to obtain access to a newspaper made the personals a significant part of their emotional life. Hence advertisements from both men and women in search of a spouse occasionally appeared in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century publications even though these notices were often subject to stigma, ridicule, and highly publicized hoaxes (see figure 2.5). Many papers banned matrimonial advertisements altogether after the Red Barn murder of 1827, which saw William Corder advertise for a wife in the Morning Herald and Sunday Times shortly after burying the body of his former lover in a Suffolk barn. Forty-five replies brought Corder into contact with Mary Moore, who became his wife before the discovery of the mutilated corpse. (Mary Braddon was one novelist known to have seen a theatrical adaptation of the murder titled Maria Marten and the Red Barn at a Chiswick Fair when she was eight years old.)

Figure 2.5. A spendthrift advertises in the Sunday Times for a wealthy wife with whom to share “the quiet happiness of the wedded state.” From Punch 3 (1842): 142. Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library.

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The Red Barn murderer’s solicitation of a bride through the newspaper heightened fears that anonymous advertisements could harbor potentially violent predators seeking to victimize unsuspecting females. A reporter covering Corder’s murder trial afterward described the case as a cautionary tale about the hazards of matrimonial advertisements written by “speculative, sensual, and sordid men, whose aim is to obtain a mistress, or a fortune, rather than a wife.”51 Publicity given to the case prompted a defensive editorial from The Times assuring readers that it refused several hundred matrimonial advertisements each year in order to ensure the paper’s suitability among family circles. The personal advertisements may originally have been intended to bring together readers but only if they did not “wound the ear of delicacy, or corrupt the heart,” as John Walter pledged in the fi rst issue of The Times, for admitting vice into the advertising columns “might seduce unsuspecting innocence from the paths of virtue.”52 Corder’s last words allegedly cautioned his wife against remarrying by advertisement because “it is a most dangerous way of getting a husband.”53 Less than a month after Corder’s execution, Douglas Jerrold’s one-act farce Wives by Advertisement (1828) opened at the Coburg Theatre. The following repartee between Laura and Lovejoke must have titillated audiences in the aftermath of the murder: Laura. There is something very delightful and romantic about these newspaper matches; fi rst, there is the charming uncertainty. Lovej. Yes—whether the gentleman advertising has not already a wife and ten children. Laura. The question to one’s self—what are his connexions?— Perhaps their names adorn the Court Guide? Lovej. Aye,—or perhaps the Newgate Calendar.54 The responses to Corder’s matrimonial advertisement became an object of public interest themselves when the unclaimed letters were published after the trial so that audiences could marvel at how close these errant young women had come to marrying a psychopath.55 One contributor to All the Year Round interested in the agony column’s popularity described how it felt to review an entire year’s worth of personal advertisements from an unspecified daily newspaper in 1888. Like many cautious readers, the author speculates about the motives of advertisers who would choose an expensive, anonymous means of communication over more straightforward methods: Every now and then some startling occurrence fi nds its way into the newspapers; and presently there is lifted a corner of the veil that conceals the secret springs and hidden motives of human existence. Generally the revelation is painful. If people shrink from the light, it is mostly because their deeds are of a nature that general opinion stigmatises as evil. There are, indeed, some natures furtive and secretive, who delight to envelope themselves and their surroundings

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with an atmosphere of mystery, and accompany the most innocent and even laudable acts with all kinds of precautions. There are others whom circumstances, or natural inclinations, have brought into a double state of existence; and still more numerous are the class who seek to hide something discreditable in their past lives by concealing all traces of their former career.56 According to this account, the newspaper itself facilitates objectionable behavior by admitting into print three types of personae: the mysterious, the duplicitous, and the discreditable. The unregulated advertisements provided illegitimate characters with an opportunity to refashion themselves into legitimate members of society. This “double state of existence” appealed in particular to governesses, orphans, criminals, lovers, and other outsiders eager to begin new lives. The newspapers might even be trying to locate a missing person at the same time as that person was using the newspapers to reenter society under an assumed name. Whether or not advertisers were as deceptive as All the Year Round alleged makes little difference here. What matters is the audience’s perception that advertisements were susceptible to disturbing new forms of criminality. The dubious motives and morals attributed to advertisers make it easy to see why audiences would fi nd the agony column so compulsively readable in a way not dissimilar to the taste for unseemly fiction. In fact, the melodramatic stories told among the personal advertisements can make it difficult to tell at times whether the agony column influenced the plots of novels or whether novels influenced the plots of the agony column. The two media often seemed to operate in mutually reinforcing ways. For example, it is nearly impossible to read the following advertisement from 1864 without skepticism after reading fictional critiques of the “madhouse” made by Collins, Braddon, and Reade: MISSING, since last Sunday night, from a private lunatic asylum, in the neighbourhood of London, a YOUNG MARRIED LADY, of weak intellect, suffering under the delusion that her child is somewhere hidden in the metropolis. This unfortunate lady is 23 years of age, has brown hair, large gray eyes, pale complexion, with a haggard expression of countenance, and stammers when speaking. She has contrived, in order to facilitate her escape, to change her clothes for those of one of the servants of the establishment, consisting of a dark cotton dress, striped woollen shawl, and straw bonnet.57 Whereas the escape of a patient from a private lunatic asylum might be alarming under ordinary circumstances, we are more likely to adopt the perspective of a sympathetic accomplice, as does Walter Hartwright in The Woman in White, than to abet this young lady’s warders. The passage raises as many questions about the pursuers as the pursued: What is the nature of this private lunatic asylum? How “weak” is the lady’s intellect? What is the source of her peculiar “delusion” about a missing child? The

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advertisement conceals far more than it reveals for a reader accustomed to reading between the lines on the newspaper’s front page. As this chapter’s examples indicate, reading the advertisements was thought to be a distinct experience from reading other sections of the newspaper. We might think of the audience for personal advertisements as “readers in agony,” who both read the newspaper’s agony column and indulge in the emotions evoked by its melodramatic messages. The manner of reading associated with these advertisements can be thought of in at least three ways: as a kind of reading suspicious in itself (recall the witness’s testimony in the divorce case of Walker vs. Walker); as a kind of reading suspicious of ulterior motive (recall those attributed to the rendezvous between Alice and Charles at the bun shop); and as a kind of reading suspicious of outside interference (recall the numerous aliases used to ensure discretion). The pseudonymity of the newspaper’s second column was partly responsible for the growing suspicion among the community that seemingly ordinary people were capable of leading secret lives—the very paranoia attributed to the sensation novel itself by its most vehement critics. Critics of both genres feared that suspicions could easily extend beyond the page to the detriment of society. The Punch cartoon “An Object of Suspicion” illustrates the potential distrust engendered by the newspaper several decades prior to the sensation mania. In this engraving, a pair of newspaper readers inspects the costume of a fellow passenger moments after reading in the Daily News about the escape of a plaid-trousered convict (see figure 2.6). The notion that anyone—even the gentleman seated next to you on the steamer—could be leading a secret life was a fundamental premise underlying the success of the agony column and, by extension, the sensation novel. The sensation novel simply confi rmed suspicions by exposing crimes hitherto only suspected of the anonymous contributors to the agony column. This hermeneutics of suspicion (“paranoia” would be too strong a term here) fostered by the anonymous stories told in newspapers underpins the extreme popularity of the sensation novel that would reach its climax in the 1860s. Before turning to the sensation novel, one fi nal, if extreme, perspective deserves attention for what it reveals about how uncomfortable some male readers still were at the end of the nineteenth century with the idea of women corresponding with strangers through the press. Sociologist Arthur MacDonald’s Girls Who Answer Personals (1897) describes an experiment for which personal advertisements were placed in American and European newspapers in order to collect information about female respondents. Originally titled Abnormal Woman, the study predicted an “abnormal nervous state” as the causal attribute of women who chose to correspond with men through the newspaper. Various measurements of correspondents’ nervous systems (specifics are withheld by the study) were made in order “to see whether their nervous condition may possibly be one of the causes of their answering a ‘personal,’ or whether it is due more to their surroundings and circumstances in life.”58 Unsurprisingly, MacDonald’s questionable hypothesis and even more questionable

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Figure 2.6. An unfortunate case of mistaken identity involving an escaped convict wearing plaid trousers and an unfortunately attired passenger. From Punch 11 (1846): 126. Illustrated by William Newman. Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library. methodology produce little evidence of physiological disorder. Instead, he concludes that circumstantial factors such as loneliness, disappointment, and boredom contribute to the motivation to correspond with other readers. In other words, the personal ads were not the refuge of “abnormal” women at all but rather ordinary women with desires left unsatisfied by domestic life. Macdonald’s study merely recapitulates what the sensation novel had expressed three decades earlier: the desire to communicate through the personal advertisements begins at home.

The Sensation Novel in Embryo The boom in cheap newspapers following the Stamp Duty’s repeal in 1855 may account for the timing of sensation literature, but it does little to explain why these novels repeatedly emphasized the advertisements over the criminal reports from which they were reputedly born.

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Although many reviewers linked sensation fiction to the crime pages under the elastic category “newspaper novels,” others discerned its resemblance to the compact stories told in the agony column. A single advertisement is “a three-volume novel in a nutshell,” according to Good Words, whereas the second column of The Times “contains hints for a hundred novels,” according to R. S. Surtees’s “Plain or Ringlets? (1860)”59 Alfred Austin put the connection in the plainest terms possible: “the well-known ‘agony column’ is the sensational novel in embryo.”60 Austin’s review of the “Sensational School” for Temple Bar expressed particular concern toward the manipulation of newspaper advertisements within sensation novels. It did not take the trained eye of a critic to see how unreliable advertisements were in comparison with other sections of the newspaper—nearly every fictional example turns out to be dangerously, if not deliberately, misleading. A startling number of false marriage announcements, fake obituaries, and fraudulent employment listings suggest how readily sensation novelists exploited the unregulated contents of the front page. These novels proceed through nearly every type of advertisement in a manner corresponding to the reader’s own focal attention along the columns of the newspaper: a marriage announcement in Collins’s The Woman in White, a divorce notice in Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861), a coded message in Collins’s No Name, an obituary in Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1863), a shipping announcement in Reade’s Hard Cash, a missing-person notice in Braddon’s John Marchmont’s Legacy (1863), a lady’s companion opening in Annie Thomas’s The Cross of Honor (1863), a governess situation in Collins’s Armadale (1866), a secret liaison in Ouida’s Under Two Flags (1867), an employment opportunity in Thomas Hardy’s Desperate Remedies (1871), and, of course, a cry from the agony column in Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. The advertisements imply a story behind the story that would remain untold without the novelist’s intervention. The recurrence of advertisements across a number of sensation novels indicates their worth to the genre. Close examination of a single representative example, however, may be the most effective way to establish what enabled this particular section of the newspaper to become a defi ning feature of sensation fiction organized around the possibility of leading secret lives. More than any other tale, Braddon’s paradigmatic sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret illustrates how readers used the newspaper in their own lives. Various kinds of advertisements throughout this novel not only enable Lady Audley to refashion a new identity for herself but also provide a narrative model for crimes whose details may be glimpsed but whose outcomes are never known by readers of the press. The fi rst of Braddon’s bigamy novels appeared in serial instalments in Robin Goodfellow and the Sixpenny Magazine shortly after the infamous Yelverton divorce trial covered extensively by the press in 1861. (Mrs. Theresa Yelverton later placed an advertisement in the second column of The Times to thank the public for numerous letters of sympathy.) 61 Helen Maldon’s transformation from the abandoned wife of George Talboys into the bigamous wife

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of Sir Michael Audley demonstrates how the sensation heroine’s reading was hardly limited to the vicarious experience of other people’s lives through risqué French romances. Heroines who not only read but also used the newspaper to start their lives anew were an alluring part of the sensation tradition, from Wood’s Lady Isabel Vane to Broughton’s Belinda. The advertising columns presented the opportunistic reader with an overwhelming range of second chances. Robert Audley’s investigation into the unexplained “blanks” in Lady Audley’s personal history between 1853 and 1859, then, attempts to connect her many incarnations throughout the novel as the woman christened Helen Maldon, wed into the name Helen Talboys, employed under the alias Lucy Graham, remarried into the title Lady Audley, and, ultimately, checked into the maison de santé under the pseudonym Mrs. Taylor.62 Although advertisements may at fi rst glance appear incidental to Helen Talboys’s departure from her Wildernsea home, they are in fact the resource that enables her defection to take place at all: “I had seen an advertisement in the Times while I was at Wildernsea, and I presented myself to Mrs. Vincent, the advertiser, under a feigned name” (353). Her husband George Talboys may be able to run away to the Australian gold mines at a moment’s notice, but there were few comparable refuges open to a married woman beyond those listed in the newspaper. Lady Audley’s familiarity with the newspaper’s front page is unexceptional at a time when women were reputed to read the advertisements almost exclusively. Even a voracious reader of the news such as Mrs. Meyrick in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) takes special pleasure in reading the list of marriages. Unlike male topics such as fi nance and politics, advertisements were assumed by many of Braddon’s contemporaries to be a largely female interest. Emily Davies complained as much in “On Secondary Instruction as Relating to Girls” (1864): “When the Times is offered to a lady, the sheet containing the advertisements, and the Births, Deaths, and Marriages, is considerately selected”63 (see figure 2.7). Annie Thomas’s Mrs. Forest epitomizes the stereotypical female reader of the newspaper: “So she read the advertisements through piously, not missing a line; and when she had done that, she began upon the other portion of the paper at hazard, for she was not at home here as she was in the advertisement sheet.”64 W. T. Stead would credit the success of the New Journalism of the 1890s in part to its rejection of the enduring stereotype of the female reader uninterested in other sections of the newspaper besides the initial column devoted to births, marriages, and deaths.65 But it would take several decades yet for the press to reach this conclusion. This popular stereotype of the female reader offers little insight into why women would be interested in personal advertisements in the fi rst place or what that interest might express about attitudes toward domestic life. The eponymous heroine of Rhoda Broughton’s Belinda (1883) presents a stark contrast to Thomas’s Mrs. Forest by reading the births,

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Figure 2.7. Newlywed Angelina reads the births, deaths, and marriages listed on the newspaper’s front page shortly after her own marriage. From Punch 71 (1876): 170. Illustrated by George Du Maurier. Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library. marriages, and deaths listed in The Times with an intensity that makes sense only in the context of her unfortunate marriage: For months she has been unable to read the Obituary without envying every one of the dead people recorded in it: the old man gently extinguished at eighty; the deeply-mourned wife, torn away in her prime; the strong man violently perishing in flood or field; the tiny sister-children swept away within two days of each other by the hot fever. There is not one among them all that she does not envy!66 The longing with which Belinda reads the obituaries here gives narrative form to the very dissatisfaction with the doll house motivating many women to read sensation novels in the fi rst place. The ease with which women could obtain access to a newspaper made the advertisements a significant part of their fantasy lives as well as an appropriate subject for fictional narratives organized around the domestic lives of heroines. Ironically, the periodical press serialized a number of novels whose fictional plots focused on the possibility of beginning a second life through the advertisements.67 Might a reader have thought about the publication in a different way after reading such instructive passages in its pages?

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Such a consequence would confi rm that the sensation novel influenced women’s reading practices in the nineteenth century as critics had always feared. Belinda may do little more than read in the passage cited above, but she nevertheless expresses the prevailing sense of dissatisfaction felt by other heroines who do more than envy the dead—who, in fact, literally become the dead. There is no more haunting example of this potential second life among sensation novels than Wood’s Isabel Vane, whose reported death in a railway accident frees her to begin a new life—or, in this case, to reclaim an old life by returning to her former home disguised as a governess named Madame Vine. The mistaken obituary indicates how even intelligence reported in the births, marriages, and deaths might withhold an entire personal history from the newspaper reader. The newspaper itself acts as a form of doubling in the sensation novel by giving social outcasts the opportunity to reenter society under an assumed identity. Helen Talboys fits the pattern established by Isabel Vane in using the newspaper to begin a second life. The improbable accident granting Vane a second chance was shown by the sensation novel to be within any reader’s grasp. The novel’s fi rst indication that the advertising columns provide more than just passive diversion from domestic routine comes when Helen disappears from home. A letter left behind explains the motive for the disappearance: “I am weary of my life here, and wish, if I can, to fi nd a new one” (250). She need look no further for a new life than the listings in The Times, where an advertisement for a Brompton school enables her to avoid the tragic fate of so many other runaway heroines in Victorian fiction. The abandoned wife’s epistolary audacity in responding to employment advertisements as an orphaned teacher should be considered alongside her husband’s epistolary neglect during his three-and-a-half year absence. Although this peculiarly female use of available resources is meant to be vilified, it is nevertheless occasioned by a distinctly male failure that has persuaded modern readers to view Lady Audley in sympathetic, if not outright enthusiastic, terms. George’s letter announcing his departure for Australia provides a precedent for Helen’s own farewell note. “No more dependence, no more drudgery, no more humiliations,” Lady Audley says to herself amid the comforts of Audley Court, “every trace of the old life melted away—every clue to identity buried and forgotten” (12). Advertisements make a second life possible by enabling the applicant to adopt a new identity through a simple name change: Helen Talboys disappears on 16 August in order to reappear as Lucy Graham on 17 August 1854. The maneuver through which she is able to establish a new identity using the newspaper is brought to light by Robert Audley’s j’accuse: “What do people generally do when they wish to begin a new existence—to start for a second time in the race of life, free from the encumbrances that had fettered their fi rst journey? They change their names, Lady Audley” (271). A motherless upbringing, regrettable marriage, compulsive aggression, Technicolor hair, and, now, secret history combine to make Lady Audley the paradigmatic sensation heroine.

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Braddon once wrote that a woman had only two choices of career: governess or actress. Her heroine Lady Audley might be said to choose both. A second advertisement, this time for a governess situation, enables Lucy Graham to arrive at the neighborhood near Audley Court as an orphan: “No one knew anything of her except that she came in answer to an advertisement which Mr. Dawson, the surgeon, had inserted in the Times” (5). Her employer acknowledges how odd it was to fi nd a qualified governess without antecedents: “Her accomplishments were so brilliant and numerous, that it seemed strange that she should have answered an advertisement offering such very moderate terms of remuneration as those offered by Mr. Dawson” (5). The Dawsons are right to be suspicious. A servant who seems too good to be true probably is too good to be true as a general rule in novels set amid the transition from the accountability of traditional communities to the anonymity of print communities. The employment listings were widely acknowledged to be a potential risk since little effort was made to verify the information provided by employers. In a discussion of servant notices in London newspapers, Joseph Belcher warned of the threat to credibility posed by “deceptive advertisements” since there was little protection against misrepresentation: “Newspaper columns are open to the honest and dishonest alike, so that even the high-toned, moral, or religious character of the journal publishing a certain advertisement affords no guarantee to the public that respondents may not be swindled.”68 Although criminal misuse rather than advertising itself was the problem, the expansion of advertising ensured that traditional oral safeguards (e.g., neighbors, reputation, gossip) were no longer as effective in policing an anonymous print community. It was not uncommon to fi nd disclaimers warning families of potential impostors. A family in St. John’s Wood offered one such caution to readers of The Times about the following correspondent: “THE WIDOW LADY, advertising in The Times of the 8th inst., for a situation as companion to a lady, and giving her address as 18, Abbey-place, St. John’s-wood, is NOT a MEMBER of the FAMILY RESIDING at that ADDRESS.”69 On the one hand, the “situations wanted” provided an efficient way for servants to communicate with potential employers throughout England. Sharon Marcus has argued that the abstraction of advertising offered a means of economic mobility especially suited to women such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, who advertises for a situation under the initials “J. E.” in the Herald.70 On the other hand, the very conditions that allow “J. E.” to present her accomplishments in music, drawing, and foreign languages made these columns susceptible to fraudulent advertisers with ulterior motives. This threat of imposture worked in both directions. In 1843, four years before the publication of Brontë’s novel, The Times indignantly disclosed the Marlborough Square address of one advertiser notorious for exploiting penniless governesses.71 Anxieties toward imposture underlie all narratives about second lives, from Braddon’s tales of bigamy to Collins’s tales of inheritance fraud. Finding a suitable governess was a source of acute anxiety for Victorian

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families who risked admitting a disreputable stranger into the sacred space of the home. Collins’s Armadale may be the anti–Jane Eyre in its portrayal of Lydia Gwilt, a notorious criminal who infi ltrates an innocent household through fraudulent credentials. In an attempt to acquire the Armadale fortune, Miss Gwilt gains access to the Thorpe-Ambrose estate by responding to a governess advertisement placed in the newspaper by the cottage’s tenant. Gwilt—an adultress, thief, and convicted felon, as her name suggests—exploits the abstraction of newsprint by misrepresenting herself as a model citizen in a way unthinkable to Jane Eyre. The imposture is only possible at all because newspaper advertisements enable Gwilt to move freely between reputable and disreputable society. In a particularly chilling scene, her accomplice, Maria “Mother” Oldershaw, identifies the anonymous advertisement through its return address. Mother Oldershaw is an alarming perversion of the presumably respectable and middleclass Times reader as she scans the columns of advertisements for illicit opportunities: “I take in The Times regularly; and you may trust my wary eye not to miss the right advertisement.”72 The conspiratorial application to become part of Major Milroy’s household leaves little doubt as to the intimate nature of the crime. Not until Allan Armadale’s discovery that the falsified reference leads to a house of ill repute in Pimlico is Miss Gwilt exposed as a fallen woman. The melodramatic revelation of Gwilt’s imposture draws upon the powerful fantasy of discovering a seemingly respectable woman to be harboring a secret history: “such was the aspect in which the beautiful governess at Thorpe-Ambrose now stood revealed to Allan’s eyes!”73 The manner in which a short advertisement turns out to disguise criminal intent is the same pattern in miniature by which nearly all sensation novels proceed from surface propriety to scandalous unmasking. The agony column’s quintessential scene in which two lovers resort to the newspaper as their only means of contact is turned inside out by Braddon’s novel when the interaction between George Talboys and his former wife through the columns of the newspaper ensures their separation. A second life for Lucy Graham involves not only establishing her identity as Sir Michael’s wife through the marriage announcements but also annulling her former identity as George’s wife through the death announcements. In a chapter titled “In the First Page of the ‘Times,’ ” the obituary for Helen Talboys protects Lady Audley from exposure as a bigamist when her fi rst husband returns from the Australian gold mines only to encounter his wife’s death reported on the newspaper’s front page: “On the 24th inst., at Ventnor, Isle of Wight, Helen Talboys, aged twentytwo” (36). The announcement in the births, marriages, and deaths column of The Times may as well be labelled “T, A, L, B, O, Y, S,” as his wife’s letter is expected to be, since, as we later learn, it has been strategically inserted in the paper to reach George’s eye upon his ship’s arrival in England (36). While another coffeehouse patron can barely stay awake over the Morning Advertiser, George experiences the personalized news item in a dramatically different manner as both a physical and mental

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shock recorded by the narrator: “I cannot tell how long he sat blankly staring at one paragraph amongst the list of deaths, before his dazed brain took in its full meaning” (36). The blank stare, bloodless face, and calm manner all register George’s “dazed brain” upon learning of his wife’s death through a single line of newsprint after not communicating with her for over three years. In fact, he fi nds it difficult to associate the impersonal intelligence with the living, breathing woman for whom he has returned from Australia: “The suddenness of the blow had stunned him. In his strange and bewildered state of mind he began to wonder what had happened, and why it was that one line in the Times newspaper could have so horrible an effect upon him” (37). The fake obituary is the fi rst act of aggression anticipating the even more violent blow to come when George’s supposedly deceased wife knocks him down a well. It is poetic justice, however, that the tidings arrive in a form as brief as the farewell letter announcing George’s own abrupt departure for the Australian gold mines. As singular as George’s discovery of his wife’s death may be, it should be considered alongside Lady Audley’s equally startling discovery of her former husband’s homeward voyage in the Essex papers one month after the bigamous remarriage. The symmetry of the two scenes is established by the cognate description of Lady Audley’s “dazed” brain upon seeing the shipping news (355). The key difference is that George reads the advertisements in the same passive fashion as he might read any other section of the newspaper (as does his counterpart reading the Morning Advertiser), whereas Lady Audley responds to the news with a counternarrative of her own invention. Although Patrick Brantlinger is right to read the newspaper in this scene as an analogue for the novel in the way that both deliver a shock to the reader’s nervous system, the failure to discriminate between news headlines and the personal information printed on the newspaper’s front page overlooks the extent to which Helen Talboys’s obituary is tailored to the eyes of a specific reader.74 The sheer impersonality of newsprint is what gives the advertisement authority as a historical record in George’s eyes: “Yes: there it was, in black and white—‘Helen Talboys, aged twenty-two’ ” (37). The dual meaning of the phrase “black and white” as both newsprint and plain fact encapsulates the double logic of advertisements in the sensation novel whereby straightforward events turn out to be anything but black and white in the end. The latent stories behind the information reported in the newspaper disrupt any efforts toward narrative closure promised by the press. A seemingly unrelated comment made to Phoebe Marks reveals her mistress’s association of the advertisements with just this type of deceptive transformation. Although Lady Audley claims to dislike reading of any sort, her cosmetic advice indicates a familiarity with the period’s ephemeral literature: “Why, with a bottle of hair dye, such as we see advertised in the papers, and a pot of rouge, you’d be as good-looking as I any day, Phoebe” (58). Cosmetics are the clue to a more radical transformation available through advertising at both a formal and thematic level in the

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novel. A pale double of the lady she serves, Phoebe could with a minor makeover abandon her abusive husband and begin life anew in the manner of her mistress—if only she would seize the opportunity presented by the advertisements. In this sense, Phoebe acts as a stand-in for the novel’s own female readers during the novel’s lesson in how to do things with newspapers. The two female characters represent before-and-after versions of the sensation heroine: one has yet to begin a second life while the other enjoys the rewards of having done so. The ease with which Phoebe could potentially transform her life through the advertisements tacitly undermines the comfortable distance by which the exceptional Lady Audley is set apart from the novel’s other, more virtuous female characters including Alicia Audley and Clara Talboys. The newspaper was a particularly effective means of causing discomfort in audiences vulnerable to fraud since many readers assumed its reporting, if not its politics, to be reliable. Another way in which newsprint unwittingly abetted the anonymity, and potential criminality, of advertisements was by eliminating one of the most distinctive markers of individual identity: handwriting. The greatest threat to Lady Audley’s impersonation is not eyewitness recognition, as one would expect, but rather identification of her distinctive calligraphic style. Robert looks upon Lady Audley’s beauty as the Rosetta stone with which to decipher her feminine handwriting: “Yes, here it all is—the feathery, gold-shot, flaxen curls, the pencilled eyebrows, the tiny straight nose, the winning childish smile, all to be guessed in these few graceful up-strokes and down-strokes” (64). Indeed, Robert is unable to connect the woman in his uncle’s household with the obituary in The Times precisely because the impersonal typeface reveals nothing about the author’s identity, much less the author’s curls. The sense of shock associated with the genre partly arises from the manner in which sensation novels default on the “autobiographical pact,” to use Philippe Lejeune’s phrase, by violating the expected correspondence between the author’s identity and the advertisement’s persona.75 Lady Audley’s letters to her husband can be traced back to their source in a way all but impossible with the impersonal methods of reproduction characteristic of the period’s new print media. The advertisements were full of unreliable narrators. As these novels warn, few documents were as authoritative as the newspaper in defi ning reputation despite a pronounced lack of accountability on the part of the press. The simple speech acts performed by the births, marriages, and deaths in particular could redefi ne the heroine’s status with a single line. (One may recall how J. L. Austin illustrated his theory of speech acts with the example of a marriage ceremony.76) It is fitting that the majority of news items reported in sensation novels concern deaths—or rather “deaths” in quotation marks, for these obituaries inevitably turn out to be invalid. Death is no longer a climax in sensation novels as it would have been for the vast majority of novels published during the nineteenth century. It is instead the starting point for narratives about a second life. Misreported deaths in the newspaper are

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what make it possible for characters to begin life anew in a manner that updates the gothic return-from-the-grave theme for a more “realistic” contemporary genre. In this sense, sensation novels reverse the sequence of births, marriages, and deaths with which the newspaper reader began. To take an obvious case, Lady Audley’s “death” is followed by marriage in a way that disrupts the usual sequence of events in the newspaper’s fi rst column. This is one reason that there are so few actual deaths in sensation novels despite their reputation for excessive violence (George Talboys survives being pushed down a well, after all). The close proximity of the births, marriages, deaths, and disappearances listed on the front page was appropriate since changes to a person’s status ensured steady traffic between these seemingly discrete categories. Some reached the obituaries only after graduating from the purgatory of “Missing” and “Mysterious Disappearance” announcements left unanswered with disturbing regularity. Numerous agencies advertised on the front page to locate these “Missing Friends, Next of Kin, &c” through a network of correspondents in America, Australia, Canada, and the British colonies; one agency claimed to maintain a list of over four thousand deceased persons with unclaimed property around the world.77 The Economic Funeral Company and the London Necropolis conveniently placed advertisements for their services alongside the reports of missing persons. The untold stories behind the obituaries were detectable by the knowing reader among the adjacent advertisements in some cases. The personal ads had always appealed to the reader’s “detective tastes,” according to The Times.78 Unexplained disappearances are a standard element of suspenseful plots in which inquiries are placed for, and go unanswered by, absentees who turn out not to be dead, as feared, but only withdrawn from society. Such cases included avoiding relatives, hiding from creditors, or simply starting life anew unencumbered by the past. The rhetoric of “Reward” and “Absconded” notices will be familiar to readers of Oliver Twist (1837–39) from Mr. Brownlow’s use of the press to solicit information about Oliver’s disappearance from Pentonville (Mr. Grimwig is sure the orphan has absconded). “Missing” was a designation used to describe two entirely different cases involving both voluntary and involuntary disappearances. An advertisement in John Marchmont’s Legacy, for example, assumes that a detailed physical description of the “missing young lady” in question will expedite her recovery.79 The desperate authors of these advertisements often had little alternative beyond an improbable identification through a brief sketch in newsprint. To take one illustration from The Times, the Parisian Monsieur Hua exhibits an attention to detail in the following description of an infant abducted from the Tuileries that is tacitly self-defeating: Age two months, appearance of body healthy and mottled, without spot or blemish; head pointed; nose well developed; chin small; very little hair, except in a blonde tuft at the back of the head; an appearance of scurf coming to a point at the top of the forehead; complexion

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fresh; upper eyelashes blonde, long, and fi ne; lower eyelashes—none; eyes lively and approaching to black; feet long; the fi ngers frequently spread.80 The more detailed the portrait becomes, the more we become aware of the search’s futility. Such attention to physical appearance disregards the extent to which outsiders—a young lady without chaperone, an infant without parents—could be identified as outsiders in the fi rst place within communities in order to invite comparison against the profi les in the newspaper’s second column. Collins’s missing persons are most representative of the class of missing persons found among the advertisements due to intentional changes in identity. Magdalen Vanstone wears her aunt’s veil in order to elude the detailed description placed in the newspaper under the heading “FIFTY POUNDS REWARD,” and Ozias Midwinter voluntarily renounces his birth name before ignoring all advertisements addressed to him under the heading “SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD.”81 Still, no reply was taken to mean one thing in a society connected by the press and the telegraph. Should the advertisements for “MR. GEORGE TALBOYS” placed in the London, Sydney, and Melbourne papers not be answered within a month, Robert Audley explains, “I shall then consider myself justified in concluding that my friend is dead” (102, 41). The appeal of the novel lies precisely in the amplitude given to a story only intimated by the advertisements— there were no “found person” advertisements for the sake of narrative closure. Readers of the newspaper would never learn of the outcome of this missing person, who is just another name to pass through the second column. Readers of the novel, by contrast, learn how George Talboys’s use of the alias “Mr. Thomas Brown” on the passenger list for the Victoria Regia confi rms that Lady Audley is not the only character capable of disappearing under an assumed name (99). This particular missing-person announcement may not reach the absentee, but it does reach the culprit responsible for his disappearance when Sir Michael Audley reads aloud the second column of The Times to Lady Audley at the breakfast table. The novel’s heroine may work her way through the gamut of marriage, death, educational, occupational, and missing-person advertisements in order to secure a new life, but the novel’s detective is the one who, à la Sherlock Holmes, turns to the agony column’s suggestive headings “CAUTION,” “SUSPICIOUS DEATH,” and “ANY WITNESS OF ___” for clues about his missing friend. Robert’s reading habits reflect his transformation during the novel into a reformed barrister whose specialty, appropriately enough for a devotee of the personal ads, is breach-of-promise cases. The novel’s epilogue confi rms his familiarity with illicit epistolary communication when recounting how he had “convulsed the Court by his deliciously comic rendering of the faithless Nobbs’s amatory correspondence” in the case of Hobbs vs. Nobbs (445). The unreformed Robert had scarcely read at all, by contrast, amusing himself with French novels or out-of-date Chelmsford papers. His reading becomes more attentive,

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and less dated, when it becomes apparent how useful the advertisements might be as a tool with which to decipher the behavior of those around him. In a novel in which husband and wife learn of each other’s movements almost exclusively through the newspaper, it is only appropriate for Robert to search for his missing friend in the newspaper’s agony column: He bought the Times newspaper, and looked instinctively at the second column, with a morbid interest in the advertisements of people missing—sons, brothers, and husbands who had left their homes, never to return or to be heard of more. There was one advertisement of a young man who was found drowned somewhere on the Lambeth shore. What if that should have been George’s fate? (98) This suspicion should be familiar by now as the attitude adopted by readers in agony, who, for better or worse, expect the column to bear some relation to their own lives. Robert proceeds according to a desperate process of elimination by which the column’s unnamed absentees are considered as possible matches for his missing friend. His inclination to personalize these anonymous tragedies indicates how supposedly impersonal news often works through a powerful process of audience identification with its victims: “What if that should have been George’s fate?” The very question illustrates how easily suspicion toward the anonymous stories in the agony column extends beyond the page to one’s community. The novel might even be said to endorse this paranoid model of reading since the advertisement for the drowned man turns out to be uncannily similar to actual events once George is discovered to have been left at the bottom of a well. In this sense, the sensation novel not only created suspicions where none previously existed, as numerous critics alleged, but also confi rmed suspicions by inviting audiences to identify with these ostensibly impersonal narratives. The cases resonating most with readers are those that correspond in some way to the reader’s own circumstances, whether this involves yearning for a secret love affair or worrying about abandonment by one’s spouse. The irony of the scene is that Robert longs for the assurance of newsprint when in fact its unreliability is the very source of George’s woes. Robert may be relieved to learn that the Lambeth corpse is not George Talboys, but the residual story of the anonymous drowning victim remains disconcertingly unresolved by the end of the novel. The vogue for sensation novels in the 1860s was in no danger of ending prematurely due to a lack of material. The readers portrayed in Lady Audley’s Secret are every bit as interested in criminal behavior as the novel’s own readers. An early reference to the Maria Manning murder trial of 1849 would thus appear to situate the novel in relation to the crime pages of the press were its occasion not the advertisement placed for George Talboys. Robert says of his friend’s disappearance, “What do we know of the mysteries that may hang about

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the houses we enter? If I were to go to-morrow into that common-place, plebeian, eight-roomed house in which Maria Manning and her husband murdered their guest, I should have no awful prescience of that bygone horror” (140). Yet Robert’s insistence that some crimes leave no trace, neither mandrake nor blood stains, runs counter to the very premise of investigative reporting. A crime without evidence would never become a newspaper story in the fi rst place. On the contrary, the Manning case reassured audiences that the press would ultimately expose serious crime—an assurance undermined when Lady Audley herself manages to avoid publicity after a string of attempted murders. Her inscrutable demeanor introduces the alarming possibility that domestic crime might not be detectable at all. Whereas a reporter investigates evidence of suspicious behavior, Robert operates according to a contrary ethic by which the very innocence of the culprit’s manner betrays her guilt. He says to the woman responsible for her husband’s disappearance, “I believe that we may look into the smiling face of a murderer, and admire its tranquil beauty” (141). Her smiling face is described as a “mask” precisely for failing to express the heroine’s latent madness to even the most discriminating observer (274). Surely this overdetermined smile deserves far more attention than the heroine’s magnificent hair that has distracted reviewers ever since the novel’s publication. At the very least, Lady Audley’s smile emphasizes the extent to which sensation novels are less about what we see than what we do not see in the newspapers. She is one among many sensation heroines to pass through the advertising columns while avoiding exposure in other sections of the press. Robert’s guarded conversation with Dr. Mosgrave about Lady Audley’s confi nement suggests that the novel is not structured along the lines of the Manning murder plot but rather in avoidance of ever becoming such criminal folklore at all. More than anything else, Robert fears the scandal occasioned by Lady Audley’s behavior: “It was a trial for murder that so long had haunted his dreams. How often he had awoken in an agony of shame from a vision of a crowded court-house, and his uncle’s wife, in a criminal dock, hemmed in on every side by a sea of eager faces!” (377). He even consents to leaving George’s body at the bottom of the well in order to avoid the unseemly publicity entailed by a coroner’s inquest. But Lady Audley is neither tried for murder nor reported in the newspapers. A single obituary commemorating the end of her former life marks the limits of her visibility. This advertisement once again implies an entire story excluded from the pages of the newspaper. Ironically, the “stainless name” of the Audley family is safe because Lady Audley’s appearances in print are confi ned to advertisements under names too ephemeral to be stained (378). Her assumption of one fi nal alias upon entering the maison de santé in Villebrumeuse protects the family name, then, but at the cost of justifying suspicion toward strangers among the novel’s readers. It is only fitting that an impersonal letter announces Lady Audley’s death after a prolonged “maladie de langueur,” the very condition driving sensation heroines to desperate measures in the fi rst

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place, if not the very condition driving the extraordinary popularity of sensation novels themselves (446). The painstaking avoidance of publicity ultimately distinguishes the plots designed by Braddon, Collins, Wood, and other sensation novelists from the romans à clef for which they have been taken. Characters in these novels are not so much drawn from the newspapers as exceedingly mindful of the latest scandals found among those papers. This self-awareness is noticeably absent from the many apologias of fiction’s capacity to explore criminal behavior to a degree not possible in the limited space of a news column. Mortimer Collins complained as much in the pages of Braddon’s Belgravia in 1870 as the sensation mania was beginning to wane: “You are supposed to see everything in the paper. But then you don’t see everything in the paper; journalists are not behind the scenes. They tell you, rather tardily, that one man has discarded his wife, and that another has disappointed his creditors; but they fail to furnish the true causes of such occurrences.”82 The sensation novel may very well explore the “true causes” of crime, then, just not of those crimes reported in the newspapers. The press was unlikely to expose the crimes passionnels hinted at by personal advertisements and subsequently amplified by sensation novels. In the end, these novels avoid proceeding chronologically toward exposure in the manner of an investigative report by instead exhibiting a reverse momentum toward the avoidance of publicity. This is what finally sets Lady Audley apart from Maria Manning. Manning becomes a recognizable allusion through her newspaper notoriety, whereas the sensation novel works in an entirely different way by offering readers an account of crimes never brought to public attention at all. Thus it is appropriate that Braddon’s novel does not end with the Audley name in print, as the novel’s title insinuates, but rather with the adoption of yet another pseudonym designed to conceal the heroine’s past life—the very maneuver with which the novel began among the advertisements. The great irony in Braddon’s case is that her own distressing encounter with the newspaper advertisements took place four years after the publication of Lady Audley’s Secret. In a Wildean twist not uncommon among the biographies of sensation authors, the art form that once claimed to imitate life discovered the hard way that life could just as easily imitate art. According to biographer Robert Lee Wolff, Braddon was rumored to have married John Maxwell only to discover afterward that he was already married.83 The headlines are easy to imagine: the queen of the bigamy novel herself alleged to be a bigamist.84 However, as Wolff and others point out, Braddon knew beforehand about Maxwell’s wife, whose confi nement to a Dublin mental institution led to a separation. This did not make it any easier for Braddon and Maxwell to live together without a legal marriage. Their unconventional relationship became a minor scandal when Maxwell ill-advisedly allowed the Sun, Court Journal, Morning Advertiser, and Public Opinion to publish an announcement of their marriage in 1864. Any reader of Braddon’s novels should have learned the lesson that advertisements never go unnoticed. Richard Brinsley Knowles,

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the brother-in-law of Maxwell’s fi rst wife, published denials of the marriage in every paper that printed its announcement. The Maxwells, of course, could not deny the embarrassing charge. Braddon’s opportunity to start a new life through the advertisements would have to wait until the death of Maxwell’s fi rst wife in 1874. Until then, Braddon’s life would be little different from those led by the defiant heroines of her novels. Sensation novels played a key part in bringing unwanted attention to the agony column during the 1860s. An unexpected turn of events the following decade contributed to transforming the newspaper’s second column into more than a refuge for malcontents when a large number of advertisements headed “Pour Paris” covered the front page of The Times during the siege of Paris by the German army in 1870–71. Delivery of these desperate messages by pigeon post gave friends and family a chance to reach isolated Parisians, whose telegraphic contact with the outside world had been cut off by the German cavalry. Microscopic dispatches photographed on thin fi lms of collodion, packaged into quills and fastened to carrier pigeons’ tails, enabled London to communicate with Paris through Tours, and later Bordeaux, from 18 November 1870 until 28 January 1871. (The pigeon’s mission became one of the siege’s most dangerous once the Germans responded to the aerial campaign with a battalion of trained hawks.) According to E. B. Leonard and other journalists, the front page of The Times was photographed on thin pieces of paper measuring less than five square inches, whose image could afterward be projected by magic lantern onto a wall to be read by hundreds of people.85 For many historians, the shift in sentiment occasioned by the occupation marked a transition away from the column’s heyday as a site for discretion. Alice Clay’s anthology, The Agony Column of the “Times” 1800–1870 (1881), designated the beginning of the siege as the end of an era.86 The agony column became official on 22 February 1886 when the second column of the front page appeared under the heading “PERSONAL.” The official naming of the column went against the very anonymity valued by its original clients. The column was anything but secret in the years to come as attention seekers and marketing fi rms increasingly dominated its columns. The Times concluded that this was the end of truly personal advertisements in the newspaper’s second column: “the heart-beat has departed from the ‘Agony.’ ”87 The sensation novel confi rms that Victorians were doing more than just reading about other people’s lives in the newspaper. The use of advertisements by these novels illustrates the unexpectedly personal ways in which audiences used the newspaper to correspond with a lover, seek a companion, locate a missing person, apply for a situation, or even reenter society under false pretenses. These fictional narratives take up and amplify stories only hinted at by the personal advertisements while at the same time demonstrating how the advertisements could potentially enable the opportunistic reader to lead a double life. Sensation novels thus capitalize on the tensions arising at this time from a constantly modified understanding of the newspaper as a documentary source of reliable

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information as well as a purveyor of far less reliable kinds of information found among the advertisements. The advertisements reveal the newspaper to be less an imagined community of unseen constituents than one in which audiences encountered the voices of other readers or even actual readers themselves through direct correspondence and subsequent liaisons arranged through its columns. The seemingly unmediated contact made possible by these advertisements was to a large degree responsible for the popularity of the front page among both male and female readers. Anonymity was the great risk and the great attraction of the advertisements. Indeed, the thrill of reading the personal advertisements came from a sense that the public expressions of desire found in the second column of the newspaper’s front page could come from just about anyone. That cry for attention might just be from someone you knew.

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PART II

The Inner Pages

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3 The Leading Article The Whispering Conscience in Trollope’s Palliser Novels

T

he otherwise charmed career of Parliamentarian Phineas Finn is never so much in doubt as when he reads an opposition newspaper titled the People’s Banner despite knowing in advance of its hostility: “Why Phineas should have read it who can tell? But who is there that abstains from reading that which is printed in abuse of himself?”1 A reader can hardly be blamed for wishing Trollope’s narratives would begin rather than end at such moments. Indeed, such rhetorical questions were responsible in part for Henry James’s complaint that the limits of Trollope’s psychology lie in knowing precisely how characters would behave in a given situation without bothering to explain why they would do so.2 This chapter takes a closer look at Phineas Finn’s masochistic taste for abuse by the press as well as that of other readers of the newspaper in an attempt to move beyond the limits of Trollope’s psychology. Although it may be difficult to explain why a character would not abstain from reading abusive commentary, it should at least be possible to account for Trollope’s interest in characters caught in such unpleasant circumstances. This chapter will attempt to do just that by examining journalists and their victims among the Palliser novels (1864–80), Trollope’s second fictional series following the Chronicles of Barsetshire (1855–67). The ministerial career of Plantagenet Palliser, if not the hostile editorial commentary of journalist Quintus Slide, threads together the six novels comprising the Palliser series, including Can You Forgive Her? (1864–65), Phineas Finn (1867–68), The Eustace Diamonds (1871–73), Phineas Redux (1873–74), The Prime Minister (1875–76), and The Duke’s Children (1879–80). The attention given by this series of novels to what were fast becoming rival media suggests far more was at stake than mere amusement with the taunts of an abusive press. The commercial success of newspapers was primarily responsible for the increased competition between journalism and literature during the second half of the nineteenth century. The newspaper only became an

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authoritative, if still controversial, source of information once it was no longer as limited in circulation, high in price, and infrequently published as had been the case until the early nineteenth century. Self-promoting journals such as the Illustrated London News made their best efforts to broadcast Napoleon’s words on the shift in power from military to media: “Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a hundred thousand bayonets.”3 The bayonet was a minor concern in comparison with the bay of the journalist in this era of press expansion—or so newspapers insisted on telling their readers. Novelists responded to the growing influence of the press by ridiculing it as a degraded form of commercial entertainment, especially after the Education Act of 1870, falsely blamed for the creation of a vast audience of semiliterate consumers. The New Journalism of the 1880s and 1890s was condemned by many novelists for its emphasis on sensationalism and human interest stories.4 Yet resentment only partially accounts for the widespread suspicion toward journalists on the part of authors. The model of literary history formulated by Pierre Bourdieu reconsiders authorship as a struggle among competing groups for the right to defi ne the terms of aesthetic legitimacy.5 Such an approach offers one explanation of what novelists stood to gain by representing potential competitors including journalists in their fiction. This emerging rivalry bears out the full implications behind criticism of the two professions. As one reviewer observed in 1904: “The Victorian novelists depict the journalist as a contemptible reptile.”6 (The epithet “reptile press” originated during Trollope’s lifetime with the exposure of Otto von Bismarck’s bribery of editors to support Prussian policy in 1866.) Novelists could only encourage the public to view the press in the same reptilian terms, an image appropriate to journalists less for their venom than for their ability to wriggle out of difficult situations—as the slippery name of Trollope’s Slide perhaps tries to suggest. Trollope was one of many nineteenth-century novelists to represent fictional journalists alongside their journalistic fictions as a way of calling into question the credibility of both. Novelists as different as Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, George Gissing, Eliza Lynn Linton, George Meredith, William Makepeace Thackeray, and H. G. Wells all made a point of introducing fictional journalists at a time when the newspaper was beginning to challenge the novel’s preeminence in terms of the realistic representation of daily life. These authors—many of whom wrote for the press at one time or another—shared a particular distrust of the way journalists made the public world visible while at the same time keeping their own identities invisible through the controversial policy of unsigned contributions. The privilege of being able to violate the privacy of others while simultaneously preserving one’s own privacy drew fierce criticism from adversaries with little means of recourse against anonymous allegations. Anonymity is a recurring grievance in the journals of Søren Kierkegaard, for example: “It is really impossible to do battle with a journalist. He keeps himself hidden; one cannot get hold of him; and then in the twinkling of an eye he incites those thousands of people against

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one person.”7 Unsigned commentary at its worst permitted personal vindictiveness to be delivered in seemingly impersonal terms. Nowhere was this editorial stance more contentious than in the anonymous editorial commentary of the newspapers toward which so many of Trollope’s satires are directed. The leading article or editorial was the most influential form of newspaper journalism from its conception at the start of the nineteenth century to its eventual dilution among competing media in the early twentieth century. It is important to remember just how authoritative this form of journalism would have been for readers in an era with limited outlets of information. The principal newspaper’s reputation as “the Thunderer” at the time Trollope was writing gives one indication of the force as well as the sheer volume of its pronouncements. The influential voice of the newspaper was a matter of some urgency to Victorian novelists, whose fictional representations of the journalist figure address growing concerns over the violation of privacy while at the same time implicitly promoting the novel as the appropriate medium in which to conduct such an investigation. This chapter proposes that Victorian novelists challenged the impersonal authority of the newspaper by representing the journalist in propria persona, or by showing the speaker behind the anonymous voice of the leading article—what George Lewes called the “mask” hiding journalists from their audiences.8 As we will see, the journalist is as much the one investigated as the one doing the investigating in Victorian fiction. The dual privilege of subjecting a figure to meticulous scrutiny while absolving the evaluator of accountability provoked novelists to reverse roles by subjecting the private lives of journalists to a similar degree of inquiry. The primary target of Trollope’s novels concerned with the influence of the press is the anonymous voice of journalism that held sway over the nation’s growing readership. Nowhere was this influence more apparent than in scenes of individual readers— from the Reverend Septimus Harding to the Duke of Omnium—who discover themselves to be the victims of a seemingly faceless and irrefutable press. The Victorian novel therefore ensured that publicity was applied to the one group safe from it: the journalists themselves.

A Horror of Newspaper Men The journalist in Trollope’s time was just becoming the professional figure recognizable to audiences today. A disreputable sort since newspapers fi rst appeared in the seventeenth century, the journalist originally evoked images of the mercenary hack hired by a political party or the Grub Street man of letters commenting on all of the day’s topics. Not until the end of the nineteenth century would the trade associated with a wide range of commercial writing from authors as different as Joseph Addison and Daniel Defoe come to be associated almost exclusively with writing for the newspaper press, an industry whose commercial growth after the 1830s enabled journalism to become a legitimate full-time occupation.

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Although there had been only a loose connection between journalists and the news up to this point, the term henceforth brought to mind a contributor to the newspapers (formerly known as “news writer” or “newspaperman”) in particular with unprecedented influence over public opinion. An editorial for The Times at mid-century explained it best in attributing the uneasy reception of the English press to concerns with publicity above all else: “the press is dreaded; and where fear is, there cannot be much love.”9 It was the unchecked influence of the new class of journalists over the reading public that Trollope’s fiction would contest through its own images of this “dreaded” profession. Journalism underwent a long transition from trade to profession in many parts of Europe at this time, although it would not be recognized as a profession until the very end of the nineteenth century (see figure 3.1). Until then, journalists sought recognition by distinguishing their occupation from that of earlier eras. Hugh Gilzean Reid, President of the National Association of Journalists, to this end argued, “The modern Press, as we know it, may be said to date from the year 1861,” when commercial independence reduced the obligations of political patronage, freeing journalists to speak with greater liberty and distinguishing them from the related vocations of politicians, educators, and men of letters.10 It was during this period that the term “journalist” went from meaning a writer for periodicals of all kinds to a writer primarily for the newspapers.11

Figure 3.1. The evolution of the journalist from Fleet Prisoner to Fleet Street impresario. From Punch 112 (1897): 293. Illustrated by Leonard Raven Hill. Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library.

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Since the 1690s, the term “journalist” (from the French journaliste) had been used in a loose, generic manner. Its earliest recorded use was in 1708 according to the Oxford English Dictionary, after which its defi nition as “a writer of journals” appeared in Samuel Johnson’s dictionary in 1755.12 The occupation was not defi ned with greater precision for almost a century, when attempts to characterize the journalist’s role were made by politicians determined to regulate criticism, legislators demanding strict libel laws, novelists eager to differentiate their work, and journalists themselves seeking to protect commercial interests. Writing for the newspapers was neither a dignified nor even a reputable activity at the start of the century. Journalism was regarded by many as an inferior occupation conducted by men of low birth, sparse education, and dubious morals. It was a group referred to by Max Weber as a “pariah caste.”13 (Glencora Palliser’s own phrase for them is “gutter-slanderers.”14) Few occupations at the time aroused such outspoken animosity as journalism. John Stuart Mill went so far as to describe it as “the vilest and most degrading of all trades.”15 Suppression and contradiction fees—what we would today call blackmail—were common features of a press devoted to personal attacks. Consequently, there was no shortage of caricatures similar to the one portraying blind-folded “Mammon” on a pedestal instructing idolatrous editors: “Write away my boys—lie as fast as you write, and you shall be paid as fast as you lie—.”16 Writers who were expected to adopt the views of newspapers controlled largely by political parties made few claims of occupational integrity and notoriously switched allegiances for the right price, provoking Johnson to condemn the news writer in The Idler as “a man without virtue, who writes lies at home for his own profit.”17 Johnson’s emphasis on the word “home” here expresses widespread discontentment with the journalist’s refusal to enter the public sphere as a named participant in a way that would persist into the subsequent century’s debates over anonymity. The early news publications attacked by Johnson resembled political pamphlets more than anything else. All but the most fervent party members were likely to dismiss opinions voiced in the newspapers at this time as politically motivated. Leigh Hunt obviously had such partisan tactics in mind when he wrote the following directive in the satirical “Rules for Newspaper Editors” (1808): “You must absolutely be a party-man, or you are neither a true editor nor a true patriot.”18 Novelists contributed to this image through their parodies of ineffectual partisan newspapers from the Eatanswill Gazette and Eatanswill Independent (Dickens) to the Swamp Town Gazette and Swamp Town Sentinel (Thackeray) to the Daily Beast and Daily Brute (Waugh). It would take the profession decades to remove the stigma of unprincipled partisanship no matter how conspicuous the reforms in conduct. The social status of journalism gradually improved throughout the nineteenth century even if attitudes toward its practitioners remained ambivalent at best. In the president’s address to the National Association for Journalists in 1888, Algernon Borthwick cited the disparity between

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public perception of the press as a whole and its individual members as an enduring problem. Historian Aled Jones has identified four factors contributing to the profession’s growing respectability during this period: a belief in the distinctiveness of English journalism, a consolidated language, the partial decline of anonymity, and the emergence of newspaper reporting as a clearly defi ned occupation.19 Journalists sought to distinguish their labor from that of other related trades in an attempt to obtain the benefits of professional recognition. Yet, despite these efforts, journalism would remain a profession in perception alone until the very end of the century. Hugh Stanbury of He Knew He Was Right (1868–69), for example, is unable to convince Sir Marmaduke Rowley that his work as a journalist should be recognized alongside the established professions of law, medicine, and the clergy. The major obstacle for journalists was the lack of formal qualifications distinguishing a profession. As numerous historians have documented, journalism had no entry requirements, administrating body, or specialized knowledge; its practitioners lacked status, stability, and consistent remuneration; and the trade was best learned through an informal apprenticeship rather than a certifying institution.20 Few of these skills could not be acquired through employment in a newspaper office. This was part of the appeal to aspiring journalists from among the self-taught working classes, educated-though-impoverished middle classes, and unemployed professionals. In fact, the most vehement criticism from among the gentry concerned the social mobility of a press in which individuals of widely disparate backgrounds could obtain influential positions. Radical journalists represented the entire profession in the eyes of the governing classes, who distrusted appeals to public opinion as a means of guiding Parliament. To take two characters created by Trollope’s contemporaries, we are told how Thackeray’s Dr. Firmin “had a horror of newspaper men, and considered they belonged to the dangerous classes,” and George Eliot’s Sir James Chettam complains, “What a character for anybody with decent connections to show himself in!—one of those newspaper fellows!”21 Trollope’s Jemima Stanbury even withdraws her nephew’s fi nancial support after his ungentlemanly decision to join the “radical scribblers and incendiaries” on the staff of the penny press, whose influence in her eyes ranks alongside other symptoms of social decay from divorce bills to false hair.22

Thunderbolts from Mount Olympus Trollope’s Palliser series was written at the same time as two key developments in Victorian journalism. First, the establishment of the leading article enabled journalists to gain unprecedented influence over an expanding readership. The typical reader was expected to open a newspaper at the center page, which contained the principal news items after several pages of advertisements. The majority of these papers maintained

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a similar layout in which the leading articles inhabited the left-hand columns opposite the cabinet meetings, political matters, and foreign affairs reported on the facing page. Most metropolitan dailies printed three to four leading articles on current events. A newspaper’s reputation at this time depended on its leading articles, the most consequential mode of British journalism during the nineteenth century and the primary source of its reputation as a fourth estate. The leading article acquired its modern meaning in the early 1800s as a statement of opinion expressed by the paper’s editorial staff. It had been little more than a digest of news, commentary, and foreign intelligence prior to this shift toward editorial commentary.23 In 1884, Thomas Gibson Bowles contended in the pages of Trollope’s Fortnightly Review: “Newspapers indeed, are now less news papers than opinion papers.”24 Most notably, The Times had attained unrivaled political clout under the editorship of Thomas Barnes and John Thadeus Delane, whose influential leading articles earned the paper its reputation as “the Thunderer.” This paper became so authoritative a voice in parliamentary affairs at the mid-century that Trollope devoted an entire chapter to its monopoly in The New Zealander, in which he complains, “Men think, and speak, and act the Times newspaper.”25 The paper’s newfound status as the most powerful platform in Britain was perhaps best expressed by Alaric Tudor’s ambition in The Three Clerks (1857) “to sit among the magnates of Great Britain, and make his voice thunder through the columns of the Times.”26 The second development arose from the anonymity debates among journalists over whether to publish the names of contributors. Disagreements over editorial policy drove many periodicals at this time from anonymous publication to the introduction of contributor names, familiar to us today as the byline. The anonymity debates raised the question of whether to publish articles without signature in order to promote the corporate authority of the journal or with the signatures of individual contributors in order to hold authors accountable for their opinions.27 Trollope was a vocal participant in these debates over the use of signature. The Fortnightly Review founded by Trollope and G. H. Lewes in 1865 was one of the fi rst major journals to adopt an editorial policy of signed articles, and other journals such as Blackwood’s, the Contemporary Review, and the Nineteenth Century followed suit by beginning to print the names of contributors over the next several decades. Although the experiment with the anonymous publication of Nina Balatka (1866–67) indicates Trollope’s general interest in authorial reputation, his involvement in the anonymity debates shows an equally pressing concern with the identity of the writers responsible for shaping public opinion through the periodicals. Yet these two developments— the rise of the leading article and contributor signature—would not come together during this period despite raising mutual concerns about accountability. The leading article remained the exception to the rule of signature through its conspicuous absence of named contributors in most newspapers until the early twentieth century.

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Use of the collective editorial “we” to convey the authority of the publication over the individual resulted in the controversial anonymous voice of nineteenth-century print media. In rare moments of candor, editors themselves acknowledged the advantages of the editorial platform when addressing the public. Thomas Barnes of The Times responded to one letter from Disraeli (a contributor to the paper under the pseudonym “Runnymede”) with the following caution: You are an anonymous writer: it is fit—it is necessary that you should preserve your incognito: & yet you put yourself in personal contrast with a man who has no means of retaliating by any tu quoque, as you & your actions must be totally unknown to him. This is unfair on the face of it & there is nothing for which the public has so quick an eye as unfairness in fight—whether physical or intellectual.28 The metaphor of a “fight” was commonly used by contemporary accounts of the press to express the almost physical impact of these speech acts. According to a cartoon by Harry Furniss, signed contributions in the French press fostered rapier-like thrusts, feints, and parries as opposed to the pugilistic model of brute force delivered under the cloak of anonymity practiced by the English (see figure 3.2). Victims of these blows had little recourse beyond condemning the unnamed antagonist, as Trollope’s novels from The Warden to The Prime Minister illustrate in dramatic fashion. Any journalist in a Victorian novel is likely to be an editor since this was the only named figure on the publication’s staff.29 The rest of the staff remained veiled from the eyes of the public no matter how controversial their contributions to the periodical in question. In the short stories from Saint Paul’s Magazine collected in Trollope’s An Editor’s Tales (1870), for example, the narrator exploits the editorial privilege of speaking in the fi rst-person plural “we” to comic effect since he is a lone individual directly addressing the audience of a work of fiction. But these humorous anecdotes belie the seriousness with which Trollope treated “The great WE” when dealing with political as opposed to literary evaluation.30 His essay “On Anonymous Literature” clearly expresses his distaste for the anonymous publication of literature: “The man who puts forward his printed words, whether for instruction or delectation, and publishes, that is makes public, his own thoughts and creations, should never be ashamed to say from whom they come.”31 Surprisingly, then, Trollope defended the use of anonymity for political editorials in the newspaper despite strong disapproval of the policy for other forms of writing. According to Trollope’s defense of this exception in the Fortnightly Review, the newspaper’s value to ordinary readers was enhanced by collective rather than individual instruction from a diverse group of experienced professionals: “The newspaper is not a lamp lighted by a single hand, but a sun placed in the heaven by an invisible creator.”32 The identity of this “invisible creator” would nevertheless come under intense

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Figure 3.2. Two models of journalism in England and France. Illustrated by Harry Furniss for Punch 99 (1890): 159. Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library.

scrutiny in Trollope’s fictional representations of journalism despite any professed tolerance of editorial anonymity. Trollope’s earliest and still best-known satire of the newspaper press is the one-volume novel The Warden (1855). This novel examines the conscience of Septimus Harding after his supervision of Hiram’s Hospital for destitute laborers is called into question by a series of leading articles in the Jupiter. The fictional newspaper’s reputation as “the great Thunderer” leaves little doubt about its resemblance to The Times.33 Two leading articles—or “leading thunderbolts,” in the novel’s parlance—bring the case of misallocated funds to public attention in the most extreme possible terms (90). The ex cathedra attacks illustrate the confl ict between an abstract morality untroubled by actual human experience and the private conscience of a decent if misguided individual. The editor responsible for the offensive leading articles signals his remoteness from human contact through his very name, Tom Towers, and an office insulated from contact with the individuals summarily judged by the columns of his paper. The newspaper’s account of events may be technically correct. Harding

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himself does not dispute the facts. Yet the case is made with a fervor out of all proportion to the actual circumstances in a way that redirects attention from the alleged impropriety to the state of mind of its mildmannered victim. Edward Linley Sambourne’s satirical illustration of the novel brings out this concern with editorial anonymity through the figure of Tom Tiddler watching through a peephole as the Penny Prometheus harasses its defenseless victim (see figure 3.3). By quoting the leading articles in full rather than through indirect discourse, Trollope’s novel is doing more than letting the audience adjudicate for itself the exaggerated case against Mr. Harding. The novel is at the same time satirizing a mode of reasoning that refuses to consider alternative viewpoints (those of, say, Archdeacon Grantly or senior bedesman John Bunce), a maneuver which might be said to be the distinguishing narrative technique of Trollope’s own novels. The movement from the newspaper’s external perspective to the psychology of the pained reader is characteristic of Trollope’s fiction in this regard. The author’s direct address to the audience brings the personal aspects of the warden’s case to its attention. When the narrator says, “I must for the present leave my readers to imagine the state of Mr. Harding’s mind after reading the above article,” the concession invites the novel’s audience to consider the consequences of such an exaggerated statement upon the conscience of a reasonable man (91). It is worth pausing to consider how remarkable Trollope’s request actually is in the context of his other works. Many readers come to Trollope’s fiction for just this kind of vicarious participation in a character’s state of mind. Such moments of mental distress arising from, say, a marriage proposal or an election campaign, are presented by Trollope with a precision rarely achieved so early in the century. And yet we are to be denied a glimpse into the warden’s anguished state of mind at the very moment of gratification? It is customary for Trollope’s novels to deny readers any such benefit of the doubt by showing in excruciating detail the sequence of thought through which a character arrives at a moral stance. What the narrator’s request avoids asking us to do is to empathize with Mr. Harding’s actual circumstances, a comfortable sinecure with which few readers would have any possible way to identify, much less express sympathy. This sidestepping of biographical detail by the narrator partly accounts for the broad appeal of a series of novels devoted almost exclusively to the lives of provincial clergymen. Instead, the exaggerated attack has the effect of drawing audiences into the character’s state of mind through the widely shared experience of reading the daily newspaper. The direct appeal for empathy ensures personal considerations are restored to the deliberately impersonal attack. The extremists in the novel are able to dismiss the attack since the newspaper’s one-sided treatment corresponds to their own manner of argument. However, it is the aggrieved Mr. Harding whose point of view most resembles that endorsed by the novel itself. Despite being forgiven by acquaintances as well as the novel’s own readers, the warden still feels “the hard and stinging words of that newspaper

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Figure 3.3. The personified image of a leading article written for the Penny Prometheus. From Francis Burnand’s parody of Trollope titled “The Beadle! Or, the Latest Chronicle of Small-Beerjester,” Punch 79 (1880): 21. Illustrated by Edward Linley Sambourne. Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library.

article, each one of which had thrust a thorn as it were into his inmost soul” (117). Henry James’s dismissal of The Warden as “simply the history of an old man’s conscience” is in this sense not far off the mark.34 But it should be remembered that the anguished conscience was to be among the richest subjects of the modernist literature soon to come from Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. The scene of the conscientious reader struggling with the discrepancy between public and private perception would be taken up at greater length by Trollope’s Palliser novels.

Trollope’s Whispering Conscience Trollope’s supreme talent as a novelist may be the ability to present both sides of an argument. This typically involves an incomparably lucid presentation of a character’s mind in the process of deliberating over opposing viewpoints. We (to continue speaking in the collective voice used so effectively by Trollope’s editors) are privy to the internal debates of key characters until, even if disagreeing with the fi nal decision, we at least comprehend the motives behind such decisions. Margaret Oliphant was not alone among reviewers in observing that “no man ever took more pains to show the way in which the mind justified to itself a certain course of action.”35 This technique of exhibiting the mind in dialogue with itself has been described by subsequent critics as the author’s “divided mind,” “casuistic method,” and narratorial “tolerance.”36 The ability to argue both sides of a case even occasioned J. Hillis Miller’s characterization of Trollope as “a great lawyer.”37 Yet it should be kept in mind that the interrogation in these cases is pursued not by legal counsel but by the characters themselves. This may be just another way of saying that Trollope’s method of indirect discourse permits the narrator to describe a character’s state of mind through that character’s own words. Trollope’s characters are thereby presented to us in the act of private communion as the mental state of one character after another is made utterly transparent to the novel’s audience in this way. This is particularly important to the Palliser series since so much of the interrogation takes place outside the space of dialogue. An exemplary instance of this internal debate is Mr. Camperdown, the opposing counsel in the protracted lawsuit described in The Eustace Diamonds. Despite unshakeable conviction that Lizzie Eustace has no right to the diamonds, we nevertheless learn that “his conscience whispered to him” potential flaws in the case against her.38 Her case is patently dishonest; we have every reason to believe that Lizzie Eustace acts without scruple. Even so, the relentless voice of conscience prevents the solicitor from enjoying the comforts of complacent certainty. We might designate this internal dialogue as Trollope’s “whispering conscience,” by which the private scruples of a character become known to the novel’s audience. A whisper is about right as a description of Trollope’s elusive narrative voice during such moments of introspection. The phrase has the

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dual value of registering how Trollope’s characters scrupulously question their own motivation while at the same time translating these sentiments into authorial discourse by way of the narrator’s voice, spoken just softly enough so that it does not interfere with the intimacy between character and reader. Even Trollope’s villains are usually aware of the indecency of their actions to some degree. (“The quiet conscience is an invention of the devil,” declared Albert Schweitzer.39) It is just that a whisper is easier to ignore than a shout. A fictional series devoted to party politics may seem unbefitting for an author with a preference for seeing both sides of every issue. Trollope’s own disillusioning experience as a candidate for the Liberal party at Beverley in 1868 would appear to invite cynicism toward the electoral process that might lead to heavy-handed satire in his fictional treatment of politics. But two facts should be kept in mind about politics in Trollope’s eyes. First, Trollope never relinquished the view that every Englishman’s ambition ought to be a seat in Parliament. In this sense, Phineas Finn can be understood as the author’s proxy rather than a means of retribution after the disappointment at Beverley. Trollope admitted as much of the Palliser novels in the Autobiography (1883): “As I was debarred from expressing my opinions in the House of Commons, I took this method of declaring myself.”40 The disappointed author would have the chance to thunder one way or the other. The second thing to keep in mind is that the statesmen most admired by Trollope, from Cicero to his contemporary Charles Buxton, were themselves renowned for seeing multiple sides to every issue.41 Buxton’s The Ideas of the Day on Policy (1866) approached parliamentary debates with a “severe impartiality” that might be taken as a model for Trollope’s own attitude toward the political novels.42 Nor is Buxton’s claim mere rhetoric since the book is little more than a tabular list of supporting and opposing arguments on issues ranging from church rates to the ballot. In a review for the Fortnightly, Trollope claimed that a politician would gain more from reading Buxton’s book than from reading an entire year’s worth of leading articles. Trollope’s major political characters from Phineas Finn to Plantagenet Palliser show something of the author’s disposition to take into account opposing perspectives before arriving at their judgment. This thoughtfulness in many cases distinguishes honorable politicians from unreliable demagogues such as the journalist Quintus Slide: “It was not that he was insincere in all that he was daily saying;—but simply that he never thought about it” (1.242). Such concerns about editorial impartiality underlie numerous warnings at this time that the leading article might more accurately be described as the misleading article.43 The reductive manner in which Slide’s leading articles calculate every issue according to personal advantage is almost to be envied by the novel’s politicians who genuinely struggle with the choice between individual conscience and party loyalty. In fact, the whispering conscience distinguishes the heroes from the villains in Trollope’s novels. Trollope’s politicians such as Phineas and Plantagenet do think about what they are saying, often to an

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excessive degree. These politicians are so receptive to opposing points of view voiced in the leading articles that they are often unable to maintain their own. The risk of such impartiality, as Buxton warned, is paralysis when confronted by the validity of opposing arguments whether in the House or a penny paper. For these characters, the conscience never stops whispering. Phineas Finn fi rst encounters the journalist Quintus Slide not at Westminster Hall but at the Westminster police station, an unflattering indication of where the interests of the press are seen to lie in Trollope’s Palliser novels. Slide’s time as a parliamentary reporter covering speeches in the House has earned him the editorship of a penny paper for which he writes leading articles just within libel limits. In his fi rst appearance in the series, Slide offers the newly elected Member of Parliament favorable publicity in the People’s Banner: You’ll fi nd, Mr. Finn, that in public life there’s nothing like having a horgan to back you. What is the most you can do in the ‘Ouse? Nothing, if you’re not reported. You’re speaking to the country;—ain’t you? And you can’t do that without a horgan, Mr. Finn. You come among us on the Banner, Mr. Finn. You can’t do better. (1.241–42) Phineas has served in Parliament long enough to recognize the value of Slide’s offer. Public life and the public prints had become practically indistinguishable since the elimination of the last taxes on the press in 1855 and 1861 made newspapers affordable to the fi rst genuinely mass audiences. The majority of constituents now saw speeches reported by the press, not those spoken to the House alone. Phineas’s own devoted constituents—Lady Laura Kennedy, Violet Effi ngham, and Mary Flood Jones—read the papers solely to see their hero’s eloquence in print. Francis Montague Hall’s frontispiece to Phineas Redux portraying Mrs. Bonteen holding her knitwork alongside Lady Eustace holding a newspaper encapsulates the changing roles of women in relation to the press, if not the tenuous boundary between the supposedly separate spheres of public and private life (see figure 3.4). Hall’s frontispiece offers a graphic reminder of the primary means of communication available to those outside the House. In this sense, Slide can hardly be said to exaggerate in warning of a public sphere in which you are “Nothing, if you’re not reported.” Hence Phineas may be wary of Slide’s class-inflected speech (“ ‘Ouses” and “horgans”) and dress (“not remarkable for clean linen”), but he never underestimates the journalist’s efficacy as a writer of “slashing” leading articles in print—where Slide’s h’s and dirty linen will have been cleaned up, so to speak, by editors (1.242). Journalists could be denied social standing far more easily than they could be denied influence. As Bourdieu has argued, journalists control access to “public space,” or the space of mass circulation, in a way that secures them a high degree of influence in compensation for marginal social status.44 This influence is all too apparent in the coverage of

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Figure 3.4. Lady Eustace and Mrs. Bonteen discuss the newspaper’s parliamentary intelligence. From Francis Montague Hall’s frontispiece to Phineas Redux, vol. 2 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1874). Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

parliamentary affairs by Victorian journalists. In Phineas Finn, for example, the stump speeches at Loughton offer the unscrupulous Slide an opportunity to thunder on behalf of his own election campaign. Although he is jeered, hooted off the platform, and pelted with three rotten eggs and one dead dog, the speech reported in the People’s Banner is a rhetorical tour de force following the editor’s “retouching,” a subtle reminder of the hand behind the supposedly impersonal newspaper (2.74). The press was responsible for reprinting candidate speeches verbatim even down to the details of an audience’s reception by way of “applause,” “laughter,” and “hear, hear.” But the insertion of fictive cheers into a fictive speech while denying the opposing candidate the right to be heard at all suggests the extent to which Slide makes use of the “hinfluences of the daily press.”45 Slide’s use of the columns of the newspaper to make the “inaudible” speech “audible” in fact parodies the capacity of the press at large to allow the unheard speeches of the House to be heard by constituents across the country (2.73). Trollope was merely expressing what many contemporaries from Thomas Carlyle to Matthew Arnold had long warned of when he complained in the New Zealander, “The newspaper Press is now the rival of the House of Commons.”46 Such alarms express anxiety toward the prominence of class-based politics in public debate, best represented in Trollope’s time by the Second Reform Bill, as well as

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the potential manipulation of these tensions by a press without any of the parliamentary safeguards. Incidents drawing attention to potential manipulation by the press in Trollope’s fiction recast Slide in the role of gatekeeper deciding which news will appear in print. The Palliser novels bring to attention the individuals responsible for leading articles printed under the cloak of anonymity, not to mention the less than reassuring procedures by which news reaches an audience. The following monologue in which Slide consoles himself for being outmaneuvered by a Member of Parliament suggests to what extent the balance of power had shifted with the rise of the mass press in the mid-nineteenth century: Nevertheless, had he not all the columns of the People’s Banner in his pocket? Was he not great in the Fourth Estate,—much greater than Phineas Finn in his estate? Could he not thunder every night so that an audience to be counted by hundreds of thousands should hear his thunder;—whereas this poor Member of Parliament must struggle night after night for an opportunity of speaking; and could then only speak to benches half deserted; or to a few Members half asleep,—unless the Press should choose to convert his words into thunderbolts. Who could doubt for a moment with which lay the greater power?47 The initial hyperbole of this speech quickly gives way to the narrator’s resigned cynicism at the truth of its claims. We do not doubt with whom lies the greater power, only whether it is appropriate for the unelected, if not unelectable, Slide to hold such power in the fi rst place. The influence of the press as a fourth estate, a watchdog of abuse on behalf of the public, was by this point in the century beyond question, if not reproach. (Oscar Wilde quipped that the fourth estate was now the only estate: “It has eaten up the other three.”48) Trollope’s narrator pauses at one point to remind audiences of the newspaper’s gatekeeping role by distinguishing between “insiders,” the actual members of a political organization, and “outsiders,” those acquainted with political affairs through the newspaper’s columns.49 The point in doing so is to highlight the discrepancy between the two perspectives. Politics in the pages of the newspaper is only half the story, if it is in fact the story at all. Although one might expect this gulf to encourage audiences to approach news reports with skepticism, the discrepancy instead licenses anonymous contributors to shape perception of political affairs without reprisal outside the pages of Victorian fiction. Whereas the novels involving journalism by Trollope’s contemporaries including Thackeray’s Pendennis (1849) and Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) draw largely upon the press of an earlier era, Trollope’s journalists are taken from the press of the present day that, as we saw in the introduction to this book, had changed rapidly following the growth of the news industry since the 1830s. Quintus Slide’s modernity at fi rst is not

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apparent in the caricature of a corrupt journalist seemingly borrowed straight from the previous century’s Grub Street. His very name evokes the tradition of Romanesque pseudonym used by eighteenth-century correspondents such as Britannicus, Historicus, and Junius when writing jeremiads to the editor. In writing for both Conservative and Liberal publications, Slide evokes the proverbial journalist who, when asked to declare his political views, responded, “Bread and cheese, sir.” The Bunces offer their own variation on proverbial wisdom in commenting of Slide: “He’s one of them as ‘d say a’most anything for a plate of soup and a glass of wine.”50 The stereotype of the mercenary journalist this late in the nineteenth century would seem unworthy of Trollope’s subtlety were it not consistent with his authorial faith in the embodiment of ideological principles through the behavior of his characters. Opposing perspectives are never presented in Trollope’s fiction in the abstract but always embodied in characters whose statements of belief can be measured against actual behavior. The speaker’s invisibility suggests one reason why the leading article posed such a problem for Trollope, who countered the cases made in newspapers with his own fictional portraits of the speakers responsible for those arguments. This tactic might be thought of as the fictional equivalent of the signature in Trollope’s work. Whereas the newspaper presents opinions seemingly divorced from any speaker, Trollope offers the counterexample of a speaker divorced from any opinions. We are confronted by the far less imposing specimen of an individual character stripped of the anonymity that so effectively shelters Slide, Towers, and other journalists from accountability. The model for this type of hypocritical journalism is Thackeray’s Captain Shandon, of course, who writes leading articles for a gentleman’s newspaper from debtors’ prison. For Trollope, actual behavior qualifies or even calls into question the validity of supposedly impersonal convictions. Lofty speech has little effect if the speaker’s ensuing actions tell a different story. It is almost impossible, for example, to accept Slide’s editorial commentary after meeting the man himself—even when those opinions turn out to be persuasive, as both Phineas and other victims of the press reluctantly acknowledge them to be at various points in the series. This is one reason that the journalists responsible for the anonymous leading articles featured so prominently in Trollope’s work are given human faces in the cases of Slide, Stanbury, Towers, and other leaderwriters. The abstract arguments representing the opinion of nobody in particular, or even the public at large through that convenient abstraction “the people,” are embodied in characters with personal lives not unrelated to their public pronouncements. Stanbury’s manner confi rms him to be a gentleman despite his aunt’s aristocratic suspicions to the contrary; Towers’s manner shows him to be remote from the people on whose behalf he claims to speak; and Slide’s manner reveals him to be a shameful opportunist. After all, Phineas’s disenchantment with the People’s Banner results less from the paper’s politics than from his newfound association with the gentry: “But what would Violet Effingham say to the People’s

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Banner and Mr. Quintus Slide?” (1.243). The journalist’s desire for the ballot is hardly as offensive as the liberty taken in using the address “My Dear Finn” in a way that arouses Phineas’s disgust: “he to be called ‘dear Finn’ by such a one as Quintus Slide!” (1.317). In the end, Slide’s gross familiarity rather than his populist rhetoric is what prompts Phineas’s resolution for Members of Parliament to remain independent of the press. Trollope’s novels about parliamentary life thus take part in a broader trend in newspaper journalism away from parliamentary reporting to news about politicians themselves. Noticing the public’s lack of interest, editors began to reduce the amount of space given to lengthy verbatim reports of parliamentary speeches.51 The public compensated for their indifference to the speaker’s opinions through interest in the speaker’s demeanor. In other words, audiences were interested less in what was said than in how it was said. This realization had important consequences for newspaper editors who were increasingly dependent on readers secured through means other than party affi liation. Trollope’s Palliser novels participate in this trend by giving extensive coverage to the personal lives of politicians to a degree undreamt of by even the most aggressive newspaper editor. Trollope himself spent several months in the visitors’ gallery of the House of Commons in order to observe the speakers fi rsthand. One of Trollope’s reviews even praised the portraits in R. H. Hutton’s Studies in Parliament: A Series of Sketches of Leading Politicians (1866) for revealing the private sides to these public figures. Comparable curiosity is shown toward Lord Silverbridge from The Duke’s Children, for example, while making his fi rst speech before the new constituents as a Member of Parliament: “There was a meeting in the town-hall and many were assembled anxious to hear,—not the lad’s opinions, for which probably nobody cared much,—but the tone of his voice and to see his manner. Of what sort was the eldest son of the man of whom the neighbourhood had been so proud?”52 This fictional episode corresponds with a broader shift from the parliamentary report to the parliamentary sketch evident in journals such as the Pall Mall Gazette, in which Hutton’s sketches fi rst appeared, and to some extent in journalism as a whole. In other words, verbatim speeches gave way to the public’s interest in colorful descriptions of personalities.53 Any mention of the speaker’s personality had previously been rare in the public sphere of the early nineteenth century, as tame as this may seem by modern standards according to which the personal affairs of politicians are presumed to be in the public domain.

The Promise of Big Type in the Morning “Tea, Toast, and Times” make up the breakfast with which every respectable Englishman begins the day, according to Trollope.54 One of Trollope’s own fictional papers acknowledged the place of the newspaper in daily life by taking as its name the Morning Breakfast Table. Reading one’s own words at the breakfast table was something of a political obligation

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according to numerous Victorian novels including George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways (1885), in which Percy Dacier discovers a leaked Cabinet secret entrusted to his care reprinted in a leading article. Such fictional narratives confi rm that the newspaper’s anonymous opinion, even more than its investigative reporting, was responsible for the publicity so dreaded by the public. Journalists had become as much an imagined as a real threat in the minds of critics. A Punch cartoon showing the editor of The Times with a reporter’s notebook in hand eavesdropping on a conversation expresses the misplaced anxiety felt toward surveillance when ministerial leaks were the real source of editorial knowledge once politicians began to appreciate the value of newspaper publicity (see figure 3.5). No space was safe from the imagined threat of publicity

Figure 3.5. An eavesdropping editor takes notes for a leading article in The Times. From Punch 26 (1854): 147. Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library.

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posed by the invasive journalist. Arthur Waugh would later complain in The National Review, “Even in the privacy of the club smoking-room free conversation is a rash, if not a dangerous, experiment. The journalist is always among us, taking notes; and any morning at breakfast, our own words may appear in print, to rebuke our indiscretion.”55 Waugh’s incipient paranoia toward the “journalist among us” was by that time a familiar element of Victorian fiction. The influence of editorial commentary disseminated through the press was thought to be extensive by Trollope and his fellow novelists. Some of the most influential nineteenth-century novels about journalism, from Honoré de Balzac’s Illusions perdues (1837) to George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), are not about newspapers at all but rather the periodical reviews. As a result, the majority of nineteenthcentury tales about journalism take aim at editors, reviewers, and correspondents instead of at reporters, who would not acquire their reputation as private investigators until the end of the nineteenth century. The opinions expressed by the leading articles certainly hold more authority in the minds of Trollope’s characters than any threat of reportorial exposure. We are told of Lord Fawn in The Eustace Diamonds, for example, “He was especially timid, and lived in a perpetual fear lest the newspapers should say something hard of him.”56 It is easy to snigger at Lord Fawn’s meekness. It is less easy to do so at the Members of Parliament who fi nd themselves the target of hostile editorial commentary. Phineas rightly estimates the political value of having an organ such as the People’s Banner behind you: everyone claims to ignore what the newspapers say even though everyone knows exactly what the newspapers have said. After all, it was a politician’s obligation to read the parliamentary speeches and accompanying leading articles in the morning’s papers. William Newman’s caricature “The Politician” from the 1840s depicts the struggle to keep up with the torrent of public opinion expressed by half a dozen newspapers with pestilent titles including “The Bug,” “The Flea,” and “The Scourge”—titles analogous to Palliser’s own description of Slide as a “gadfly.”57 Still, the rapid growth of the reading public meant that newspapers were taken more seriously at this time than at any previous point in history. News organs could no longer be ignored as mere nuisances once the value of publicity became apparent to the holders of public office. Indeed, there was no better motivation for the media-savvy politicians among Trollope’s novels than “a promise of big type on the next morning” (2.341). Certainly Phineas reads his own speeches reported in The Times several times over before forwarding these mementos on to Ireland. But Phineas’s satisfaction with family praise indicates only one facet of the introspection for which Trollope’s characters are known. Fictional scenes of newspaper reading in Trollope’s novels depict a character’s engagement with a public sphere accessible largely through print media while at the same time offering opportunities for self-examination seldom possible outside of a character’s own mind. Whereas we typically encounter Trollope’s characters in a process of internal deliberation

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perceptible only to the narrator, newspaper publicity supplies an image of the self as seen by the outside world for that character’s scrutiny. It is an image circulated among the public but at the same time intensely personal. The leading articles in particular provide the commentary of a third party from which individuals have generally been insulated. Consequently, these commentaries occasion a character’s interior dialogue in response to the allegations made by journalists. Leading articles in these instances resemble nothing so much as the literary reviews, a comparison Glencora Palliser explicitly makes to justify a subscription to the People’s Banner in order to learn the rumors from which she is sheltered by her husband. Much as with an unpleasant review (Trollope was still able to recite verbatim a review of one of his early novels in The Times thirty years later), big type in the morning held severe psychological repercussions for the target of editorial criticism. Phineas describes Slide’s leading articles as a “dagger” thrust in the bosom, “thin blade” penetrating every joint, and “poison” curdling in the blood, all images designed to convey the cognitive act of reception in terms of physical trauma.58 Slide writes about opponents “as if his pen had rabies,” to borrow a simile used by Balzac.59 This masochistic subjection to the perception of other characters even at their worst distinguishes Trollope’s characters from the comparatively unexamined lives portrayed by so many other novelists writing at the time. More than any other character, Plantagenet Palliser reveals the extent to which the supposedly impersonal press could unexpectedly become the most intimate form of reading—more so even than the letters for which Trollope is justly celebrated. Palliser has always discounted personality in favor of impersonal politics, to the degree that real life practically takes place for him in the columns of the newspaper’s parliamentary intelligence.60 We are told of Palliser early in the series: “Not to be looked at, but to be read about in the newspapers, was his ambition.”61 His own speeches on decimal coinage presume a shrinking aristocratic audience still interested in the intricacies of parliamentary affairs rather than in the personal affairs of its speakers. However, it is while reading about his performance as Prime Minister that Palliser demonstrates the thin skin for which he is deemed unfit for public office by members of his own party. Nowhere is this more evident than the manner in which the Duke locks the door of his room in order to read the commentary of the opposition papers. This withdrawal from company underscores the way in which Trollope’s scenes of reading a newspaper, much like those of reading a letter, facilitate the private reflections of his characters. The Palliser novels progress from the Irish Member to the Prime Minister, but throughout the series Slide operates as a mediating figure whose journalism occasions the crise de conscience suffered at times by both politicians. Palliser may hide the People’s Banner behind a chair during a visit from the Duke of St. Bungay, for example, but the spoken words “lethargy on the country” nevertheless signal the influence of Slide’s latest editorial column responsible for the phrase.62 The editor’s disapproval

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confi rms for Palliser the sense of ministerial isolation: “To have a festering wound and to be able to show the wound to no surgeon, is wretchedness indeed!” (2.5). The solitary act of reading calls into question the newspaper’s effectiveness as a community organ since Palliser is unable to speak about these grievances even to his wife. It is an admission of how thoroughly the Prime Minister has internalized the voice of the People’s Banner despite the warnings of the Duke, who upon hearing the phrase “understood at once how the poison had rankled” (2.5). It is one thing to listen to doubts spoken by one’s constituents; it is another to listen to doubts spoken by an opponent such as Slide. These recurrent scenes of newspaper readers, from the disenfranchised laborer Mr. Bunce to the Prime Minister himself, suggest that Trollope was among the earliest novelists to address the psychological influence of the press. Such scenes anticipate twentieth-century anxieties toward a mass media whose materials do not merely preoccupy our attention but, it has been suggested by some, also colonize consciousness itself.63 This way of reading Trollope should not be taken as an attempt to refigure Victorian literature as proto-modernist so much as an assertion that modernism is in many ways post-Victorian when it comes to representing the media’s presence in public and private life. Trollope’s critique of the media’s influence antedates by several decades the twentieth-century literature with which such claims have usually been assumed to originate. The most revealing exchange among Trollope’s novels takes place after the arrival of Slide’s letter requesting an invitation to Gatherum, when Palliser says to the Duke: “Would it not shock you if your private arrangements were invaded in that way?” “He can’t invade you.” “Yes he can. He does. That is an invasion.” (1.164) In the blink of an eye, the conversation slips from “your private arrangements” to “you” in a manner divulging the psychological toll exacted by journalism in the Palliser novels. When we talk about Slide’s journalism, we are more accurately talking about Palliser’s susceptibility to public opinion by way of the whispering conscience. These manufactured opinions constitute an “invasion” of the minds of conscientious characters from Harding to Palliser by allowing them to see their reflection through the eyes of a third party. The Times once warned audiences to remember that all items in a newspaper come to them through the prism of the journalist: “The reader sees facts through his eyes.”64 Trollope’s Palliser novels bear this warning out by forcing us to see the world through the eyes of Slide. In this regard, Slide’s leading articles prolong the internal debate for which Trollope’s characters are known by allowing the public prints to stand in for the voice of conscience. We might say that the whispering conscience ultimately gives way to Slide’s own whispers arising from

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the columns of the People’s Banner. In the Duke’s mind, for example, “every word from Mr. Slide’s pen settled on his own memory, and added to his torments” (2.243). This is especially the case for politicians who fi nd themselves surrounded by partisans at the expense of electors. Yet, rather than motivating elected officials to be more attentive to these marginal voices as a result, this situation has the reverse effect of making them susceptible to the most caricatured version of the opposition. Palliser’s attention behind closed doors to the editorial criticism of the penny newspapers borders on the prurient: “And he would skim through them all till he found the lines in which he himself was maligned, and then, with sore heart and irritated nerves, would pause over every contumelious word” (1.359). Palliser’s acknowledgment that this malice is attributable to no more than a rejected invitation to Gatherum makes the suffering especially gratuitous. In fact, the newspaper tells us more about the conscientious reader in Trollope’s novels than it does about current events. Not once does Palliser acknowledge the worth of Slide’s opinion. Every line from the editor is nevertheless “a scourge which hit him on the raw and opened wounds” in a manner that highlights the real function of these private communions as self-mortification (1.359). Hegel famously saw the newspaper as modern man’s substitute for morning prayers; Trollope takes the analogy one step further in showing it to be a substitute for confession and penance as well.65 As the clinical precision used to describe these wounds suggests, Trollope’s characters make little distinction between personal and impersonal debate. The editorial arguments wound physically as well as mentally, perpetuating the continuity between the two, just as Trollope’s novels as a whole might be said to establish continuity between the anonymous opinions voiced in the newspaper and the actual person from whom those opinions originate. What all of Trollope’s novels involving journalism from The Warden to The Duke’s Children dispute, then, is a notion of the leading article as anything other than a form of one-sided debate. The leading article looks somewhat different when considered alongside other forms of verbal selfdisclosure in Trollope’s novels, from conversation to interior monologue. Trollope’s much-praised letters, for instance, had always performed the dual role of disclosing the composer’s ulterior motives while at the same time granting the audience access to the recipient’s mind in a way that corresponds to the narrator’s own intrusion into interior thought. As we have seen, the leading article works in a very different way. James Fitzjames Stephen proposed a model of speech opposed to the lecture in the Cornhill, in which he writes, “The best leading articles that are written are nothing more than samples of the conversation of educated men upon passing events.”66 Yet, in Trollope’s eyes, this notion of reciprocal exchange is precisely what leading articles fail to accomplish. The term “conversation” is a misnomer altogether for a form of speech in which there are neither two parties nor, in a sense, even one, since that party itself remains in absentia. The metaphor of a conversation taking place

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before readers in the columns of the daily newspaper is therefore misleading if not outright false. The Scottish politician John Boyd Kinnear provided a more accurate assessment when observing that the leading article had evolved from the role of an “advocate” for a particular point of view to that of a “judge” whose decisions would be accepted as the last word by the vast majority of readers.67 The leading article increasingly exhibited a refusal to consider opposing viewpoints, which, as we have seen, is a distinguishing feature of Trollope’s own lawyer-friendly fiction. This offers the most persuasive explanation as to why Trollope goes to such lengths to satirize a mode of discourse whose very purpose might be characterized as provocation, or, as Slide describes such tactics, “to draw his badger” through defamatory insinuation (2.151). Nor does Trollope’s fiction present itself as an alternative to the leading article, since a novel entails its own deterrents to dialogue, as much as a reminder of the multiple sides to any story reported in the columns of the daily paper. No longer were newspapers able to preserve authority simply by hiding from sight the speaker, exposed and at times humiliated in the growing number of fictional portraits by journalism’s great rival, the Victorian novel. Trollope gave audiences what newspapers refused to do by presenting the speaker behind the anonymous voice of the press. This may be one reason that discussions of professional ethics from as early as the 1850s sought to deflect suspicion away from the personal bias of the journalist so exaggerated by Victorian novelists. Since the legitimacy of journalism would increasingly come to depend on public perception of the journalist as impartial, the formulation of ethical guidelines to counter negative stereotypes of the journalist was professionally, if not commercially, advisable. Even Joseph Pulitzer, who established his reputation as an editor of the disreputable penny press in America before founding one of the fi rst institutions for the training of journalists, conceded the value of “character” if the news was to be accepted by the public: “Influence cannot exist without public confidence. And that confidence must have a human basis. It must rest in the end on the character of the journalist.”68 The journalist’s character in both senses of the word was taken by Trollope as a foil against which to defi ne his authority as a novelist. Slide’s editorship consists in suppressing multiple viewpoints instead of, as Trollope’s authorial voice aspired to do, allowing ample room for confl icting points of view to perform the work of deliberation in the novel. Trollope’s fiction presents itself as a forum for multiple perspectives in a way that sets it apart from the supposedly authoritative newspaper. At the same time, the novel preserves an authority uniquely its own by presenting itself as a viable medium for the kind of deliberation not possible in the columns of the leading article. Fortunately Slide’s influence was as short-lived as the paper on which it was printed. As the narrator of Thackeray’s The Adventures of Philip observed: “A score of years hence, men will read the papers of 1861 for the occurrences narrated—births, marriages, bankruptcies, elections,

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murders, deaths, and so forth; and not for the leading articles.”69 We can take consolation from the fact that Slide’s journalism will not be read by posterity with the same enthusiasm as Trollope’s novels. The tenacity of this disreputable journalist undoubtedly would have made him an outstanding interviewer, however, the subject of the following chapter on Henry James.

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4 The Personal Interview Wishing to Be Interviewed in Henry James

W

hen Henry James complained about the age of “newspaperism” he was really complaining about the “age of interviewing.”1 Although newspapers had existed for over two centuries, the interview was a controversial invention of the late-nineteenth-century press that dramatically influenced the way audiences thought about private life. The public’s willingness to share their most intimate experiences with journalists through this conversational form was even more alarming to James than the invasion of privacy by newspapers. Matthias Pardon of The Bostonians (1885–86) has been taken to embody the invasive style of American journalism described in James’s notebooks: “There must, indispensably, be a type of newspaper man—the man whose ideal is the energetic reporter. I should like to bafouer the vulgarity and hideousness of this—the impudent invasion of privacy—the extinction of all concept of privacy, etc.”2 The notebooks characterize the loss of privacy in a way that attributes to the overzealous reporter sole responsibility for any revelations to come in the novel. Pardon begins his career in just such a fashion by collecting potentially scandalous names from hotel registers, although he makes his reputation through nothing more intrusive than speaking with hotel guests on behalf of The Boston Evening Transcript: He was the most brilliant young interviewer on the Boston press. He was particularly successful in drawing out the ladies; he had condensed into shorthand many of the most celebrated women of his time—some of these daughters of fame were very voluminous—and he was supposed to have a remarkably insinuating way of waiting upon prime donne and actresses the morning after their arrival, or sometimes the very evening, while their luggage was being brought up.3 Although lurking about the hotel might imply a journalistic invasion of privacy, as culling names from the hotel register certainly does, we should

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not disregard the self-promotion of these “voluminous” prime donne. The assumption that Pardon obtains these responses through an invasion of privacy greatly underestimates the desire for publicity on the part of his respondents. Pardon’s invasion of privacy goes no further than a series of inappropriate questions: “he asked for revelations of the vie intime of his victims with the bland confidence of a fashionable physician inquiring about symptoms.”4 The voluntary replies given to the interviewer show a very different side to the alleged victims who, as it turns out, are predisposed to share their private lives with anyone willing to listen. James rarely disguised his hostility toward the period’s journalism for its emphasis on personalities, lifestyles, and gossip, or what British journalist Stephen Stapleton described as the “desire for peeps into the boudoirs and drawing-rooms of the polite world.”5 Critical assessments of James’s relation to the print culture of his time initially promoted three main ideas: fi rst, that journalism is a foil against which to distinguish “high” artistic value or the Jamesian aesthetic; second, that when James makes use of popular materials he does so ironically, even subversively; and third, that when James criticizes the press he is taking an ethical stance against the invasion of privacy.6 While James’s involvement with mass culture has since been reconsidered, recent work has upheld this last point about one’s right to be left alone even while calling into question the very opposition between publicity and privacy. Studies of journalistic inquiry by Brook Thomas and Richard Salmon, for example, demonstrate how commercial media incorporated the resistance to privacy in order to stage its subsequent violation.7 These studies might be said to perpetuate the image of the journalist as a transgressive figure intent on the kind of public exposure proposed by Gustave Flaubert’s satiric definition of “celebrities”: “Find out the smallest details of their private lives, so that you can run them down.”8 However, rethinking the controversial figure of the journalist within the context of nineteenth-century newspaper production suggests a different interpretation. As we will see, the supposedly invasive methods used by this figure were among journalism’s least invasive techniques since the success of the interview depended on the cooperation of the respondent. Journalists on the lookout for headlines are everywhere in James, so it may come as a surprise to learn that few of these journalists are responsible for the indiscretions that make up James’s plots. The initial diversity of James’s journalists—as editors, reporters, columnists, and correspondents—disguises their ultimate uniformity when it comes to the practice of interviewing. Nearly all of James’s journalists are interviewers in some capacity: Matthias Pardon in The Bostonians, George Flack in The Reverberator (1888), Mr. Morrow in “The Death of the Lion” (1894), the unnamed narrator in “John Delavoy” (1898), Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove (1902), and Maud Blandy and Howard Bight in “The Papers” (1903). Even the correspondent Henrietta Stackpole in The Portrait of a Lady (1880–81) relies upon the method for “chatty” society letters to The New York Interviewer, the telling name of the American

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journal for which she writes. Stackpole and her fellow journalists have at one time or another been interpreted as the author’s protest against invasions of privacy. “My poor Henrietta,” says Isabel Archer, “you’ve no sense of privacy.”9 Yet it is the interviewee who is the greatest threat to privacy in James’s novels. “Ah, do draw me out!” exclaims Ralph Touchett. “So few people will take the trouble.”10 What Ralph says facetiously will be repeated by other characters across James’s novels without a trace of irony. The press can hardly be held responsible for those readers whose desire for public attention outweighs any sense of privacy. The Bostonians gives the best example of this peculiarly modern type in Selah Tarrant, of whom we are told, “the wish of his soul was that he might be interviewed.”11 The distinction between interviewing and reporting may seem to make little difference at fi rst glance, but any discussion of privacy rights must acknowledge that in James’s fiction it is not the journalist who poses the greatest threat to privacy but rather the public itself. Journalism practices arising at the end of the nineteenth century were a problem for traditional defenses of privacy since, unlike investigative reporting, the interview was rarely an invasion of private life.12 On the contrary, James’s fiction directs attention to people’s willingness to share the most intimate details with an unseen audience—a phenomenon described by Richard Sennett as the “boundaryless self”—in a way that ran counter to James’s own preference for impersonal narration.13 The Reverberator, James’s only novel devoted exclusively to newspaper journalism, and “The Papers,” a long tale about the London journalism scene, were written during the very decades in which the personal interview established itself as a means of self-representation that would eventually become a defi ning feature of the “interview society” of the twentieth century.14 Hence these fictional narratives address a pattern of behavior whose significance extends well beyond the invasions of privacy for which it has usually been taken. Instead, James’s fiction examines the kinds of reading appropriate to a culture in which audiences accustomed to reading about other people in the newspapers now wanted to read about themselves. As we will see in the following sections on The Reverberator and “The Papers,” these narratives suggest that the interview may be a problem whose implications reach well beyond the limited interaction with the journalist in James’s fiction to all conversation involving the selective disclosure of information with an unseen audience in mind.

Interviewed! Interviewing has become such a familiar part of today’s news media that it is easy to forget how controversial this practice was for audiences in the nineteenth century. The interview was not practiced in America until the 1860s or in England until the 1880s, and the fi rst published interviews were discomforting for readers not accustomed to such personal forms of

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news. Nils Gunnar Nilsson’s “The Origin of the Interview” establishes that during the nineteenth century the word “interview” went from meaning a face-to-face meeting to “the published result of a meeting between a representative of the press and someone whose views are related verbatim or with indirect quotations.”15 Some historians cite as the fi rst interview James Gordon Bennett’s questioning of Rosina Townsend, a witness in the Ellen Jewett murder case, for the New York Herald in 1836. American penny papers of the 1830s adopted from the English popular press’s coverage of courtroom trials two techniques—humorous treatment and verbatim testimony—that would eventually contribute to methods of interviewing. Reporters had used elements of the interview such as direct quotation and the question-and-answer format only sporadically up to this point. As Bennett’s unofficial deposition of Townsend demonstrates, the examination procedures used in court would be taken up by the press as a valuable tool for collecting information from witnesses everywhere. The practice of interviewing became increasingly common in America in the 1860s following a meeting between Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune and Brigham Young, the leader of the Mormon Church, in Salt Lake City and especially after the publicity given in 1867 to Joseph McCullagh’s interview with soon-to-be-impeached President Andrew Johnson. Although conversations with famous men have attracted the most attention, Michael Schudson emphasizes the gradual acceptance of the interview as standard journalistic practice referring both to “a social interaction between a person of public interest and a professional writer and to the literary form that is the product of that interaction.”16 Newspapers printed only verbatim transcripts of public speeches prior to the use of interviews, which were still unusual in the early 1870s (or early 1890s in England) though occasional direct quotations from public figures indicated an increasing reliance on interview methods. The rapid growth of the newspaper industry during this period made it possible to devote more resources than ever before to the active pursuit of news and, consequently, for specialized forms of journalism such as interviewing to emerge. Horace Townsend explained the two approaches to news as a contrast between faith in official sources and skepticism toward commonplace statements that may conceal interesting facts if drawn out by close questioning.17 Journalists at fi rst regarded the interview as a news event in itself rather than as an additional technique for gathering evidence. As audiences recognized, the journalist was no longer an anonymous byline in many of these interactions but a visible actor within the story itself. And by the 1880s and 1890s many of the same people who initially resisted the publicity associated with interviewing would learn how to turn this attention to their own benefit. As Julian Ralph of the New York Sun explained in his memoirs, “The feature of interviewing which most laymen fail to understand is that, seven in ten times, the man who is interviewed is glad of a chance to speak.”18 The reluctance of the British press to adopt interviewing techniques until several decades after the American press meant that after

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moving abroad Henry James was able to continue following debates over their appropriate use. The interview was widely regarded as an American invention and, consequently, associated by many with “the Americanisation” of English journalism.19 British journalist Alfred Arthur Reade’s Literary Success: Being a Guide to Practical Journalism (1885) describes interviewing as an extension of prominent national characteristics: “The interviewer is a creation of American civilisation, and arises out of the universal curiosity among Americans for the details of private life and the opinions of public men.”20 Similar responses made by other journalists expressed a fear that the British press was importing American values along with American journalism techniques. All the Year Round melodramatically announced in 1892, “The plague of interviewing has spread to England. We fear the cholera; but this other pest, which, I verily believe, is at least as serious, we seem to welcome. . . . Already interviewing is becoming, even in England, a regular profession.”21 Use of the interview confi rmed for many critics the degradation of a formerly respectable British press that had distanced itself from the intrusive New York papers ridiculed by Charles Dickens through parodic titles including the Peeper, Private Listener, and Keyhole Reporter. Successful attempts by American journalists to interview British public figures drove journalists in England to adopt interviewing techniques, although insistently without the American impertinence. Edmund Yates’s Celebrities at Home series for The World during the 1880s was among the fi rst to draw upon personal conversations, and W. T. Stead regularly interviewed public figures for the Pall Mall Gazette, most notably the 1884 interview with General Gordon, resulting in the Khartoum expedition. One of the fi rst interviews in England occurred when Liberal politician W. E. Forster agreed to be interviewed by W. T. Stead in October 1883, under the condition that Forster be permitted to revise the manuscript before publication. Stead would become Britain’s most vocal advocate for the practice of interviewing in the pages of the Pall Mall Gazette, which under his editorship published more than one hundred interviews in 1884 alone.22 The following decade in the Strand Magazine, caricaturist Harry Furniss’s “Interviewed!” portrayed the celebrity pinned down like an entomological specimen, impaled through the chest with a quill pen before a photographer and a journalist who inspects his appearance through a magnifying glass (see figure 4.1). In the background, preservation jars labeled with abbreviations for the Latin “aetatis” permit biographical scrutiny of the subject at ages eight, twenty, twenty-five, and the “present time.” Nevertheless, American and British interviewers were thought to adhere to confl icting codes of decorum when it came to obtaining information from private individuals. Whereas the British interviewer supposedly respected an unwillingness to be interviewed, the American interviewer recognized no such limits: “He desires to fi nd his way into the most private places. With your leave, or without your leave, that desire of his he does his best to realize.”23 Characterization of the American

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Figure 4.1. “Interviewed!” by Harry Furniss. From the Strand Magazine 5 (1893): 571. Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

interviewer “willing to thrust himself anywhere” by The Journalist, a trade newspaper for the British press, did little to discourage this national distinction.24 Queen Victoria herself reportedly said of one American journalist’s attempt to interview her in a Scottish churchyard, “He is as audacious as the rest of his nation.”25 British journalists advocated a less intrusive style of interviewing distinct from that of their American counterparts. John Mackie’s Modern Journalism: A Handbook of Instruction and Counsel for the Young Journalist (1894) is careful to distinguish between the two approaches: “Interviewing,” as practised in connection with English journalism, is on a higher plane than that with which the American press has familiarised the world. It shows more respect for the sacred privacies

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and for the domestic sanctities. It is altogether less reckless, seeking rather to provide interesting information than to supply gossip or scandal.26 Although Mackie may exaggerate the deference of British journalism, whose Sunday papers had provided the raw materials for the interview in America, his account nevertheless acknowledges the formal nature of newspaper publicity in Britain, in which interviews typically took place with participants who had a favorable relationship with the periodical in question. As Alexander Innes Shand explained in Blackwood’s, “If you prevail on a celebrity to let you interview him ‘at home,’ you give a pledge tacitly or in words that you propose to treat him considerately.”27 This idealized phase of unintrusive publicity could not last under a commercial press intent on fi nding new ways of attracting public attention. No matter how controversial the interview may have been initially, this format was far too popular among readers for editors to resist publishing them for long. Arnold Bennett’s How to Write for the Press: A Practical Handbook for Beginners in Journalism (1899) made no apology about devoting an entire chapter of this manual to the art of interviewing.28 Each of Bennett’s five styles of questioning—the conversational, the argumentative, the interrogatory, the one-sided, and the descriptive—was designed to be a more efficient way of eliciting information from the variety of speakers encountered by the reporter. Shand questioned whether such subtlety was necessary at all when dealing with a public who, contrary to James’s notebooks, willingly cooperated with the journalist: “as a rule, we imagine that the accomplished interviewer makes his entry by the front door, and is courteously welcomed by his victim.”29 Newspapers and magazines benefited from the name recognition of a celebrity, who in turn received free publicity while boosting the circulations of these periodicals. By the 1890s, even those celebrities who had once avoided the press began to recognize the value of making themselves available to journalists. Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson spoke of being interviewed at this time as “the penalty of celebrity” that no public figure could reasonably expect, or even desire, to avoid during an international tour.30 One incident from Henry James’s life known to have influenced his attitude toward journalistic invasions of privacy deserves recounting here for the specificity with which it singles out the practice of interviewing. In October 1886, Julian Hawthorne published a private conversation with his former Harvard tutor James Russell Lowell under the heading “Lowell in a Chatty Mood” in the New York World.31 Lowell’s response in the Boston Advertiser insisted: “nobody could ever have been more surprised and grieved than I by Mr. Julian Hawthorne’s breach of confidence in his report of my conversation with him . . . It never entered my head that the son of my old and honored friend was ‘interviewing’ me. If it had he would have found me dumb.”32 It is not surprising that the World editors defended Hawthorne’s conduct. The next day, an editorial titled “The Lowell Interview” suggested that “Mr. Lowell is not the first man of distinction who has been

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shocked by seeing his own freely expressed opinions in print. They are often distressing.”33 Lowell responded with a statement defending the privacy of all individuals against unnecessary public exposure: “The life of a man into whose private affairs the public assumes the right to look is far from agreeable at the best, but on the terms which Mr. Hawthorne seems willing to justify it would be unbearable.”34 Hawthorne’s final letter to the press went unacknowledged by Lowell, who watched in mortification as the press continued to discuss the affair for the next two months. Afterward, James in a notebook entry condemned in the most explicit terms Hawthorne’s “beastly and blackguardly betrayal” of Lowell (this notebook entry, along with an indiscreet letter published in the World by May McClellan, would provide the material for James’s The Reverberator).35 The incident was a vivid example for James of how drastically public exposure could affect the meaning of a private conversation, a fate he sought to avoid by burning any potentially indiscreet correspondence to which he had access. The interrogative methods criticized by James for being too personal were at the same time criticized by others for not being personal enough. Skeptics doubted the interviewer’s ability to provide anything more than a superficial image of the speaker. The conversational format enabled individuals to describe experiences in their own words, and yet, as Pierre Bourdieu has argued, to consider life as a meaningful sequence of events is already to conform to the “biographical illusion.”36 Although the interview was accepted by many audiences as an authentic account of subjective experience, journalists writing in the nineteenth century were among the fi rst to raise questions about the reliability of interviews. One contributor to Dickens’s All the Year Round contended that the interview had less to do with realism than with fantasy: As for verisimilitude, interviews are supposed to be pictures from the life. As a matter of fact, the supposition is merely supposition, for that is what they never are. If they were pictures from the life, some people would keep interviewers away from them with tooth and nail, with sword and gun—some of the very people who now welcome them with open arms.37 This account dismisses any idea of a threat to privacy posed by interviews that can hardly be said to resemble “pictures from the life” in the fi rst place. In spite of the pretense of spontaneous conversation, these interactions nearly always took place in accordance with well-established conventions. Even the most self-aware interview proceeded under the dubious assumption that a speaker’s personal stories were authentic and valuable in their own right. As part of the symposium “Are Interviewers a Blessing or a Curse?” involving Stead, Eliza Lynn Linton, Barry Pain, John Strange Winter, and W. L. Alden in 1895, Linton for one derided the notion that a sequence of formulaic questions was capable of capturing experiences accumulated over a lifetime: “an interviewer comes in with a few superficial

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questions and a sharp look round on the outsides of things, and presto! there you are, in a few sentences introduced to the world as a perfectly understood and perfectly represented human being!”38 The main target of Linton’s criticism was the inductive method by which outward signs were interpreted as revelatory indexes of an individual’s inner life. Hair color might be reported without embellishment, for instance, but furniture was likely to be taken as the metonymic expression of the speaker’s mind, books as an expression of the intellect, and manners as an expression of the soul. The American journalist Rollo Ogden went one step further in declaring that an interviewee’s reserve only encouraged him “to gather the truth from his gesture and expression, to guess at what is left unsaid,” a method that makes for good reading but hardly makes for good journalism.39 Writers on both sides of the Atlantic including Linton, E. L. Godkin, Mark Twain, Evelyn March Phillips, and Arthur Shadwell who shared Henry James’s distaste for publicity agreed that the interview was not too personal, as the Lowell incident suggests, but rather too trivial. In their accounts, the only threat posed by the interview was to the reader’s patience. Interviewers increasingly emphasized the speaker’s presence through detailed attention to appearance, mannerisms, lifestyle, and conversation; according to this way of thinking, incidentals of the meeting were at least as important as actual conversation. Parodies such as “The Interviewer’s Vade Mecum” appearing in Punch gave currency to this notion of the vacuous interview in which a figure’s attire was likely to receive more attention than the accomplishment for which he was admired: Q[uestion]. Which would be the better copy—an account of the subject’s most successful campaign, or a description of his wardrobe? A[nswer]. Undoubtedly the latter. The exploits will certainly have been described a score of times, but a list of coats, hats and neckties will probably have the charm of novelty. Q[uestion]. Then you would not value your subject’s diary? A[nswer]. Not if it merely recorded his public life. In such a case it would be distinctly less interesting than his butcher’s book.40 The “author at home” feature—an informal conversation with the writer in a domestic setting—was an effective way of converting the artist into a literary personality for public consumption.41 Stories such as “The Death of the Lion” (1894) might be read in this context as a satire not only of literary publicity but also of James’s fellow authors who agreed to be profi led in order to succeed in the marketplace.42 It was in this commercial environment that James insistently distinguished between the author and the author’s work, saying of virtuoso soprano Adelina Patti, “After you have heard a Patti sing why should you care to hear the small private voice of the woman?”43 James’s own refusal to speak with the press—he gave only three interviews in his lifetime—is noteworthy for taking place

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during the very decades in which the British public had become more interested in reading about the lives of authors than at any previous point in history.44 However, this version of degrading publicity may say more about the author’s privileged position within the literary marketplace than about the actual interests of reading audiences, many of whom would have read an author’s butcher’s book as a complementary pleasure to the reading of his literature. The literary interview was a particular problem for James and other writers who sought to preserve the cultural distinction of authorship in the fi nal decades of the nineteenth century. As Arthur Conan Doyle replied to one interviewer more interested in his private life than in his writing: “What has the public to do with an author’s personality?”45 The “author at home” feature ostensibly brought readers into contact with the private self, if not the creative mind, of a prominent writer through an intimate conversation conducted inside the author’s home. It made little difference how staged and formulaic these conversations might be. An anonymous reviewer for The Bookman complained that the “Chat with an Author” feature invariably presented identical series of illustrations consisting of the author’s face, profi le, front door, library table, and garden.46 Harry How’s interview with W. S. Gilbert for The Strand Magazine in 1891 vividly illustrates such an attempt to capture the artist’s genius through a sequence of photographs moving progressively inward from the exterior of the Harrow Weald mansion to a portrait of the composer in his study to a facsimile of the handwritten manuscript for “Tessa’s Song,” the closest thing possible to a metonymic representation of the artist’s mind in the act of creation. James’s tales of journalists interested in the private lives of authors exhibit a similar ambivalence toward the interview that makes it difficult to tell at times whether we are meant to regard it as a serious threat to individual privacy or as a frivolous diversion from literary matters. In “The Death of the Lion” and “John Delavoy” (1898), for example, the fictional authors resemble no one more than James himself in their wariness of publicity as well as their ineffectual reticence in defending themselves from its spotlight. The narrator of “John Delavoy” begins the story after meeting a deceased author’s daughter who, in the narrator’s eyes, offers access to someone whose very obscurity as an “uninterviewed” writer is the source of appeal: “Was he not the man of the time about whose private life we delightfully knew least?”47 Even the dead are not safe from the journalist’s prying eyes in James’s story, or so it would appear. As with other tales organized around literary journalism, the narrator’s curiosity about the author’s private life calls into question the limits of biographical inquiry more than investigative journalism.48 By focusing on a dead author, this tale ultimately sidesteps the issue of consent and therefore of complicity between interviewer and interviewee addressed by so many of James’s other stories about journalists. A more complex problem in James’s fiction is presented by the interviewee who is not dead but merely “dying” to talk with journalists. In

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“The Death of the Lion,” a literary journalist sent for a “revealing and reverberating sketch” of the author Neil Paraday realizes his aversion to the task upon meeting his journalistic double, a celebrity interviewer named Mr. Morrow who contributes to a syndicate of thirty-seven journals as well as the “Smatter and Chatter” column of The Tatler.49 Although Morrow certainly gives more attention to the author’s milieu than to his writing, the dismissive, almost playful language used to describe the interview at the same time conceals the degree of violence James saw behind the seemingly benign act. Indeed, James’s characterization of aggressive reporting tactics as “the assault of the interviewer” later in his career would strike us as hyperbolic were its image not literally and metaphorically repeated throughout his fiction.50 The journalist’s efforts to extract personal revelations from an uncooperative subject are figured here through a disturbingly graphic analogy between Morrow with his notebook hidden from view “even as the dentist, approaching his victim, keeps the horrible forceps.”51 James’s original intention recorded in the notebooks to have the author unceremoniously “murdered by the interviewers” confi rms the sincerity of the violent image, although only with difficulty could one attribute the author’s death at Mrs. Wimbush’s country house Prestidge to the intrusive guests.52 Paraday’s acceptance of every invitation he receives suggests that the problem James had in mind extended well beyond the intrusiveness of the newspaper press to the author’s perplexing compliance with the requests of every interviewer to cross his path. In fact, it would be misleading to isolate journalistic invasions of privacy when so many of James’s other narratives rely upon a similar dynamic of intrusion and revelation. “The Aspern Papers” (1888), his most well-known story about privacy, implies that its invasion is a problem not limited to journalists at all but rather one that is applicable to anyone intensely interested in the life of another person.53 As described in the preface to “The Aspern Papers,” James himself nearly faced a journalist’s decision about where to draw the boundaries of personal curiosity while living in Florence at the same time as Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron’s former mistress who would feature in the story as the tantalizingly “uninterviewed” Juliana Bordereau.54 The proximity of so remarkable a witness to literary history leads James to speculate about how he might have acted had he known of Clairmont’s presence. Fortunately the situation did not depend on his own delicacy, he admits, a pointed contrast with the story’s unnamed narrator who in his search for Juliana’s private documents explicitly compares himself to a newspaper reporter. The comparison works in both directions by showing how anyone can act with the indelicacy of the journalist as well as how James’s most invasive figures often turn out not to be journalists at all. Had the story’s unnamed narrator actually been a journalist, he might have been surprised by the ease with which people will reveal their most cherished secrets to the press. Yet the very connection to the past that gives Juliana Bordereau her value ensures her adherence to bygone standards of reticence that

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make her unrepresentative of the modern celebrity, ready and willing to share the most private experiences with the newspapers. James claims to have been satisfied in the end simply by knowing that he had walked past the door behind which Byron’s contemporary sat undisturbed. Would James have been delighted or dismayed to knock and fi nd the great Claire Clairmont willing to “tell all,” as the journalists say today? As with most of James’s views on journalism, the matter comes down in the end to a sense of delicacy rather than a clear formulation of the permissible and the impermissible. If one has to ask where the line between public and private is, then one should not be writing about it at all.

The Rise of the Interview Society James wrote The Reverberator at a time when the interview was just becoming a popular means by which people made sense of their own lives through the act of reading about the lives of others. The periodical press played a key role in promoting this form of cultural visibility especially familiar to audiences of the intimate public sphere arising in the twentieth century.55 Audiences by now familiar with interview conventions expected a face-to-face encounter between two people to result in a published conversation disclosing the speaker’s true self. Sociologists Paul Atkinson and David Silverman have argued that the very act of confession encourages audiences to feel an intimate connection to the speaker no matter how predictable the nature of the personal revelations. The fi rst-person voice is persuasive evidence of an individual’s hidden self otherwise known to audiences only through impersonal images circulated by the mass media. For this reason, interview methods have been criticized by many sociologists who advocate constant awareness of the media apparatus responsible for the seemingly unmediated selfpresentation. A coherent life narrative is instead “always pastiche,” in the words of Atkinson and Silverman, or retrospectively put together from select memories and memorabilia.56 The two most common approaches to interviewing presuppose that narrative acts reveal, as opposed to create, a speaker’s identity: in the one, the supportive interviewer’s questions facilitate the spontaneous emergence of the genuine self; in the other, the hostile interviewer strips away layers of deception in order to reveal the hidden self. Both models take for granted that the journalist has only to ask the right questions in order to uncover the respondent’s character. Disagreement over the interview’s ability to represent identity in this way might be framed through two confl icting optical metaphors used by journalists in the nineteenth century to characterize the interview as either “a clear sheet of plate glass” or “a convex mirror.”57 For James, the interview was never without a mirror’s distortion, although such a realization does little to explain why his fiction emphasizes precisely those characters most interested in reading about other people’s private lives.

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James’s The Reverberator fi rst appeared as a serial in Macmillan’s Magazine from February to July 1888 before coming out in separate one- and two-volume editions for America and England. Inspired by an actual case in which a young American woman wrote an indiscreet letter describing Venetian society for the New York World, it tells the story of the engagement between Francie Dosson, an ingenuous American girl visiting France with her family, and Gaston Probert, a Gallicized American whose aristocratic family despises publicity of any sort. The trouble begins when Francie indiscreetly reveals the Probert family secrets to rejected suitor George Flack, the correspondent of a fictional American society newspaper called the Reverberator. The contrasting receptions given to Flack’s scandalous letter when it appears in the newspaper form the basis for this international-themed comedy. The Probert family’s indignant, if hypocritical, reaction leads to the temporary breaking-off of the engagement, although Gaston eventually goes against his family’s wishes by choosing to marry Francie anyway in what turns out to be one of James’s few unambiguously happy endings. The Reverberator is James’s only novel to take newspaper journalism as its primary subject rather than isolating it in minor characters such as Matthias Pardon or minor attributes of characters such as Merton Densher. Although inspired by an indiscreet letter written to the newspaper by Miss May McClellan, James’s novel splits its female source into the twin figures of Francie Dosson (a “newspaperized American girl”) and George Flack (“a journalist, of the most enterprising, and consequently of the most vulgar, character”).58 In doing so, the novel goes against a contemporary stereotype of the female journalist’s innate advantages for conversation, a notion raised in earlier novels by the New Woman attitude of Henrietta Stackpole and the androgyny of Matthias Pardon. James’s conception of the intrusive masculine journalist fi nds its initial expression in Flack, whose ambition to transform the Reverberator into the world’s leading society paper borders upon self-parody: I’m going for the secrets, the chronique intime, as they say here; what the people want is just what isn’t told, and I’m going to tell it. Oh, they’re bound to have the plums! That’s about played out, any way, the idea of sticking up a sign of “private” and thinking you can keep the place to yourself. You can’t do it—you can’t keep out the light of the Press. Now what I am going to do is to set up the biggest lamp yet made and to make it shine all over the place. We’ll see who’s private then!59 Flack’s mission to provide “the plums,” or sensational stories about private life, perpetuates the stereotype of the journalist peeping through windows and behind closed doors. The lamp metaphor—consistent with a long tradition of naming newspapers after luminary sources including stars, suns, and lanterns—elaborated throughout the novel further promotes the image of an intrusive press bringing to light a concealed

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private life. Yet this image of the invasive journalist is misleading. It is comparable to accusing the lights on a fi lm set of giving unwanted attention to the lead actor. As with Pardon’s self-promoting prime donne, the social elite will be the ones who furnish the scandalous intelligence appearing in Flack’s newspaper: “The society news of every quarter of the globe, furnished by the prominent members themselves (oh, they can be fi xed—you’ll see!)” (60–61). The role of the press can hardly be deemed invasive when the grand monde itself is providing the plums. Flack’s is an exaggerated perspective within the novel but not as exaggerated as James’s dismissive remarks in the notebooks may lead us to believe. In fact, the Dossons confi rm this view of a publicity based on voluntary participation over violated privacy. Flack envisions a society internalizing the protocols of newspaper journalism to the degree that audience members participate in the reception as well as the production of scandal, even when that scandal should happen to involve those very readers. It should be borne in mind that Flack is not an investigative reporter but a Paris correspondent whose personal impressions appear in intimate letters to an American journal. He specializes in “the interviewing business” and, similar to James’s other journalists, is said to lack “delicacy,” “discretion,” and “reserve” when it comes to deciding what news is fit to print: “Every one has something to tell, and I listen and watch and make my profit of it” (64, 115).60 Yet in spite of this image of the prying reporter, Flack characterizes his role in very different terms as a form of editorial gatekeeping. He is in many ways opposed to the investigative reporter when it comes to collecting information “straight from the tap”: “People just yearn to come in; they’re dying to, all over the place; there’s the biggest crowd at the door. But I say to them: ‘You’ve got to do something fi rst, then I’ll see; or at any rate you’ve got to be something!’ ” (117). The image of the crowd “dying” to tell their stories effectively reverses the novel’s earlier image of a sign marked “private,” for it is not the public who shuts the door on Flack but rather Flack who shuts the door on the public. The unremarkable individuals admonished by Flack to “do something” or “be something,” thereby setting themselves apart from the crowd, expect the newspaper to generate, not report, their fame. These readers aspire to a distinctly modern version of celebrity in which one could be famous simply for being famous.61 Then there is the Dosson family’s own interest in reading about celebrities. Delia Dosson longs to infiltrate an elite circle of Americans abroad encountered only through the newspapers, or, in the narrator’s words, “that select body which haunted poor Delia’s imagination, glittered and re-echoed there in a hundred tormenting roundabout glimpses” (42). The tantalizing images “re-echoed” through Delia’s mind align her with Flack’s Reverberator, which reflects society back to itself via mediated images that, as the echo suggests, inevitably take on a life of their own. The glittering fragments about which Delia cannot stop thinking promise a satisfying, if endlessly deferred, experience available only through the newspaper’s

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mediation. The spatial terms used to portray Delia’s media-induced yearning can be seen to map out a virtual “inside” defined only through visibility in print. James would later describe newspaper publicity as a citadel closed off to outsiders in “The Papers” in much the same way as Delia perceives here “a little kingdom of the blest” known only through the newspapers: “That was where she wanted to get Francie, as she said to herself; she wanted to get her right in there” (42). The newspaper represents and even replaces intimacy for Delia, who, having already met Gaston Probert, reverses the conventional order of social interaction by asking Flack to profile Probert “as if it would be in the natural course that he should elicit the revelation by an interview” (41). Delia goes from reading about strangers whom she would like to meet to meeting strangers about whom she would like to read. Delia’s ambition to become part of the grand monde known only through the newspapers explains her sister Francie’s willingness to forego her own privacy in order to attain a place within the public sphere. Thus Francie’s lesson about the perils of interviewing comes less through the chiding of the Proberts than through its interference with her marriage prospects. Flack’s forthcoming manner absolves the journalist of sole responsibility for publishing the controversial interview that will endanger Francie’s engagement. “Of course I must be quite square with you,” Flack tells her in the Bois de Boulogne, “If I want to see the picture it’s because I want to write about it. The whole thing will go bang into the Reverberator. You must understand that, in advance” (121). There are no sly interrogative tricks as were used in the case of Hawthorne and Lowell. Here as elsewhere the journalist establishes consent prior to the interview. “You may say what you like,” Francie tells her interviewer, “It will be immense fun to be in the newspapers” (121). Ingenuous as she may be, Francie expresses a pleasure in publicity usually addressed by James through caricature or outright contempt. In fact, Flack’s unromantic willingness to accept an interview in lieu of marriage needs to be interpreted within the context of Francie’s anticipated pleasure, which presumably arises from her recollections of reading about other people in the papers. The parallel drawn between the marriage proposal at Saint-Germain and the interview in the Bois underscores the meeting’s intimacy. Hence Flack’s vicarious participation in Francie’s personal life through the interview comes so close to the real experience that the two are practically indistinguishable: “You make me feel quite as if I were in the grand monde” (132). There is no sense of resentment at how the interview allows Flack to feel part of a circle owing its very prestige to the exclusion of outside observers like him. Instead, Flack feels what he intends to make the Reverberator’s audience feel while reading the conversation, which, as Flack’s words intimate, offers a chance to experience someone else’s life. Flack’s affective identification with Francie through the interview— “You make me feel quite as if I were in the grand monde”—anticipates a form of behavior described by psychologists as “parasocial interaction” to explain how audiences develop intimate relationships with personalities known only through media images.62 Hence Flack recognizes that he

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will paradoxically be part of Francie’s life to a greater degree when he is not with her than when he is with her. In this sense, reading about other people could at the same time be a way of reading about one’s self. James’s novel ultimately is set apart from contemporary indictments of journalism by its recognition that the journalist’s behavior is of little consequence as long as ingénues such as Francie (or May McClellan, for that matter) insist on speaking to the press. The Proberts’ indignant reaction to Flack’s interview resembles that of readers who interpret James’s narrative as an invasion of privacy: both want to blame the press for the act of a willing agent. Flack’s status as a “newspaperman,” an even less reputable designation than “journalist” in the 1880s, makes him a convenient scapegoat. At the same time, the Proberts insist on Francie’s remaining “stainless,” or in no way complicit with the press, even though the metaphor ironically evokes the narrative’s earlier image of Francie’s ink-stained finger, an established trope (along with Flack’s crooked forefinger) at the time for press work (139). Gaston’s characterization of journalism as “pollution” expresses the family’s anxiety about Francie’s contaminating entrance into the family circle (190). Thus Madame de Brécourt is surprised by Francie’s refusal to participate in the rhetoric of victimhood that enables the Proberts to maintain their superiority in the face of degrading scrutiny: “Oh, Francie, don’t say it—don’t say it! Dear child, you haven’t talked to him in that fashion: vulgar horrors, and such a language!” (137). Since Francie speaks the English of the newspapers, her admission into the family’s French salon hinges upon absolution of the journalistic taint—figuratively, the ink stains on her fingers—by attributing full responsibility to Flack. Even Gaston pleads with her to assume the appropriate role as the journalist’s victim: “That you told him—that you told him knowingly. If you’ll take that back (it’s too monstrous!) if you’ll deny it and declare you were practised upon and surprised, everything can still be arranged” (187). Ultimately the sundering takes place because of Francie’s intolerable attitude toward the American press rather than her indiscretion: she genuinely believed the family would like being talked about in the newspapers. The Proberts, of course, make no distinction between favorable and unfavorable publicity in their disgust at being “served up to the rabble” (136). The family dreads exposure to their neighbors through the story’s imminent syndication in the French press only slightly more than its reception among distant readers whom they will never encounter; as Madame de Brécourt says of the story’s reception overseas, “So many people in America—that’s just the dreadful thought, my dear” (145). The family’s vulnerability to unsympathetic interpretation by strangers with little sense of the salon’s values and traditions accounts for their sense of violation even in the absence of actual reader responses.

James’s Overhearing Audience The interviewer’s presence in an otherwise conventional romance allows James to explore how characters respond to what Michael

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Schudson has called the “overhearing audience,” an unseen third party in a triangulated relationship with interviewer and interviewee.63 Even when the journalist reporting the conversation refrains from explicit evaluation in such cases, there is always an inferred evaluation by the implied public, whose presence, if known, would certainly alter the behavior of those under its scrutiny. As W. L. Alden, one of James’s contemporaries, observed, “The man who submits to an interview knows that he is talking for publication.”64 This third presence reminds us that our behavior is being observed and that we are being appraised by outside eyes. It forces us to alter not just what we say but how we say it—a form of anticipation Erving Goffman referred to as “impression management.”65 Perhaps there is no greater sign of intimacy in James than the wordless communication between two characters whose thoughts are so in tune that there is little need for speech.66 The interview provides the inverse model of speech: meaning must be made explicit and unequivocal for comprehension by outsiders. Consequently, many conversations in James that do not have the formal structure of the interview nevertheless have the premise of the interview behind them. We see this in numerous episodes of Jamesian dialogue in which characters with virtuoso skill manipulate, misdirect, evade, and deflect questions without ever formulating a clear response that might put them at a disadvantage in terms of the balance of information. In this sense, the interview in James’s fiction may not be a problem limited solely to interaction with the journalist but applicable to all conversation that relies on the tactics of withholding and revealing information with an audience, seen or unseen, in mind. The Reverberator thus introduces a model of reading appropriate to an interview society in which the strategies of revelation and concealment have become almost second nature. In his discussion of literacy within mass culture, Thomas Strychacz has proposed “affi rmative publicity” as the novel’s third term in between the models of misreading represented by the Dossons’ publicity and the Proberts’ privacy.67 Although absent from the narrative itself, this defi nition of modernist literary competence presumably precedes or arises during the reader’s interaction with the text. As appealing as this conception of the Jamesian interpretive community may be, however, it dismisses too quickly the prescriptive models of reading found throughout the narrative.68 One ideal image of the selfawareness James sought to instill in the novel’s readers comes through Francie’s reconsideration of her family’s complicit role in reading the newspapers: Perhaps they had got coarse and callous, Francie said to herself; perhaps they had lost their delicacy, the sense of certain differences and decencies. Then . . . she thought of the lively and chatty letters that they had always seen in the papers and wondered whether they all meant a violation of sanctities, a convulsion of homes, a burning of smitten faces, a rupture of girls’ engagements. (158–59)

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The style of reading advocated by these interruptions makes use of journalism’s resources while at the same time remaining aware of the media through which a conversation reaches its audience.69 These hypothetical scenarios (violated sanctities, convulsed homes, smitten faces, and ruptured engagements) nowhere stated in the actual letters express Francie’s dawning awareness of what a published conversation may conceal through the very gesture of revelation. The passage is remarkable for its refusal to blame the journalist. Francie’s revised reading style neither celebrates journalism, as the Dossons once did, nor turns a blind eye to it, as do the Proberts. This third approach takes into account how newspaper reportage can just as easily operate as a screen. After all, as Francie comes to realize, the incriminating portions of Flack’s letter are to be found in “the allusions” (157). The lesson notably comes to the novel’s most naïve reader, whose reversal takes place only after recognizing what has been left unsaid in her own interview for the Reverberator. Still, Francie’s reversal would be little more than a moralizing digression if not for its relevance to subsequent scenes of James’s novel that make little, if any, literal sense without this revised approach to interpreting dialogue. The most important of these scenes occurs when Gaston shares his ambiguous impressions of America with Mr. Dosson: “Well, what didn’t you like?” Mr. Dosson genially inquired. Gaston Probert hesitated. “Well, the light for instance.” “The light—the electric?” “No, the solar! I thought it rather hard, too much like the scratching of a slate-pencil.” (185) One can hardly blame Mr. Dosson for his blank-faced response. (Dodie Smith’s theatrical adaptation of the novel has Delia confusedly ask at this point, “The light was like a slate pencil?”70) The dialogue thwarts literal interpretation unless one concedes that the American sunlight is capable of making such a curious impression on visitors. The remark is not taken this way by Mr. Dosson, however, who mistakenly assumes Gaston is speaking about a “great lamp company” with which he is unfamiliar (185). The figurative language of the dialogue makes sense only to an audience who has been following the narrative’s elaborate metaphor used to describe the press from its earliest mentions as part of Flack’s vision of the press as “the biggest lamp yet made” and the “great shining presence” of the time (61, 22). In this regard, Flack’s “brilliant” interview is just one of the novel’s many conversations to take place beneath carefully arranged lighting (lamps, fi replaces, sunlight) of varying intensity (57, 157). Conversely, Gaston returns from America noticeably “sunburnt” by the glare of publicity, and Francie’s disaffection with the press can be traced from her initial “brightness” at being in the papers to a face with “no bright fl icker” that greets Gaston after the scandal (164). Mr. Dosson nevertheless remains oblivious to the connotation (or denotation, for that matter) of Gaston’s metaphor; the audience alone can follow

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the conversation whose full import is available only through the method of reading modeled by Francie’s recognition of a potential story behind the story. In a novel about the effects of publicity upon private conversation, the most significant emotional exchange notably takes place outside the boundaries of dialogue altogether. Whereas Flack is unable to distinguish between the two meanings of the interview, that of a conversation between two people and that of a conversation reproduced for a third party—in this case, the more than 200,000 subscribers to the Reverberator—Gaston successfully cultivates an intimacy bypassing speech altogether. Thus at the very moment in which Francie declares the engagement to be over, a contrary course of events is set in motion outside the quotation marks: “ ‘Ah, I’m not worth it. You give up too much!’ cried the girl. ‘We’re going away—it’s all over.’ She turned from him quickly, as if to carry out her meaning, but he caught her more quickly still and held her—held her fast and long” (198). Speech means the opposite of what it says in this scene, in which reconciliation is apparent only by observing how the unspoken interaction contradicts the spoken words “it’s all over.” Even so, this scene would be little more than a conventional reconciliation between lovers were it not for the interruption by Mr. Dosson and Delia: “Oh, I thought you had at least knocked over the lamp!” (198). The two lovers have knocked over the lamp by creating a space for themselves apart from the light of the press. Through this silent gesture, Gaston and Francie establish an unspoken intimacy that would scarcely be perceptible if read in the manner of an interview. The ruptured engagement Francie imagines to be implicit in all newspaper correspondence is effectively reversed through this reconciliation away from the light of the press. Flack’s fi nal letter to the Reverberator ironically ensures their privacy by mistakenly reporting Francie’s marriage to have been called off—the next best thing to sticking up a sign marked “private.” As the novel’s scenes of reading indicate, The Reverberator ultimately poses a larger formal question about the degree to which the experience of reading an interview and reading a novel should be taken as analogous acts. The parallel is unmistakable. In both situations the reader acts as an invisible third party to a conversation between two people: in the one, a character’s dialogue takes place as if unaware of a potential audience; in the other, a character self-consciously directs the conversation toward an implied audience. (James’s dismissive remarks about fi rst-person narration in the preface to The Ambassadors and elsewhere noticeably resemble his criticisms of journalistic writing.) James invokes the comparison through scenes of dialogue that eliminate the boundary between personal conversation and professional journalism. Not only does Flack’s initial intimacy with the Dossons come through recounting aloud the day’s celebrity interviews, but even a personal conversation between Flack and Delia proceeds along the lines of a professional interviewer “drawing out” a respondent for the benefit of an unseen third party: “If an auditor had happened to be present for the quarter of an hour that elapsed and had

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had any attention to give to these vulgar young persons he would have wondered perhaps at there being so much mystery on one side and so much curiosity on the other” (10). The twin poles of “curiosity” and “mystery” should be familiar to us by now as the asymmetrical arrangement between interviewer and interviewee even if the ensuing conversation makes one wonder why James would bother to invoke an imagined third party for the occasion at all. The auditor who appears to be little more than the author’s rhetorical sleight of hand turns out to be maintained for the entire conversation. Yet this third party, described by the narrator as the “observer whom we have supposed to be present,” is superfluous since the editorial “we” already assumes an audience addressed by the narrator (13). Introducing the hypothetical observer enables James to prescribe an appropriate reaction lest the audience, contrary to the author’s intention, should mistakenly empathize with the two conversationalists or even with the novel itself as a kind of conversation with the author, as Barbara Hochman has argued audiences persisted in doing long after the turn toward impersonal narration at the close of the nineteenth century.71 The characters are permitted to tell their own stories here under condition that the anonymous narrator, or in this case the anonymous narrator’s proxy, is given the last word. James’s written record would lead us to conclude that he opposed interviews published without the speaker’s consent, but often in James’s novels we fi nd the opposite situation in which a speaker desires to have his or her words reprinted for an outside audience. Under such conditions characters deliberately alter their speech in order to present themselves, to borrow James’s metaphor, in the most favorable light. Francie’s reading lesson suggests that the skepticism with which a reader approaches fiction, where characters cannot know their words are being overheard, should not be set aside when reading journalism, where speakers know their words are being overheard. We are asked to recall Francie’s conversation with Flack in the Bois de Boulogne not as a way of evaluating the fairness of the published interview but as an occasion for asking whether this mode of journalism can adequately represent a life at all. As audience to the novel, we know what readers of the interview alone will never know: Flack’s failed proposal at Saint-Germain, Francie’s indebtedness to the journalist, the Probert family’s predictable displeasure. Thus when Francie later becomes a disillusioned reader of the published interview, her stance might be taken to correspond with the implied reader’s own position. We are asked to approach the interview with the same hermeneutic sophistication with which we would analyze dialogue in a novel—particularly a Jamesian novel in which character emerges gradually through what is said as well as what is not said. This careful distinction reflects James’s awareness of how close his own role as author could be at times to that of the journalist writing about other people’s private conversations. A novel originally based on reports of a young woman’s indiscretion certainly risked being perceived as a roman à clef no different from the material it claimed to be satirizing. By making this material

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into a story at all, James ran the risk of himself being perceived as a journalist using his “interviewees” for personal gain. The Reverberator might even be read as James’s way of working through his own ambivalence toward the authorial use of other people’s conversations by emphasizing what ultimately sets the art of fiction apart from the art of interviewing. While James’s hostility toward the interview may seem anachronistic today, his insistence that we read the interview as another form of fiction remains as applicable now as it did at the turn of the century.

The Age of Interviewing As we have seen, Henry James’s characterization of the time in which he lived as the “age of interviewing” came in response to a newspaper press that had only recently begun to use interviewing techniques as a means of generating news.72 Since James’s use of the phrase, interviewing has evolved from an occasional technique for obtaining information into a constitutive feature of social discourse across a wide range of communications media. Atkinson and Silverman argue that we now live in an “interview society” in which shared personal narratives have become fundamental to our self-understanding.73 Such a society disproportionately values a confessional form of discourse in which personal stories offer privileged access to private experience. In other words, the most effective way to know a person’s “true” self is through that individual’s own voice. Three conditions distinguish the interview society that was just coming into visibility in James’s time. First, the individual must be perceived as a worthwhile source of information. Second, various professions need to be in place in order to record personal testimony. And third, a mass communications media is necessary for the distribution of the interview to audiences. Although particular kinds of interrogation have always taken place, it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the press began to consider individuals as valuable or even appropriate sources of knowledge about their own experience. As late as the end of the nineteenth century, it was still socially unacceptable in many circles for a journalist to question a stranger about personal matters. In 1901, one of James’s contemporaries, Lady Broome, complained: “My experience of being interviewed began many years before the invention of the present fashion of demanding from perfect strangers answers to questions which one’s most intimate friend would hesitate to ask.”74 The interviewing method that would become a defi ning feature of modern journalism was still in its infancy at the beginning of the twentieth century. The intimate style of news reporting associated with the “New Journalism” arising in Britain in the 1880s was at the center of debates over privacy rights.75 Although it has often been claimed that the commercial journalism taking shape at the end of the nineteenth century brought about a more standardized culture (or a more “feather-brained”

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one, according to Matthew Arnold), Paul Starr argues that efforts to reach a mass audience instead encouraged diversification of content and style.76 Banner headlines, illustrations, and interviews were among the most conspicuous changes to newspapers at this time; depending on whom you asked, these innovations were either sensational or progressive. It was the latter in the eyes of American-influenced editors who encouraged audience involvement through an intimate rhetorical style in marked opposition to the tradition of impersonal journalism in Britain. The interview was a particularly effective way of making newspapers accessible to casual readers. Whereas newspapers had reported parliamentary speeches verbatim with minimal attention to the speaker for most of the century, as we saw in the previous chapter, T. P. O’Connor insisted that personalities, not politics, sold newspapers. According to O’Connor, the best way to attract readers was through a “personal tone” involving detailed description of a public figure’s appearance, clothes, habits, home, and lifestyle.77 One journalist even described interviewing as a way of speaking about celebrities “as if they were your old familiar friends.”78 Henry James’s “The Papers” was among the fi rst works of fiction to identify changing conceptions of intimacy brought about by new print media that had only recently become a part of everyday life. This fi nal section will begin by considering “The Papers” within the print culture at the turn of the century before then asking how the conversational format of the interview became the focal point for James’s critique of a society in which intimate personal stories were becoming a defining feature of public life. It has become something of a commonplace for legal historians to point out that the right to privacy was not defi ned until it was thought to be endangered. According to sociologist Edward Shils, the “intrusive perception” of watchdog occupations such as journalism posed the greatest threat to the informal privacy enjoyed at the end of the nineteenth century.79 Similar accounts of public life at this time have identified a tenuous separation between the public realm of impersonal institutions and the private realm of intimate relationships.80 Privacy, in these accounts, designates what we are entitled to keep inaccessible, protected, or out of sight from others, a notion generally associated with personal life. In Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873), James Fitzjames Stephen was one of the fi rst to defend personal life against “unsympathetic observation” that might infl ict pain and moral injury.81 Nearly two decades later, Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis’s “The Right to Privacy” in the Harvard Law Review established a legal right to privacy in the United States.82 No direct legal protection was given to privacy prior to this landmark essay, which focused on the publication of details relating to a person’s private affairs. Mental anguish infl icted upon individuals by newspapers was suspected to be the primary threat to privacy: “The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency.”83 The essay itself was thought to have been written in response to Boston newspapers that had printed personal details (little more than the family’s

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name and address, as it turns out) about Mabel Warren’s society dinners held in the Back Bay.84 This was the era of “keyhole journalism,” after all, which made the protection of individual privacy an issue at the end of the nineteenth century, the very years in which Henry James composed his own fictions supposedly attributing the loss of privacy to an invasive press.85 Yet, as recent studies of James have begun to recognize, the very technologies blamed for encroachment were in fact responding to the increasing anonymity of urban life that lay behind the desire to read about other people in the newspapers.86 Defenders of privacy rights seldom considered that the most serious obstacle to their establishment might not be legal. One exception was the defense of privacy made in 1890 by Edward Lawrence Godkin, who persuaded James to write reviews for The Nation and was later cited as a source by Warren and Brandeis. Godkin’s essay for Scribner’s Magazine concedes that individuals vary in their desire for privacy and, in what amounts to a troublesome point for any defense, that some people have no wish to protect it at all: “To some persons it causes exquisite pain to have their private life laid bare to the world, others rather like it.”87 Soon after publication of Warren and Brandeis’s article, Godkin wrote a piece for The Nation predicting that legal intervention would be ineffective with newspapers because of their popularity: “a very large proportion of every community nowadays dislike privacy so much for themselves that they are very unlikely to help other people to secure it. It has to struggle against the passion for notoriety on the part of obscure people— one of the strongest of social forces to-day.”88 A major obstacle to privacy rights, then, was the simple fact that many people did not want them, as inexplicable as this idea may have seemed to its defenders including Warren, Brandeis, Godkin, and James. Yet the desire to appear in the newspapers—“the passion for notoriety” cited by Godkin—ultimately poses a more profound problem in James’s fiction than does the relatively straightforward defense of privacy against invasive journalists for which James has been credited. James’s renewed interest in interviewing at the turn of the century is best observed in the way he describes the manufactured intimacy between characters in “The Papers,” the last of his fictional tales devoted to newspaper journalism. According to records kept by James’s amanuensis, this nouvelle was fi nished on 13 November 1902 and appeared the following year in the collection The Better Sort (1903). In his notebooks James describes an idea for a story about the contrasting fortunes of a cynical male journalist who never fails to get the scoop and an aspiring female journalist who never succeeds in doing so. These characters later became Howard Bight and Maud Blandy in “The Papers.” (James’s own experience as Paris correspondent for the New York Tribune in the 1870s is the source of Howard’s comment, “We do the worst we can for the money.”89) The two interviewers regularly meet to discuss the parallel careers of Sir A.B.C. Beadel-Muffet, a Member of Parliament who has mastered the mechanisms of publicity, and Mortimer Marshal, an

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obscure dramatist whose sole ambition is to appear in the press. The plot is set in motion when Beadel-Muffet seeks Howard’s help in disappearing from public life, only to watch the disappearance itself become the subject of further publicity in The Papers, an anonymous corporate entity whose name is always capitalized in James’s tale. The romance between the two journalists becomes central to the story when Maud rejects Howard’s fi rst marriage proposal in Richmond Park while he continues to promote her career. Once the sensational disappearance of Beadel-Muffet is resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, the story ends with Maud’s acceptance of Howard’s proposal by way of a kiss beneath the stars. The last we hear from them is an announcement about their retirement from journalism. As previous comments have shown, James’s journalists have long been taken to express the author’s hostility toward the invasion of privacy by an increasingly sensational newspaper press. Although there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of James’s wish to be left alone, there is little evidence in his fiction that he saw newspaper reporters as the greatest threat to that privacy. In “The Papers,” Howard Bight describes the very opposite situation, in which the culprit responsible for the loss of privacy turns out to be none other than the public itself: People—as I see them—would almost rather be jabbered about unpleasantly than not be jabbered about at all: whenever you try them—whenever, at least, I do—I’m confi rmed in that conviction. It isn’t only that if one holds out the mere tip of the perch they jump at it like starving fish; it is that they leap straight out of the water themselves, leap in their thousands and come flopping, open-mouthed and goggle-eyed, to one’s very door. (548) Where we might expect to encounter an unwarranted invasion of privacy in James’s narrative, we fi nd instead that there was never any initial privacy to be invaded. Howard has little need to extort information from these “open-mouthed” respondents, who are well aware that there is no such thing as bad publicity: “What is the sense of the French expression about a person’s making des yeux de carpe? It suggests the eyes that a young newspaper-man seems to see all round him” (548). The very invocation of privacy would be out of place when referring to a public who fears cultural invisibility more than any other fate. Indeed, Howard is not an investigative reporter at all, but rather an interviewer whose professional success depends on the respondent’s cooperation. Why James continued to write about journalism even after acknowledging that its interrogative methods scarcely constituted an invasion of privacy is a question yet to be explained. What set James’s fiction apart from other defenses of privacy at the time was its abiding interest in situations in which there is little initial privacy to be invaded. Despite James’s outspoken concern for protecting numerous forms of privacy, his journalism tales are noteworthy for

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their attention to precisely those characters least interested in avoiding the public gaze. Whereas earlier works such as The Bostonians, The Reverberator, and “The Death of the Lion” raised questions about individual reportorial responsibility, “The Papers” directs its satire toward the eponymous corporate media under which the ethical deliberations of individual journalists make little difference. Numerous readers have noticed the shift in James’s tone from the satirical treatment of journalists in his earlier works to something approaching sympathy for the journalists Maud and Howard.90 Howard Bight’s name may even mislead readers of the earlier satires into expecting the “bite” to be the journalist’s own. “The Press, my child,” as the journalist says to his colleague, “is the watchdog of civilisation, and the watchdog happens to be—it can’t be helped—in a chronic state of rabies” (586). This image of rabid publicity would seem to suggest that the press has overstepped its bounds as protector of society and become, through the very ferocity for which it originally had been employed, a threat to that society. The metaphor of the rabid dog is grossly out of proportion, however, in reference to the blasé attitudes of the story’s two journalists. “Muzzle your Press,” demands one client, but Howard and Maud imply that the appropriate metaphor would surely be the gag rather than the muzzle, for it is more bark than bite. The metaphor is doubly misleading in attributing a single voice to a press that speaks through many voices, not least among them those in quotation marks. If anyone in “The Papers” is in a state of rabies it is the public, described in James’s notebooks as hounding Howard for publicity rather than the other way around: “they leap, bound at him, press, surge, scream to be advertised” (200). The story’s pseudo-celebrities Beadel-Muffet and Marshal yearn for the very exposure that had always confounded James and that he could address only through caricature. These two characters in search of a newspaper have no greater wish than to surrender their private lives—or their lives themselves, as it turns out—in order to become personalities talked about by the newspapers. Far from defenseless victims of cunning reporters, they exhibit an appetite for media attention characterized as “the greed, the great one, the eagerness to figure, the snap at the bait of publicity” (546). Howard’s “at home” interview with Beadel-Muffet is just one example of self-promotion intended solely to keep the man’s name visible in the press. He is a distinctly modern version of celebrity whose fame bears little relation to achievement. Despite James’s visual image of the interview providing the celebrity with “a glass case all to himself,” there is little sense that its pictorial conventions provide a transparent image of the speaker at all (546). Beadel-Muffet, who is present in the narrative through intermittent headlines alone, sustains his celebrity status by establishing himself as a voice to be heard above the crowd. The ability to attract attention to one’s name through the spadework of soliciting journalists was a necessary skill for those hoping to make use of a mass-circulation press in which celebrity was insistently verbal: “The fame was all voice” (547).91 Beadel-Muffet appears in the newspaper with

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such regularity that he has passed from obsolescent content to serial form: “He was universal and ubiquitous, commemorated, under some rank rubric, on every page of every public print every day in every year, and as inveterate a feature of each issue of any self-respecting sheet as the name, the date, the tariffed advertisements” (546). This is the very idea of publicity that haunted the dreams of Selah Tarrant in The Bostonians, whose greatest wish is that he might someday be interviewed by the newspapers. James’s publicity-seeking characters share a taste for fame, but Marshal’s ineffectual desire for publicity separates him from as much as it aligns him with Beadel-Muffet. Although Selah Tarrant would be envious of the serialized publicity accorded to Marshal by “Personal Peeps— Number Ninety-Three: a Chat with the New Dramatist” (576), Maud’s unpublished interview with the playwright at his Earl’s Court Road flat indicates that the problem is not getting Marshal to talk but rather getting anyone else to listen: “She had described with humour his favourite pug, she had revealed with permission his favourite make of Kodak, she had touched upon his favourite manner of spending his Sundays and had extorted from him the shy confession that he preferred after all the novel of adventure to the novel of subtlety” (555). The trivial details about pugs and leisure habits parody the invasiveness of the interview as well as its presentation as a revelatory moment: Marshal’s camera choice is revealed with “permission,” and a modest literary preference was facetiously “extorted” from him. The conversation presumes rather than cultivates intimacy, a condition figured through the eighty-three photographs decorating the flat. These images suggest that the playwright experiences his internal life theatrically, as though he were already oriented toward an audience long before he had an opportunity to speak with the press. Marshal’s sentimental response anticipates the intimate relationships that twentieth-century audiences would develop with personalities known only through media images, a condition invoked by James’s earlier work through Flack’s interviews. The term approximates Marshal’s own relation to celebrities as well as the position he aspires to hold in relation to the anonymous readers of his interviews; the scarcely mentioned plays are merely the pretext for personal disclosure. Hence his longing to be talked about conceives fame as a voice—“the great murmur”—that will compensate for the inability of the eighty-three photographs to speak (602). A confessed need for “the breath of sympathy” from newspaper audiences suggests just how literally he takes the company of potential readers (556). Marshal serves as a cautionary tale when it comes to mistaking publicity for intimacy, since he never appears in the company of anyone except journalists. In fact, the sight of Maud’s interview in Brains magazine elicits a marriage proposal from Marshal, for what better way to ensure daily exposure through the “at home” interview than by making arrangements with the journalist for it to become “our home” (580)? As Marshal’s proposal suggests, the professional transaction of the interview could easily develop into an intimate situation—at least this was

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the fear of critics concerned with the growing number of women entering the largely male profession of journalism at the turn of the century.92 The impropriety of women conducting conversations with men in an unsupervised setting was a common argument made in order to keep women out of the profession altogether. Interviewing itself was considered by many in the industry to be a distinctly feminine branch of journalism for giving disproportionate attention to private life. The “lady interviewer” was even thought to possess innate advantages over her male colleagues when it came to the work of conversation. For example, Arnold Bennett’s Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide (1898) singles out the verbosity of the women of the press, and Frances H. Low’s Press Work for Women: A Text Book for the Young Woman Journalist (1904) urges women to make use of an instinctive sympathy appropriate for interviewing. Curiosity, if not anxiety, about the profession helped make the woman journalist a fashionable heroine in contemporary works including Elizabeth Banks’s Campaigns of Curiosity: Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in Late Victorian London (1894), Robert Barr’s Jennie Baxter, Journalist (1898), and Alice Muriel Williamson’s The Newspaper Girl (1899), not to mention James’s own depiction of the prying Henrietta Stackpole in The Portrait of a Lady.93 Although David Kramer has argued that the emasculation of male journalists in The Bostonians expresses James’s discomfort with the popular press, “The Papers” presents a slightly more complicated dynamic through the reversal of both male and female gender roles.94 Hence Maud Blandy exhibits the masculine traits of “the young bachelor” alongside the “comparatively girlish” Howard Bight (544). The “gestures, tones, expressions, resemblances” through which Maud expresses her masculinity, and which are notably “latent” or “suppressed” in Howard, offer one explanation as to why these journalists would be especially receptive to the outward signals through which interviewers are able to detect the hidden lives of interviewees (544). In fact, Howard’s success as an interviewer appears to be directly linked to his feminine passivity; whereas Maud’s solicitations initially go unanswered, Howard was “never more void of aggression than when he solicited in person those scraps of information” for which he is never turned down (544). As the story’s Shakespearean subtext As You Like It suggests, no marriage can take place between the two journalists until their transformation into appropriately gendered personae, at which point the two should have little inclination to remain part of a scandal-driven press disproportionately oriented toward private life. Although the ease with which public figures discuss their personal lives might suggest an environment of comfortable intimacy, the inarticulate romance between the two journalists needs to be understood in opposition to this demonstrative behavior. The oddness of the story’s romance partially arises out of conversations from which the most meaningful words seem to be withheld. Whereas the story’s celebrities instinctively adopt a rhetoric of intimacy with interviewers whom they have never met before, Maud and Howard communicate through the sparest of signs,

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which might be taken to be at the root meaning of intimacy.95 Barely perceptible gestures across crowded pothouse tables in the Strand reveal a closeness lost upon outsiders: “So it was, that, at times, they renewed their understanding, and by signs, mannerless and meagre, that would have escaped the notice of witnesses. Maud Blandy had no need to kiss her hand across to him to show she felt what he meant” (550). The messages intimated between the two journalists could not be more antithetical to the transparency of the celebrity interview, in which even the most reticent characters such as Mrs. Chorner “overflowed,” “prattled,” and “gushed” (625). When Howard and Maud meet for the fi rst time since Beadel-Muffet’s disappearance, Howard does not even respond to Maud’s urgent questions: Then she as soon felt that his silence and his manner were enough for her, or that, if they hadn’t been, his wonderful look, the straightest she had ever had from him, would instantly have made them so. He looked at her hard, hard, as if he had meant “I say, mind your eyes!” and it amounted really to a glimpse, rather fearful, of the subject. (577–78) Visual information is taken as verbal information by Maud, who translates Howard’s look into direct speech (“I say, mind your eyes!”) and then back again into a “glimpse” of a conversation that never takes place and whose meaning is never made explicit. Maud’s conversion of Howard’s expression into intelligible dialogue bears a conspicuous resemblance to the manner in which the interview deciphers conventional mannerisms (smiles, winks, nods) as rhetorical markers of interiority. The very legibility of Marshal’s interview, which endeavors to make his inner life accessible to an audience of strangers, is in stark opposition, however, to Maud and Howard’s manner of secret sharing. An implicit familiarity developed over time distinguishes their intimacy from the counterfeit intimacy taken for granted between interviewer and respondent. What the story designates as “the unspoken” between the two lovers might be taken to express the story’s conception of intimacy as a form of speechlessness defi ned in opposition to the confessional voice of the interview (591). The irony of the story is that, in a plot devoted to the confessional manner associated with the interview, Howard and Maud’s relationship develops almost entirely without speech. A further difficulty in following Howard and Maud’s romance arises because their dialogue is exclusively about other people—the very celebrities appearing in the newspapers, in fact. The spaces in which they do discuss their own lives are pastoral environments deliberately set apart from the Fleet Street noise (“boom,” “bawl,” “howl,” “roar,” “shriek”) that ordinarily shapes their thoughts. In the idyllic quiet of Richmond Park, Howard’s fi rst marriage proposal to Maud would come as a non sequitur in the midst of a conversation about Beadel-Muffet, were not so much of their intimacy based upon the vicarious experience of other people’s

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lives. In fact, Maud describes the otherwise desirable proposal in terms more appropriate to the rhetorical intimacy associated with journalism than to their habit of gestural intimation. Her complaint that Howard’s proposal has “no form” resembles James’s own complaint, made one year after the story’s publication, that journalism is responsible for “a sort of pseudo-form, a largeness, looseness, and elasticity of talk which has flooded the country with an enormous sea of chatter” (573).96 It is easy to overlook the precise moment of Maud’s change of heart as long as attention is given to the lovers’ words (often little more than chatter) rather than to the manner in which the exchange of vows takes place. This attention to minute gestures suggests just how important embodied interaction, or what Maurice Merleau-Ponty referred to as “intercorporeality,” remained to intimate conversation in James’s eyes.97 Although Maud’s refusal stands out among the crowd of supplicants eager for Howard’s attention, she eventually agrees to marry him once the two journalists have established themselves on equal professional footing. She does so without words, however, fi rst through “the long look they exchanged” and fi nally through that most articulate of inarticulate gestures, a kiss (589). The story’s closing lines leave ambiguous whether what will appear in the papers is the marriage announcement or—as a reading in which actions speak louder than words would have it—the long-awaited kiss that seals the marriage. Yet even a private language would be of little use if the dialogue continued to be restricted to the private lives of other people. Throughout the story, Howard and Maud exchange confidences in private but derive pleasure mostly from the publicized world of the newspapers. Thus, after Beadel-Muffet’s disappearance, Howard’s offer to Maud (“Well then, my child, interview me”) is a renewal of the original marriage proposal (“Will you have me?”) as well as its reversal, since it brings their public and private lives into direct confl ict by forcing the two journalists to decide whether or not to share their intimacy with the newspapers (614, 572). Whereas Maud declines the initial proposal out of concern that marriage may imperil their careers, Howard’s exclusive story would ensure the success of both of them. Agreeing to the interview, however, would mean surrendering the intimacy between them by converting their unspoken secrets into explicit speech: “But his surrender made her tremble. It wasn’t a joke—she could give him away; or rather she could sell him for money” (615). The ease with which Maud substitutes “him” for his speech indicates exactly what is at risk in the transaction. If the parallel is still not clear, Maud’s reaction to the proposed interview as if it were a marriage proposal should remove any remaining doubts as to whether more is up for grabs than an exclusive news story: So unlike anything that had ever come to her was, if seriously viewed, his proposal. The quality of it, while she walked, grew intenser with each step. It struck her as, when one came to look at it, unlike any offer any man could ever have made or any woman ever have received; and

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it began accordingly, on the instant, to affect her as almost inconceivably romantic, absolutely, in a manner, and quite out of the blue, dramatic. (615–16) The gravity of the moment arises from Maud’s impending choice between competing marriage proposals from a public fi gure with no private life and from a private figure with no public life. Maud’s decision to reject Howard’s offer of an interview (“I’ll keep your secret”), then, is what afterward enables her to accept the offer of marriage (615). Instead of two successful journalists who make their livings by reproducing private conversations for public consumption, Maud and Howard resign from journalism altogether in order to keep each other’s secrets, including Maud’s exclusive interview with Mrs. Chorner and Howard’s exclusive access to Beadel-Muffet. For James, the very act of withholding this valuable information preserves and metaphorically deepens the intimacy between the two characters: “There was more between them now than there had ever been, but it had ceased to separate them, it sustained them in fact like a deep water on which they floated closer” (636). This fi nal image of “deep water,” an interiority whose depths remain hidden to the naked eye, is in stark opposition to the image of the interview as an overflowing fountain in which the more one has to say, the less one seems to reveal. It is an intimacy based on all that goes unspoken between two private individuals at odds with the publicity-hounding Marshal, whose supplicant pose outside the pothouse is what enables Maud to perceive the change in her relationship with Howard: “she fully perceived how interesting they had just become to themselves” (632). In other words, the story concludes with two journalists who were interested only in the lives of others becoming interested in their own lives for a change. Although most authors who protested against the invasion of privacy at the same time welcomed the benefits of publicity in the manner of Marshal and Beadel-Muffet, James’s own refusal to speak with the press during this period contributed to the mythic image of the artist’s selfimposed exile from the popular culture of his time. In his entire career James gave only three interviews, and even those with outspoken reluctance. In 1905, during one of these rare occasions, James explained to the poet Witter Bynner his aversion to becoming a literary personality or, worse, a celebrity author: May I add, since you spoke of having been asked to write something about me, that I have a constituted and systematic indisposition to having anything to do myself personally with anything in the nature of an interview, report, reverberation, that is, to adopting, endorsing, or in any other wise taking to myself anything that any one may have presumed to contrive to gouge, as it were, out of me? It has, for me, nothing to do with me—my me, at all; but only with the other person’s equivalent for that mystery, whatever it may be.98

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Were his distaste for newspaper publicity not so well known, James’s opposition to the interview might seem to be at odds with his longstanding ambition to achieve popular success as a novelist.99 James’s defensive characterization of the interview as an invasion of privacy in which the author’s words are taken by force—“gouged” out of him, as it were—along with comparably hostile remarks made in conversations, letters, notebooks, and elsewhere have encouraged the critical reception of James’s fictional journalists along similar lines. The shortcoming of such readings, however, is their failure to explain James’s attention in fictional narratives from The Reverberator to “The Papers” to precisely those characters most interested in reading about other people’s private lives. The explanation given to Bynner shows less concern for James’s “my me,” the private self with whom the public has nothing to do, than for what he might have called “their me,” the public persona with whom the public has everything to do. Journalists appear to have been the least of James’s worries when considered as part of the larger print culture in which the interview was becoming the favorite format of readers who, if not yet constituents of a full-fledged interview society, were at least accomplices in the emergence of that society. One can hardly blame Howard Bight for deciding that it was the public rather than the journalist who sought publicity: “Not that I suppose they don’t like it—why should one suppose anything of the sort?” (548). Newspapers were not so much an invasion of privacy as its compensation, offering isolated individuals the chance to read about the private lives of other people and, for the chosen ones, to read about themselves. “The Papers” is James’s response to the assurance with which readers presumed to know a person encountered solely through print media. James, even after conceding the public’s role in the loss of privacy, continued to be suspicious of the manner in which readers turned to the newspapers to satisfy needs and desires not met in their own lives. The lesson of “The Papers” is that intimacy with people we do not know is far easier to establish than intimacy with people we do know. As the satirist Barry Pain observed in 1895, “Nothing conceals one’s real self better than an interview, except more interviews.”100 The press manipulates the opinions of its audience in a way best called into question by a fictional narrative with its own stratagems—most notably the marriage plot—for manipulating reader sympathies on behalf of its protagonists. It is no coincidence, then, that James’s fiction during these same years would take an inward turn, away from journalism’s transparency and toward the subtle, demanding reading experience characteristic of the Jamesian aesthetic. The demands of this aesthetic, it should by now be clear, come in response not only to the period’s popular literature but also to its popular journalism, namely the interview that defi nes James’s age as well as the age still to come.

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5 The Foreign Correspondence Joseph Conrad’s “Wild Story of a Journalist”

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enry Stanley traveled to Africa in January 1871 with the following assignment from the New York Herald: “Find out Livingstone, and get what news you can relating to his discoveries.”1 Month after month readers watched the newspapers for reports of the silent explorer. News of Dr. David Livingstone’s discoveries—and his own discovery, in this case—reached London in May 1872 to the delight of international audiences.2 One impressed reader was Joseph Conrad, who recalled hearing the accomplishments of explorers “whispered to me in my cradle” and reading as a boy Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857), a source of the sentimental daydreams that would one day make Conrad a steamboat captain on the Congo.3 The newspaper itself read like an exploration narrative at such moments, never more so than in the journalism of Stanley, who introduced the press to territory formerly reserved for the explorer’s lone voice. Stanley’s dispatches gave audiences the impressions of a correspondent, the adventures of an explorer, and the plots of a novelist, all in a single column. Yet these dispatches also gave audiences a misleading perspective on events, as Conrad learned when his own African experiences failed to correspond with press descriptions. He returned to England in 1891, disenchanted and resentful toward events excluded from the London newspapers. Conrad did not forget Stanley’s publicity lesson. In 1898, while writing a fictional work drawing from his experiences in Africa, he would make the novel’s most compromised character a journalist. Stanley and Livingstone’s story, which fi rst appeared in the newspapers, is a reminder of how influential print journalism was for late Victorian authors. The newspaper made available to the novel, to adapt a phrase from Mikhail Bakhtin, “new worlds of verbal perception.”4 Conrad’s perception of the world was influenced as much by the daily press as by serious literature. He read with the skeptical perspective of a cosmopolitan émigré forced to rely on the newspaper’s foreign correspondence

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for news of Poland, France, Africa, and, while at sea, of home. Foreign news at the time was a pastiche of accounts from British political figures, Reuters wire service, and the paper’s own journalists. The foreign correspondence provided him with the latest intelligence in a commercial format often lacking perspective or thick cultural description. In Conrad’s view, correspondents were responsible for public misperception of events experienced only through the pages of the daily newspaper. Letters and essays reveal his recurrent frustrations with international reportage as inadequate mediations of complex psychological and political situations. As Marlow says in Chance (1913), “Is it ever the business of any pressman to understand anything? I guess not.”5 Conrad was reacting to recent developments in journalism that saw the work of the foreign correspondent established as a legitimate profession by the end of the nineteenth century.6 Michael Schudson has argued that the professional reporter was an invention of the late nineteenth century, a time when editors began employing experienced writers rather than informal sources (including their friends) as the paper’s “own correspondent.”7 According to Lucy Brown, foreign correspondence became increasingly prominent after the Franco-Prussian War, when public interest shifted from war reporting to foreign reporting on diplomatic relations.8 The generic term “correspondent” by Conrad’s time had come to include recognizable names such as Nellie Bly, William Howard Russell, and, of course, Henry Stanley. More than any previous journalist, Stanley made exploration of Africa a public spectacle through a sensational style that aimed to interest and excite audiences. Stanley spoke with the authority of the press, and his voice was an enduring problem for Conrad, who henceforth would criticize newspapers for shaping perception of events—a phenomenon addressed in the eloquent journalism of Kurtz. Conrad is often remembered alongside journalist-writers including Roger Casement, Richard Harding Davis, Arthur Conan Doyle, E. D. Morel, Mark Twain, and George Washington Williams in their criticism of the Belgian Congo, but studies are just beginning to address the elements of journalism in his own writing.9 Conrad’s novels show his interest to lie not with the reformers but with the unprecedented influence of journalists. He is one of the earliest authors to challenge the press for its psychological authority—indeed, its emergence as a mass media—rather than its subliterary status as panem et circenses for the public. Heart of Darkness (1898) more than any other work shows the influence of the newspapers on Conrad’s fiction. News supplied factual sources and, more important, intellectual provocation for this novel. Discussions of Africa in the English and Belgian press made Conrad aware of journalism as a discourse influencing the way individuals see, talk about, and understand world events. Hence Conrad’s novel is as concerned with the media through which Kurtz represents experience as with the experience itself, for it is the newspapers that bring Kurtz’s voice out of Africa.

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Brains Pulsating to the Rhythm of Journalistic Phrases English newspapers gave Conrad his fi rst language lessons. Letters describe him arriving in Lowestoft in May 1878 and reading the Standard.10 Reading the news not only introduced him to English speech and customs but also cultivated a sense of belonging to an “imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson defi nes the nation.11 W. G. Sebald records the following news items appearing the week of Conrad’s arrival: a mine explosion in Wigan; a Mohammedan uprising in Rumelia; Kaffi r unrest in South Africa; the hazards of Bosnia; the status of Hong Kong; the departure of the Largo Bay steamship; the Duke of Cambridge’s voyage to Malta; a Whitby housemaid’s death; and a Silsden mother’s stroke.12 Sebald’s miscellany makes sense only in the pages of the daily newspaper, in which links among items are imagined if reassuringly grounded in everyday life. Conrad was participating in a national ritual along with other citizens reading the same reported events on the same day. Just as he experienced home through the newspaper’s foreign intelligence, so he gradually became English through reading about world news. Conrad’s newspaper reading is a reminder of the distance that he felt between himself and most destinations. He traveled among ports as an outsider soon to cast off, always glimpsing local life from afar. One letter attributes this distance to the call of duty: “But indeed I knew very little of and about shore people. I was chief mate of the S.S. Vidar and very busy whenever in harbour.”13 The very phrase “shore people” suggests the quasi-anthropological perspective of an outside observer. Edward Garnett recalls Conrad’s frustration with this detachment: “I have spent half my life knocking about in ships, only getting ashore between voyages. I know nothing, nothing! except from the outside. I have to guess at everything!”14 V. S. Naipaul, another writer used to cultural displacement, argues that Conrad’s protest over a lack of material “is the complaint of a writer who is missing a society. . . . Conrad’s experience was too scattered; he knew many societies by their externals, but he knew none in depth.”15 From such a vantage point, the news offered compensatory insight into societies grasped only intermittently through experience. Newspapers offered the outsider a degree of cultural literacy difficult to acquire through the limited contact during stays in port. Two of Conrad’s political essays, however, ask whether audiences were in fact becoming accustomed to reading about distant atrocities through the newspapers. The impersonal voice of the newspaper was a particular problem for Conrad, who in “Poland Revisited” (1915) claims to have been so dissatisfied with the daily press that he was unaware of the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand. He disapproved of the “necessarily atmosphereless, perspectiveless manner of the daily papers, which somehow, for a man possessed of some historic sense, robs them of all real interest.”16 This impersonal, disembodied voice made events feel remote from one’s life, a drawback too well understood by the son of patriot Apollo Korzienowski. “Autocracy and War” (1905) shows Conrad’s

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concern for a mass audience unable to make the same fi ne discriminations as he, going so far as to distrust the very form of the newspaper in a series of peculiarly phenomenological criticisms. Opinions found in the press could not be tolerated except for “something subtly noxious to the human brain in the composition of newspaper ink” or “the large page, the columns of words, the leaded headings, [that] exalt the mind into a state of feverish credulity.”17 Newspapers encourage misinformed and complacent readers according to this view, for the “printed page of the Press makes a sort of still uproar, taking from men both the power to reflect and the faculty of genuine feeling; leaving them only the artificially created need of having something exciting to talk about.”18 The oxymoronic phrase “still uproar” expresses the deep frustration he felt as both Polish exile and British citizen in watching world events reduced to idle conversation. Conrad memorably expressed this frustration when he described journalists as “rats” in the typescript’s margin.19 In the same essay, Conrad describes the experience of reading about the Russo-Japanese War, anticipating the sentiments of another novelist who wrote for the press, Ernest Hemingway: “Real war is never like paper war, nor do accounts of it read much the way it looks.”20 Conrad’s essay suggests that casualty reports from abroad quickly lose their emotional force in print, as one can see in the following intelligence telegraphed to the Standard from Tokyo in January 1905: “It is estimated that the casualties at Chen-chieh-pau and Hei-ku-tai were—Japanese, 5,000; Russian, 10,000.”21 The mind becomes “strangely impervious to information” after enough body counts, rounded off to the nearest thousand in this instance. The visceral immediacy of combat contrasts markedly with the fi ltered security of news consumption: We have seen these things, though we have seen them only in the cold, silent colourless print of books and newspapers. In stigmatising the printed word as cold, silent, and colourless, I have no intention of putting a slight upon the fidelity and the talents of men who have provided us with words to read about the battles in Manchuria. I only wished to suggest that in the nature of things, the war in the Far East has been made known to us, so far, in a grey reflection of its terrible and monotonous phases of pain, death, and sickness; a reflection seen in the perspective of thousands of miles, in the dim atmosphere of official reticence, through the veil of inadequate words.22 The descriptive passage regrets newsprint’s inability to convey distant realities with any feeling, for the impersonal prose is the only contact most readers will have with this part of the world. News reports inevitably lack the requisite intensity and come to us as shadows of the real thing: cold, silent, and colorless. Conrad’s novels often take as a starting point this dissatisfaction with the impersonal voice of news narratives. Chance is a novel, after all, beginning with Mr. Powell’s disgust at how journalists “never by any

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chance gave a correct version of the simplest affair.”23 As with many of Conrad’s press episodes, a critical fi rst-person perspective of an experience calls into question the accuracy of subsequent news coverage. The trial of Mr. de Barral ends with a wave of the defendant’s fist, a fatuous gesture lacking the gravitas expected in a capital case. Marlow comments: The pressman disapproved of that manifestation. It was not his business to understand it. Is it ever the business of any pressman to understand anything? I guess not. It would lead him too far away from the actualities which are the daily bread of the public mind. He probably thought the display worth very little from a picturesque point of view; the weak voice, the colorless personality as incapable of an attitude as a bed-post, the very fatuity of the clenched hand so ineffectual at that time and place—no, it wasn’t worth much. And then, for him, an accomplished craftsman in his trade, thinking was distinctly “bad business.” His business was to write a readable account.24 This projected criticism, framed by the qualifier “probably,” redirects attention from the psychology of the defendant to the psychology of the reporter, reminding readers of the subjective decisions involved in a presumably impartial representation. The dismissal of the pressman’s “readable account” in this passage echoes Marlow’s contempt for the brickmaker’s “readable report” in Heart of Darkness.25 As Marlow knows, audiences will accept the anonymous account as fact simply because it appears in newsprint. Under Western Eyes (1911) brings the news even closer to personal experience through the sensation of reading not about strangers but about one’s own circle. In this cosmopolitan novel, Geneva-based characters read of Russian events in the columns of an English newspaper. The narrator remarks, “On returning home I opened the newspaper I receive from London, and glancing down the correspondence from Russia—not the telegrams but the correspondence—the fi rst thing that caught my eye was the name of Haldin.”26 The speaker discovers private significance within the public affair through the familiar name of Haldin, which appears in the correspondence columns because Haldin’s forgotten story is no longer newsworthy enough for the telegraph. Nathalie Haldin has a strikingly different reaction to the story, however, as seen in the narrator’s description of the physical shock she experiences when reading about her family as intelligence: “I pulled the paper out of my pocket. I did not imagine that a number of the Standard could have the effect of Medusa’s head. Her face went stony in a moment—her eyes—her limbs.”27 The story of Haldin’s midnight arrest, likely to be picked up by the French and Swiss press, soon becomes available to the very people from whom the narrator wants to protect this information. Mrs. Haldin reads the correspondence about her son and remarks: “The English press is wonderful.

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Nothing can be kept secret from it, and all the world must hear.”28 As the private suffering of these characters makes clear, however, the world sees the news story with indifferent eyes. Yet it would be a mistake to underestimate the allure for audiences of even the most sensational newspaper, which spoke with an authority unavailable to many post-Romantic literary forms. After the murder of Mr. Verloc in The Secret Agent (1907), Winnie Verloc compulsively recalls executions reported in the press: “the murderer was brought out to be executed, with a horrible quietness and, as the reports in the newspapers always said, ‘in the presence of the authorities.’ ”29 The very impersonality of the language imparts a clinical aggression to the description while at the same time stressing the legitimacy of the act. The quietness, not the gallows, is “horrible,” and the standardized phrase conveys the chilling anonymity of state power. “Today everyone takes part in public executions through the newspapers,” claimed Elias Canetti, and only through details gleaned from news accounts is Winnie able to visualize the execution.30 She compresses all previous executions—closed to the public since 1868—into the memory of a single phrase: The impossibility of imagining the details of such quiet execution added something maddening to her abstract terror. The newspapers never gave any details except one, but that one with some affectation was always there at the end of a meagre report. Mrs. Verloc remembered its nature. It came with a cruel burning pain into her head, as if the words “The drop given was fourteen feet” had been scratched on her brain with a hot needle. “The drop given was fourteen feet.” (245) In an attempt to convey the phrase’s force, Conrad can only resort to images of physical rather than mental suffering. The journalistic phrase crowds out all imagined details and resonates until her death. Once haunted by reported deaths, Winnie eventually is reduced to such a headline: “Suicide of Lady Passenger from a Cross-Channel Boat” (279). Alexander Ossipon, whose abandonment hastened the suicide, reads the article afterward, again showing the peculiar way in which impersonal information can unexpectedly become the most intimate narrative. Just as the execution phrase consumed Winnie’s attention, Ossipon repeats to himself verbatim his own phrase from the newspaper: “An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair” (279). It is repetition without insight for these traumatized characters. The article’s formulaic phrases show an inability to account for any except the most superficial details surrounding Winnie’s death. In the end, the anonymous narrator’s own words best express the press’s influence over its readers as “the mystery of a human brain pulsating wrongfully to the rhythm of journalistic phrases” (283). Here, journalism’s uncanny rhythm suggests the psychological force of print media over Conrad’s characters and, one might add, over the writer himself.

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Stanley’s Journalism by Warfare Stanley earned a reputation as one of the era’s most sensational journalists for his correspondence from Africa.31 These dispatches, appearing in newspapers from 1871 until the end of the century, gave Conrad enduring impressions with which to fi ll his childhood vision of a blank space on the African map. Numerous critics have identified Stanley as an influence on Conrad’s interest in Africa.32 It is likely, then, that the journalist’s discovery of his boyhood hero was not far from Conrad’s thoughts at the outset of his voyage to the Congo. Hence Stanley and Livingstone’s narrative is one lens through which to approach Heart of Darkness and its vehement, if obscure, references to journalism. Stanley was a more influential source upon Conrad than has been realized, but less as a historical figure than as a representative of his profession.33 Conrad’s cynicism toward the joint enterprises of exploration and journalism fi nds a human face in Stanley, who, in this sense, is the voice behind Kurtz’s journalism. Livingstone’s story is well known.34 He worked with the London Missionary Society in Africa during the 1850s and soon began to explore the continent on his own, undertaking several expeditions between 1852 and 1873 to study the geography and search for the watershed of central Africa. England welcomed him as a hero when he returned from his fi rst expedition and published Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857). He entered Africa for the last time in 1866 to locate the source of the Nile, but the expedition collapsed, stranding him in Ujiji with limited capital, supplies, and men. Rumors of his death reached Zanzibar, and Europe received its last letter from Livingstone on 30 May 1869. James Gordon Bennett, Jr., son of the proprietor of the New York Herald, recognized a story in the legendary figure’s silence and assigned Stanley the task of fi nding and interviewing the supposedly lost explorer. News of Stanley and Livingstone’s meeting reached London on 2 May 1872, when “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” became journalism’s latest phrase célèbre. Stanley’s correspondence would fashion Livingstone’s image for readers who had never seen the man. Livingstone had been out of sight for years and many readers knew him only through the press. Stanley’s dispatches presented an unforgettable image: “Passing from the rear of [the expedition] to the front I saw a knot of Arabs, and, in the centre, in striking contrast to their sunburnt faces, was a pale-looking and graybearded white man, in a navy cap, with a faded gold band about it, and red woollen jacket. This white man was Dr. David Livingstone, the hero traveller, the object of the search.”35 The exclusive interview was one element of a familiar nineteenth-century plot: a journey to the center of Africa in search of the venerated white explorer.36 Livingstone’s portrait appeared daily in the Illustrated London News, and pages devoted exclusively to the famous meeting appeared in newspapers for several months (see figure 5.1). Stanley speaks of a desire to shake the hand of “the man

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Figure 5.1. Engraving of the famous meeting between Stanley and Livingstone at Ujiji, Tanganyika, 10 November 1871. From the Graphic (3 August 1872): 100–101. © Illustrated London News / Mary Evans Picture Library. with whose book on Africa I was fi rst made acquainted when a boy,” but audiences were more likely to recall the two men tipping their caps in Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone (1872) than to recall Livingstone’s own writing.37 Like Stanley, Conrad arrived in Africa full of expectations gathered from his reading. The Victorian myth of the Dark Continent, as Patrick Brantlinger and other critics have shown, made an impression on Conrad well before the voyage through adventure tales, travelogues, biographies, chronicles, and journalism.38 Conrad, who despite a lifelong interest had never been to Africa, obtained many of his ideas through narrative representations of the continent. Stanley describes a similar experience upon arriving in Africa: I imagined I had read Burton and Speke through, fairly well, and that consequently I had penetrated the meaning, the full importance and grandeur, of the work I was about to be engaged upon. But my estimates, for instance, based upon book information, were simply ridiculous,—fanciful images of African attractions were soon dissipated, anticipated pleasures vanished, and all crude ideas began to resolve themselves into shape.39 Conrad’s expectations came from many sources, not least among them from Stanley. As we will see, Conrad was equally surprised at the discrepancy between what was reported by the press and what he would encounter in Africa.40

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The late essay “Geography and Some Explorers” (1924) revisits the African explorers of Conrad’s youth: Mungo Park, James Bruce, Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, and Livingstone. Conrad refuses to include Stanley in the company of these explorers, alluding to him only through a critical reference to sensational journalism. He speaks in a very different tone of Livingstone as “the most venerated perhaps of all the objects of my early geographical enthusiasm.”41 Yet Conrad visualizes Livingstone in the decline of his last years: The words “Central Africa” bring before my eyes an old man with a rugged, kind face and a clipped, gray moustache, pacing wearily at the head of a few black followers along the reed-fringed lakes towards the dark native hut on the Congo headwaters in which he died, clinging in his very last hour to his heart’s unappeased desire for the sources of the Nile.42 The image here is of Stanley’s Livingstone. Conrad is recalling Stanley’s popular description of the aged explorer rather than earlier images such as Henry Wyndham Phillips’s 1857 portrait for Missionary Travels, which depicts the explorer in relative youth, with fi ne clothes and neatly combed brown moustache.43 In Stanley’s account, by contrast, one member of the expedition says, “I see the Doctor, sir. Oh, what an old man! He has got a white beard,” and Stanley himself writes, “As I advanced slowly towards him I noticed he was pale, that he looked wearied and wan, that he had grey whiskers and moustache.”44 The figure in the image above has already received Stanley’s aid and, according to the passage, marches toward an anticipated death in the hut to which attendants would carry him. The tiny following, the dark native hut, and the Congo headwaters all point toward knowledge obtained from news coverage of the explorer’s death on 1 May 1873. The press had described the mise-en-scène of Livingstone’s death in detail, including his picturesque order at Ilala, “Build me a hut to die in,” noted in the Herald telegram cited in Stanley’s “Memoir of Livingstone.”45 Conrad’s description even shares the tone of the newspapers, which uncritically celebrated Livingstone’s ambition (“his heart’s unappeased desire”) rather than his failure to discover the Nile’s source. The essay’s most well-known passage again shows memories of Livingstone compromised by Stanley. Here Conrad describes his disappointment upon reaching Stanley Falls, formerly a blank spot on the map of Africa that he had made a “boyish boast” to visit someday: A great melancholy descended on me. Yes, this was the very spot. But there was no shadowy friend to stand by my side in the night of the enormous wilderness, no great haunting memory, but only the unholy recollection of a prosaic newspaper “stunt” and the distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration. What an end to the idealized realities of a boy’s daydreams!46

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Critics have long cited this passage as the moment of unambiguous disillusionment for Conrad—a moment explicitly linked to Stanley’s “prosaic newspaper ‘stunt,’ ” the completion of Livingstone’s explorations in Central Africa sponsored by the New York Herald and the London Daily Telegraph.47 As in the earlier passage, Stanley’s specter presides over what should be a pristine memory of Livingstone, a point accentuated by the passage’s uncanny vocabulary. Daydreams give way to melancholy, for Conrad cannot disregard Stanley’s influence over the way he sees and remembers the Congo. At the time of Livingstone’s death, Stanley had yet to achieve a reputation beyond journalism. Felix Driver argues that publicity generated by the Stanley-Livingstone expedition inaugurated a new relationship between exploration and sensational journalism. Over the next several years Stanley became emblematic of a new mode of “exploration by warfare”—or journalism by warfare, as the case may be—and he earned a reputation as one of the most ruthless explorers of the age during the 1887 Emin Pasha Relief Expedition48 (see figure 5.2). Yet Stanley freely, if naïvely, had admitted the controversial actions in public dispatches, in which his unrepentant hostility to native Africans appeared in stark contrast to Livingstone’s missionary work. General Gordon for one expressed surprise at the voluntary disclosure of Stanley’s methods: “He is to blame for writing what he did. . . . These things may be done, but not advertised.”49

Figure 5.2. Stanley tries out a Maxim automatic machine gun during the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition of 1887. From the Graphic (5 February 1887): 137. © Illustrated London News / Mary Evans Picture Library.

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Stanley would be remembered by many critics only for the publicity given to his experiences in Africa. Despite being criticized for single-handedly sensationalizing exploration, Stanley reveals the degree to which all explorers relied on print media to make their stories public.50 As Conrad’s essay cited earlier demonstrates, Livingstone’s own image was to a degree created by Stanley’s journalism. However, no previous explorer had made use of publicity so audaciously. Stanley was aware of an audience with every step and blithely disregarded accuracy when it interfered with entertainment. He begins How I Found Livingstone, the volume edition of the revised Herald dispatches, with the following declaration: “One thing more; I have adopted the narrative form of relating the story of the search, on account of the greater interest it appears to possess over the diary form.”51 The volume thus surrenders its status as personal record by modeling itself after narrative fiction. Stanley’s ambivalence as narrator of the ostensibly factual report can be detected in other revisions, as when he assures the volume’s readers: “There was no need of exaggeration—of any penny-a-line news, or of any sensationalism.”52 In the dispatches he describes himself “acting the part of a newspaper” when asked about world events by Livingstone, but the revised version substitutes “annual periodical” for “newspaper.”53 This emendation subtly attempts to distance his voice from mere newspaper journalism by redefi ning the text as a more stable and respectable genre. Stanley is positioning himself as interpreter rather than reporter of events—claiming status as a higher journalist, so to speak—by effacing the original medium of his narrative. He is claiming for the narrative a different status from that of the newspaper, leaving the revised version ambiguously between factual and fictional discourse. This dubious narrative voice would provide one model for Conrad’s own journalist in Africa. Stanley returned to Africa to develop the Congo Independent State between 1879 and 1884. This partnership with Leopold II of Belgium made him both a journalist and a colonial administrator—the unusual credentials of Kurtz himself. The work also kept Stanley’s name visible in the news prior to Conrad’s voyage to Africa. Ian Watt’s discussion of possible models for Kurtz links Stanley to the corrupt “moral atmosphere” that produces the station manager, but Stanley raises other important questions about the news media’s presence within developing states.54 His journalism led Conrad to distrust the newspaper as a mode of discourse and to ask how accurately readers can know events when not present, like Marlow, as a witness. Stanley was not, as many critics would have it, the passing of an age of innocent exploration. He was the passing of that age’s myth.

Kurtz’s Letters from Africa A 1902 letter from Conrad to Henry-Durand Davray describes Heart of Darkness as a “wild story of a journalist who becomes manager of

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a station in the interior and makes himself worshipped by a tribe of savages.”55 Studies have discussed the psychological, ethical, and cultural implications of Kurtz’s “wild story” without pursuing the relevance of his journalism, perhaps because the very profession of the journalist-cum-manager is so difficult to establish with any certainty outside this letter. Kurtz is spoken of as journalist, poet, painter, musician, political leader, station manager, and ivory merchant at different points in the novel. He is not limited to a specific area of expertise, but rather, as a journalist, he speaks for all professions and no profession. This unplaceability brings about Marlow’s fascination with Kurtz’s voice. Even after returning to Brussels, Marlow concedes he had taken Kurtz “for a painter who wrote for the papers, or else for a journalist who could paint.”56 The confusion arises from the visual expectations of journalistic narrative, which effectively creates its subject through graphic verbal description in the absence of illustrations or photographic images, as Frederick Greenwood noted in referring to foreign correspondence as “word-photographs” in Blackwood’s Magazine the year before the serialization of Conrad’s fiction.57 However, Marlow recognizes that the journalist, again like the painter, transforms experience in the process of representing it. Only incrementally does Marlow perceive the difference between Kurtz’s lived and reported experience, for he does not see Kurtz’s notorious exploits but hears or reads about them. Kurtz speaks with authority so long as his identity remains separate from his journalism—so long as he remains, in Marlow’s phrase, an “eloquent phantom” (75). Marlow’s description of Kurtz as “little more than a voice” or “just a word” directs attention to the station manager’s elusive presence in the novel. He is, in the words of one critic, a voice without a body.58 Yet Kurtz’s journalism challenges characterizations of him as disembodied speech, for many of his words are written specifically for print. Criticism’s emphasis on Kurtz’s orality neglects the very writing that qualifies him as a journalist—the “documents,” as Kurtz’s papers are called by the Company agent (70). Journalism mystifies the relation between speaker and speech in new and unexpected ways, for even if the written words are often indistinguishable from the spoken words, print distorts speech through what journalists refer to as the “transcription effect,” the newspaper’s elimination of nonverbal accompaniment to words (namely charisma, expression, tone, gesture, and gaze).59 The voice of journalism therefore has a disembodied quality all its own, an abstraction of which Marlow is suspicious throughout the novel and which Conrad criticized as the “atmosphereless, perspectiveless”—in short, disembodied—voice of journalism. Looked at in this way, Conrad’s novel is as much about the reembodiment of speech, or the attribution of voice to a specific individual. This is in many ways the primary goal of the interview, for the narrative continues largely because Marlow is not satisfied with allowing Kurtz to remain a voice. Marlow cautiously pursues the man behind the documents, creating parallel

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narratives between his story and Kurtz’s story—a story that, if told in Kurtz’s words alone, would be unrecognizable to Marlow. In his essay “The Storyteller” (1936), Walter Benjamin describes a shift from lived experience toward the experience of reading about life in the newspaper as a fact of modernity. Lost is the storyteller’s community of listeners, for the newsreader is an isolated individual reading other people’s stories as told by the journalist in absentia. The newspaper’s information confronts storytelling in a “menacing” way, interfering with people’s ability to communicate: “Every morning brings us the news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories.”60 Studies have presented the essay’s description of a decline in storytelling as one way of understanding Marlow’s yarn aboard the Nellie.61 Accordingly, Marlow epitomizes the difficulties of sharing experience within a culture of information, but it should be emphasized as well that the one character who communicates effortlessly is a journalist. In fact, Marlow initially regards Kurtz as the storyteller par excellence for being able to speak at all. “This is the reason why I affi rm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it,” Marlow tells us after admitting that he himself might have nothing to say.62 Marlow is said to discover the inadequacy of Kurtz’s ultima verba when he is unable to repeat them to the Intended. Kurtz’s words, looked to for wisdom by characters and critics alike, would have been better understood as the provisional words of a journalist than as those of a storyteller. Initially it appears that Marlow is the journalist, not Kurtz. Peter Brooks has called Heart of Darkness a “detective story gone modernist,” and Marlow does indeed confound expectations by performing in detective-like fashion the work appropriate for the novel’s journalist.63 Like Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone, the entire narrative is organized around an anticipated interview with a famous man, although with Marlow in the role of pursuant journalist. Marlow even seems to be repeating Stanley’s journey to deliver the great explorer to the public. He fi rst hears of Kurtz as “a very remarkable person” (22), describing him as the man “whom at the time I did not see—you understand. He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do” (29), or any more than Stanley saw Livingstone in the name: “He was only an object to me—a great item for a daily newspaper, as much as other subjects in which the voracious news-loving public delight in.”64 Stanley and Marlow both describe an earlier experience, enabling them to insert proleptic allusions to the impending interview that had been an uncertain conclusion at the time. The interview conventionally promised a climactic summation to an otherwise puzzling experience for both explorer and audience, as is evident when Marlow says of the interview, “It was the furthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me—and into my thoughts” (11). One might recall the Russian appearing in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) as an American photojournalist documenting the war for a distant public,

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but here the Russian is protective of Kurtz’s image and even requires Marlow’s assurance that “Mr. Kurtz’s reputation is safe with me” (62). In fact, Marlow is the one who accepts Kurtz’s personal papers just before death and who gives Kurtz’s Report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs to a journalist in Belgium for publication (without the postscript, of course). Throughout the novel Marlow’s perspective provides a broader context of contemporary news coverage in which to place Kurtz’s journalism. Specific references, even to Africa itself as numerous readers have pointed out, are notably absent from Heart of Darkness.65 The fi nal text is deliberately allegorical, but, as excised references to “some third-rate king” and other topicalities suggest, during composition events remained close to Conrad’s experience. Marlow’s boyhood fascination with maps, for example, alludes to the recent European presence in Africa. He says of the map, “True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got fi lled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness” (11–12). The rivers, the lakes, and, above all, the names evoke explorers identified in the essay “Geography and Some Explorers,” and only through deliberate oversight can one disregard the names Stanley Falls and Leopoldville along the very river Marlow is navigating. This river had in fact inspired the adventure: “Then I remembered there was a big concern, a Company for trade on that river. Dash it all, I thought to myself, they can’t trade without using some kind of craft on that lot of fresh water–steamboats! Why shouldn’t I try to get charge of one. I went on along Fleet Street, but could not shake off the idea” (12). Where was Marlow more likely to have learned of the distant African trading company than in news reports of Leopold and Stanley’s Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du HautCongo? The very idea occurs to him on Fleet Street, home of the press. Another passage, included in the manuscript but omitted from the fi nal text, describes the narrator’s disillusionment after a visit to Boma: “We went up some twenty miles and anchored off the seat of the government. I had heard enough in Europe about its advanced state of civilization; the papers, nay the very paper vendors in the sepulchral city were boasting about the steam tramway and the hotel—especially the hotel. I beheld that wonder” (18). That wonder turns out to be no more than a “greasy and dingy place” wrongfully credited as a sign of progress by the newspapers (18). Nor is it a specific political paper like the Belgian Mouvement Géographique but rather the collective press (“the papers”) that is responsible here for the misrepresentations making their way into people’s speech (18). His aunt’s fondness for terms such as “emissary of light” and “apostle” has already incited Marlow to dismiss this talk as “a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk about that time” (15, 16). Conrad’s early story “An Outpost of Progress” (1897) shows how easily such “rot” in the press could influence people’s speech. Kayerts and

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Carlier, two trading agents in Africa, read a dated home newspaper discussing “Our Colonial Expansion” while waiting for the steamer’s return: It spoke much of the rights and duties of civilisation, of the sacredness of the civilising work, and extolled the merits of those who went about bringing light, and faith, and commerce to the dark places of the earth. Carlier and Kayerts read, wondered, and began to think better of themselves. Carlier said one evening, waving his hand about, “In a hundred years, there will be perhaps a town here. Quays, and warehouses, and barracks, and–and–billiard-rooms. Civilisation, my boy, and virtue–and all. And then, chaps will read that two good fellows, Kayerts and Carlier, were the fi rst civilised men to live in this very spot!” Kayerts nodded, “Yes, it is a consolation to think of that.”66 Consolation is found in the unnamed author’s “high-flown language” that depicts the venture in terms of “light,” “faith,” and “commerce”—words anticipating the rhetoric Marlow encounters in his aunt, the pilgrims, and, above all, Kurtz.67 The vacuous language, the expired date, and the unidentified speaker do little to support the paper’s claims. Yet this unsubstantiated opinion nevertheless bears the authority of print, for the two men unhesitatingly accept the arguments and reconceive their roles in accordance with the specious vocabulary. Carlier and Kayerts can now imagine themselves as light-bringers in future newspaper headlines that will confer public legitimacy upon their otherwise obscure and selfserving roles. This consolation is not altogether different from that which readers might fi nd in Kurtz’s report. Nor were Kayert and Carlier alone in receiving European news while in Africa. Like the two traders, Stanley and Livingstone received “Khabari Kisungu” or “white man’s news” while in Unyanyembe68 (see figure 5.3). Livingstone fi rst became aware of his fame while recovering from illness in Angola, where he transcribed into his diary a Times article describing his journey as “one of the greatest geographical explorations of the age.”69 What Heart of Darkness does not mention is the increasingly critical press coverage of Leopold’s methods. The absence is striking, considering the widespread criticism of Congo atrocities after Conrad’s return to England.70 Stanley’s triumphalist rhetoric may have commanded attention throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, but the press began to report the appalling conditions shortly afterward. In this regard, the decision to omit Roger Casement from a largely autobiographical narrative is especially puzzling. Like Kurtz, Casement was “writing for the papers” while in the Congo, and Casement’s 1904 report on alleged atrocities for the British government as well as his founding of the Congo Reform Association eventually helped turn public opinion against the Belgians (68). The two men fi rst met in June 1890 at Matadi, and historians have observed that Casement seems to have been the only person there whom Conrad liked. Conrad notes the meeting in the “Congo Diary” but not in

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Figure 5.3. Stanley and Livingstone reading newspapers in Unyanyembe. From the Graphic (16 November 1872): 460. © Illustrated London News / Mary Evans Picture Library. the novel, leading several critics to wonder why Casement does not appear as a contrast to other Europeans.71 Despite a positive model in Casement and recent friendships with journalist-writers Stephen Crane and H. G. Wells, Conrad deliberately represents journalism as disreputable.72 The irony is that the press would later turn out to be one of the most effective means of protest against Leopold’s rule.73 The omission of Casement from the narrative suggests that earlier reporting by unreliable correspondents still influenced Conrad’s perception of the press, for Stanley had entered the Congo as a journalist and published his exploits as humanitarian achievements—reports Conrad bitterly recalled while convalescing in London. For years Conrad read foreign correspondence bearing little resemblance to the Congo of his own experience. The eventual disclosure of the brutal working conditions (namely the grove of death, chain gangs, and mounted skulls) by Casement was not yet imaginable as a public document, nor was any factual exposé in the newspaper press. Casement’s disinterestedness would have offered an alternative to the novel’s choice of nightmares, an alternative Conrad was unwilling to concede in the context of Stanley’s widely read correspondence. Instead the novel’s only journalism comes from the complicit voice of Kurtz. Just as Stanley’s journalism led to employment with Leopold, so Kurtz’s writing on “moral ideas” led to his employment with the Company (33). Both Stanley and Kurtz continued to write for the newspapers despite being employed by the very organizations that should have been the subjects of their journalism.

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Use of the elastic term “journalist” makes one wonder precisely what Conrad means by the term. By the end of the century, “journalist” had come to indicate a person writing primarily for the newspapers, often with the negative connotation of mass appeal and sensationalism; literary authors anxious to preserve their own professional status were the quickest to use the term condescendingly.74 Journalism could mean either description without interpretation or, on the contrary, description with outspokenly biased interpretation. Since Kurtz uses the newspapers as a forum for communicating his “moral ideas” in the manner of a special correspondent, it comes as little surprise that the reportorial values of disinterestedness, verifiability, and public relevance are altogether absent. His correspondence resembles the leading article or editorial, much like the sham column found in Conrad’s “An Outpost of Progress.” Readers, however, were known to make little distinction between news and correspondence. For this reason, Frederick Greenwood had objected in Blackwood’s to placing the foreign correspondence under the heading of news: So printed, they delude—not by intention of the writer, but through the imagination of the reader. We all know how unconsciously imagination can lead us astray. Because these screeds are telegraphed, and because they are printed with news as news, the writer’s remarks are invested by most minds with the importance due to a statement of facts. Whatever may be his aim,—whether to persuade or dissuade, to appease or inflame, to allay mistrust or to alarm suspicion,—all is understood as if resting on a background of actual knowledge. To the fancy of the reader, the special correspondent in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, is always a news-writer.75 Like other well-known correspondents including Rudyard Kipling, G. A. Henty, and Robert Louis Stevenson whom Conrad would likely have read in the press, Kurtz was expected to interpret events, for these interpretations were themselves a form of news. Consequently, Kurtz’s primary concern is with persuasion, explaining why he disregards surrounding living conditions while cultivating his rhetoric and why Marlow has an interest in Kurtz’s other forms of artistic expression including poetry, painting, and music. Kurtz’s journalism is described only in terms of verbal eloquence, never critical publicity. Marlow reads the seventeen-page Savage Customs Report and concludes, “It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence . . . a beautiful piece of writing” (50). The experience of reading is emphasized above all else: “From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. . . . It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence—of words—of burning noble words” (50). Marlow’s reaction anticipates the effect Kurtz’s prose will have on European audiences when read in the newspapers. They too will be made to tingle with enthusiasm.

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The description of the Report as a “magic current of phrases” (51) returns us to Conrad’s initial letter about the “wild story of a journalist,” for the adjective shows Marlow grasping for totemic explanations of journalism’s appeal, likening Kurtz’s “magic” over European audiences to the “worship” received from native audiences (71). A late episode showing Kurtz at work underscores the Romantic basis to his journalism. Marlow wonders, “Was he rehearsing some speech in his sleep, or was it a fragment of a phrase from some newspaper article. He had been writing for the papers and meant to do so again, ‘for the furthering of my ideas. It’s a duty’ ” (68). This solipsism conspicuously departs from—in fact parodies—the visual clarity expected of the correspondent. His eyes are shut when he says, “Live rightly, die, die . . .”—the closest we get to a verbatim excerpt from Kurtz’s journalism (68). The ellipses show the speaker grasping for a well-phrased antithesis or perhaps inviting readers to fi nish the phrase with their own platitude (the manuscript continues: “die nobly”). Marlow is not even sure how to categorize the unconscious utterance, illustrating the effectiveness with which Kurtz transfers the rhetorical force of his speech over to his journalism. There is no reason for the phrase “Live rightly, die, die . . .” to have any less authority than the equally oracular phrase “The horror! The horror!” Kurtz’s words up to this point—the moral ideas, the poetry, and the Report—have existed independent of the body, as here we fi nd the purest example of dreamlike disembodied speech. But the embodied speaker stays behind as a crucial corrective to the otherwise seductive language. Phrases that may sound compelling when printed by the newspapers lose their authority when spoken by the dying journalist. This absurd image of hallucinatory speech is meant to linger within the reader’s mind as an indictment of the voice of journalism—in this case, the nightmare from which Marlow is trying to awake. All of which calls into question Marlow’s decision to give the press a report he knows to be corrupt. Kurtz, little more than a voice by the time Marlow reaches him, is nonetheless responsible for opinions circulating far beyond the Congo: Marlow’s words will reach no further than the Nellie, whereas Kurtz’s words will potentially reach a mass readership. The media presence in the Belgian Congo is a reminder of the means by which foreign nations are represented to home audiences, many of whom will have no other source of information apart from the newspapers in which Kurtz appears as an authoritative voice. Heart of Darkness ends with a press all too eager to preserve for audiences the myth of the remarkable man. Only through Marlow’s interview do we meet this “eloquent phantom,” after which it is no longer possible to read Kurtz’s journalism as the authoritative voice of news. In telling his tale, Marlow prevents Kurtz from disappearing from sight along with his last words, mere whispers in the wind.

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Conclusion “The Back Page”

T

hackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–48) makes the bankruptcy of John Sedley appear unexceptional by situating it alongside countless similar misfortunes taking place across London. The auction of Mr. Sedley’s belongings from Russell Square is little more than “one of those public assemblies, a crowd of which are advertised every day in the last page of the Times newspaper.”1 Nearly everyone in London has attended one of these auctions at some point in their lives, we are told, with thoughts of the day when their own turn will come. The auctions listed on the newspaper’s back page are a poignant counterpart to the bankruptcies named by the Gazette. What more touching record of the personal tragedies behind these bankruptcies could one ask for than the material possessions that once formed a life? Similar to the advertisements on the newspaper’s front page, the back page also had its untold stories. Untold, that is, until Thackeray and the other novelists featured in this book came along to tell them. It is a pattern repeated throughout this book: every news story conceals a further story that novelists take it upon themselves to retell. Part 1 followed the reader’s eye along the columns of commercial and personal advertisements inhabiting the newspaper’s front page. Part 2 carried our attention to the paper’s inner pages, where one fi nds the leading articles, personal interviews, and foreign correspondence. This brings us to the newspaper’s back page, which, as Thackeray mentioned, gathers together notices of public assemblies around town. Likewise, the concluding section of this book—the book’s back page, so to speak—brings together the contents of the preceding chapters one last time. This book has argued that the shape taken by the Victorian novel must be understood alongside the simultaneous development of the news as a commercial commodity read by up to a million readers per day. In the words of Times reviewer Eneas Sweetland Dallas: “The rise of the periodical press is the great event of modern history.”2 The steam-driven expansion of the press transformed the newspaper from relative obscurity as

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a conveyor of “ear-tickling news” read aloud at the public house early in the century to a dominant commercial position amid a print market in which virtually everyone would have been expected to show some familiarity with the contents of the daily paper by the century’s end.3 The public perception of living in an era of radical change contributed to the climate in which increasing numbers of people were clamoring for up-to-the-minute news, as recognized at the time by Thomas Carlyle’s Signs of the Times (1829), John Stuart Mill’s The Spirit of the Age (1831), and Edward Bulwer Lytton’s England and the English (1833). Speed itself was a valuable commodity for editors who sought readers with editions printed at increasingly narrow intervals throughout the day.4 Use of the word “Express” in the titles of nearly one hundred newspapers during this period registered the public’s fascination with the rapid transmission of news that seemed to embody the experience of modernity. Long gone were the days when a newspaper retained its value for several weeks while migrating from one pair of hands to the next among the provinces. The growth of the press was as tangible as it was high tempo. The paper used for a single day’s issue of the Illustrated London News at the mid-century weighed thirty tons, covered sixty-two acres, and formed a pile three hundred feet tall; if stacked on top of one another, the columns of letterpress would span over two thousand miles.5 (Max Nordau predicted that twentieth-century readers would be able to read a dozen square yards of newspapers on a daily basis.6) Needless to say readers were impressed by such statistics of their own importance. The Victorians watched the change in the nation’s reading habits with remarkable selfawareness as the newspaper evolved from a luxury item read by oneeighteenth of the population to required reading for nearly all of Britain.7 One observer described the dramatic increase in newspaper circulations as a news “revolution.”8 The Illustrated London News confi rmed the cultural centrality of the press at the turn of the century with an image of Queen Victoria reading the newspaper after her death in 1901 (see figure 6.1). Or rather, having the newspaper read to her by Princess Henry of Battenberg—the image straddles both ends of the century in its retention of an oral practice of communal reading at a time when the halfpenny paper was readily available for private consumption by readers of all classes. The queen had been using the mechanisms of newspaper publicity to fashion the royal image for several decades by this point.9 Still, the tableau would have been inconceivable for earlier monarchs. It is a vivid image of the progress made by a press subjected to fiscal restrictions since the reign of Queen Anne. There could be no more effective publicity for the rehabilitation of the press since its former associations with the political instability of the radical unstamped press earlier in the century. The government’s heavy-handed regulation is a distant memory in this reassuring image of news fit for a queen. At a time when newspapers boasted of reaching the man on the knifeboard of the omnibus, here was influence in the other

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Figure 6.1. Princess Henry of Battenberg reads the newspaper aloud to Queen Victoria in “A Glimpse of the Queen’s Home Life.” From the Illustrated London News (26 January 1901): 130. © Illustrated London News / Mary Evans Picture Library. direction—upward stability, as it were. Queen Victoria is reading about the people but also as one of the people in this image by participating in the same ritual performed on a daily basis by thousands of constituents across the country. The image implies a collective investment in the newspaper as a national record available to all readers alike—even if all

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readers did not share the luxury of a princess to read it aloud to them. At the same time, however, the image is already nostalgic for an era in which the press was taken seriously by readers willing to devote their attention to the nation’s affairs. It is a fitting image to commemorate the end of the Victorian era’s optimism toward the press. The “Great Divide” between high art and mass culture in the early twentieth century was for many years accepted to be a defi ning feature of Anglo-American modernist literature.10 George Gissing’s portrait of a literary sphere driven by commercial interests in New Grub Street (1891) memorably depicted the widening divide between journalism and serious literature as the nineteenth century came to an end. Adopting a critical stance toward the press was a way for writers to signal intellectual rigor and artistic commitment. The newspaper acted as a convenient foil against which to defi ne the aesthetic project of modernism in terms of complexity, erudition, and political commitment—in other words, the qualities conspicuously absent from the mass media. The launch of the Daily Mail on 4 May 1896 has been taken by many press historians to inaugurate the mass media of the twentieth century by becoming the fi rst daily paper to reach a million readers during the Second Boer War. It did so in large part through the tabloid formula embraced by the paper’s editor, Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe), whose success owed much to economy in the use of words—the fewer the better. As one memoir observed, this was at least a departure from the style of Victorian journalism described by George Eliot as the ability to say very little in a very great space. Harmsworth studiously avoided the irony fundamental to the techniques of modernist literature with the explanation: “Readers don’t understand it.”11 George Saintsbury expressed the resentment of many writers when blaming the “age of tabloids” for the decline of interest in serious literature in the inaugural issue of T. S. Eliot’s The Criterion.12 The little magazines associated with modernist literature took pride in their minuscule circulations as confi rmation of a discerning minority alone capable of appreciating quality literature. The very title of The Little Review, in which some of the most influential modernist writing fi rst appeared, defi ned itself in opposition to the size of the mass circulation periodicals. It may be true that the newspaper replaced the book for a generation of readers in the twentieth century, as Isa Oliver alleges in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941). French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine had predicted this would happen over a century earlier.13 Yet accounts confi rming the alleged divide between literature and mass culture have underestimated the willingness of modernist authors to engage with the press in other ways than through hostile irony. To take one of the most influential twentieth-century novels, Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) has been described as “the counter-newspaper” for the kaleidoscopic manner in which it brings together discordant materials with no obvious connections.14 Whether celebratory or subversive, the intertextual relationship between Joyce’s novel and the newspaper is profound. The broadsheet

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exerts as much influence as the Homeric namesake over a novel whose chapters flaunt newspaper headlines, whose central character hums advertising jingles, and whose very scope memorializes a single day in defiance of the disposable seriality of the daily paper. The montage of disconnected events presented by the novel invites methods of reading more appropriate to the newspaper than to any other form of literature. The verbal resourcefulness generated by the newspaper at nearly every level of the narrative is the fl ip side to Leopold Bloom wiping his bottom with pages of newsprint. Joyce’s novel exemplifies the way in which novelists sought to distance themselves from the very print culture responsible for much of their formal experimentation. The “Great Divide” was not as wide a gulf as once thought. Recent scholarship has revised our understanding of the agonistic relationship between modernism and mass culture. Instead of confi rming a uniform hostility on the part of modernist writers toward all things popular, these studies document a far more ambivalent relationship best expressed by Ezra Pound’s defi nition of literature as “news that STAYS news.”15 Use of the plural term “modernisms” by these studies registers the diversity of practices among artists undermining any sweeping claims about the movement’s opposition to popular culture.16 The reversal has been accomplished in part by expanding the modernist circle to include writers such as Rebecca West, who, as a journalist, held a less adversarial stance toward the mechanisms of publicity derided by supposedly serious authors. The traffic between literature and journalism at the beginning of the twentieth century likewise looks very different when taking into account authors including Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Ernest Hemingway who had always disregarded the boundary between the two discourses.17 It has even been suggested that modernist writers benefited from the marketing tactics of Harmsworth, a figure held personally responsible by many of his contemporaries for the widening gap between literature and journalism at the turn of the century.18 Patrick Collier identifies three positions available to modernist authors in relation to the press. First, some modernist writers sought to critique journalism through their experimental writing. Second, other writers sought to use journalism itself as a forum in which to interrogate the press. And third, still others envisioned experimental writing as an alternative space altogether to that of a degraded public sphere.19 All three of these positions defi ne modernist writing in relation to journalism even when using it as a countertext. As we have seen, the ambivalent relationship between the two media is a continuation of rather than a break from the dynamic already visible in the nineteenth century. This rivalry resurfaces periodically in controversies over a “new journalism” or “nonfiction novel” in which either the newspaper or the novel uses narrative methods associated exclusively with the opposing medium.20 Two very different responses to the newspaper on the part of Victorian authors—namely, Charles Reade and Oscar Wilde—give some indication of the spectrum of opinion toward the press covered by this book. The

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fi rst comes from a letter written by Reade toward the end of his career. Renowned for intemperate reactions to criticism, Reade responded to allegations that one of his novels was inappropriate for respectable audiences by crediting the very newspaper in which the review appeared as the offending novel’s source. The Times printed Reade’s letter to the editor under the heading “Facts Must Be Faced” in 1871: “For 18 years, at least, the journal you conduct so ably has been my preceptor, and the main source of my works.”21 A news report printed by the paper two decades earlier had, Reade continues, “touched my heart, inflamed my imagination, and [it] was the germ of my fi rst important work.”22 The paper’s investigative reports and leading articles provided material for at least four of his novels. He even admitted to imitating the newspaper’s impersonal tone in retelling these stories. This should come as little surprise from an author who attributed waning interest in the historical novel to a preoccupation with the present times exhibited by a public nurtured by the daily paper. For every reader of his historical novel The Cloister and the Hearth, he insisted, there were a thousand who had read his topical novel It Is Never Too Late to Mend.23 Reade may be the consummate “newspaper novelist,” but he is far from an exceptional case. The newspaper was the unacknowledged preceptor of numerous Victorian novelists featured in this study—whether or not they wrote letters to the editor expressing their gratitude. By contrast, Oscar Wilde takes exactly the opposite stance toward the press whose reportage had provided such abundant material for Reade’s novels. One of the fi rst complaints Wilde made after being released from prison was toward the prohibition of newspapers. The lack of news behind bars threatened to return him to society as a modern-day Rip Van Winkle. Warders even refused to allow Wilde to read the Daily Chronicle on the train journey home from Reading before at last granting him permission to read the paper upside down. This unusual style of reading inspired the comment: “It’s really the only way to read newspapers.”24 Wilde’s attitude toward reading the overturned paper has been interpreted by at least one critic as an emblem for the artist’s ambivalent relationship to journalism.25 According to this perspective, the newspaper is a quotidian record of daily life requiring imaginative treatment by the artist. The documentary material relied on by Reade as the factual basis for his improbable plots is figuratively turned on its head by Wilde’s formulation, in which literature bears an inverse relationship to the straightforward representation of life: facts must not be faced. Reade’s devotion to facts is to be pitied instead for turning a talented novelist into a “common pamphleteer.”26 What one author takes as the raw material for art is taken by the other author as art’s antithesis. The incongruous pairing of Reade and Wilde demonstrates how both stances were available to the Victorians long before these positions were taken up by subsequent writers in the early twentieth century. Like their successors, Victorian novelists moved back and forth in their attitudes toward journalism as both source and scourge. It would take the memory of Rip Van Winkle to think otherwise.

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The continuity between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction is apparent in their mutual suspicion toward journalism’s capacity to record events with any degree of accuracy. This disillusionment with the press (Balzac’s Illusions perdues is representative of the genre in this regard) lies behind the shared technique of news pastiche—whether it be the shipping news, personal advertisements, leading articles, personal interviews, foreign correspondence, or other sections of the paper drawn on by novelists at this time. The news reports incorporated into Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Dickens’s Dombey and Son, Thackeray’s Pendennis, Trollope’s The Warden, Wood’s East Lynne, Collins’s Armadale, Eliot’s Middlemarch, James’s The Reverberator, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey, Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Stoker’s Dracula, H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, and the other Victorian narratives featured in this book prefigure the use of the press by twentieth-century fiction. These novels call into question the credibility of news by situating it amid the fictional narrative, which retells the story with a degree of psychological depth and narrative amplitude unavailable to the limited resources of the investigative reporter. The paratextual material undermines the news reports in most of these cases by placing the reader in a privileged position in comparison with the limited perspective of the journalist, who is dependent on circumstantial evidence for the reconstruction of events. This narrative method has long been associated with twentieth-century fiction exemplified by Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), in which the short story “A Painful Case” derives its title from a misleading news report quoted verbatim in the narrative. The two versions of “A Painful Case” contrast factual and fictional versions of the same set of events, although there is little doubt which of these narratives is superior in the author’s eyes. The ironic treatment of the press by modernist authors presumably challenged the previous century’s confidence in the realistic representation of events. The use of news reports by the novels featured in this book should make it abundantly clear, however, that the Victorians never accepted the authority of the press without a similar degree of skepticism. For writers of both periods, the novel might be said to begin where the newspaper ends. The inadequate explanatory power of the newspaper is the very thing that set apart factual and fictional narrative for many novelists. Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” was mentioned by the preceding chapter in relation to Conrad’s journalists, and here we can return to it once more for the relevance of its ideas about journalism to the other fictional narratives featured in this book. For Benjamin, the Egyptian king Psammenitus’s downfall is a paradigmatic example of a story whose value lies in its ambiguity. Herodotus’s tale recounts the imprisonment of Psammenitus by a Persian king determined to humble his captive. The prisoner is forced to watch a series of humiliating spectacles: the triumphal procession of the Persians, the enslavement of his daughter, and the execution of his son. Psammenitus stands silently with his eyes fi xed on the ground throughout each of these incidents. After stoically withstanding the previous scenes, however, the Egyptian king succumbs to inconsolable grief at the sight of

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an elderly servant reduced to beggary. How to explain the king’s behavior? The story is exemplary in its susceptibility to multiple interpretations. Montaigne’s Essays (1580) offers one way of understanding the tale, and an informal survey among Benjamin’s circle supplies at least four other ways of construing events. The very absence of a defi nitive explanation has been responsible for the story’s continuing relevance for more than a thousand years, according to Benjamin. The following line among Benjamin’s notes for the essay establishes why such stories are no longer possible after the emergence of the press: “What is certain is that every reporter would find an explanation at the drop of a hat.”27 The reduction of a complex situation to a single inadequate account effectively conceals from readers as much as it reveals. A story that has lasted for over a thousand years would not last a single day in the hands of the press. The fictional narratives considered by this book in one way or another all confront the tension between these two methods of storytelling. With this in mind, we might consider one fi nal illustration of the embattled relationship between fiction and journalism at the end of the nineteenth century. First published in The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales in 1888, Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” takes place at the office of a provincial Indian newspaper modeled after the Allahabad Pioneer for which Kipling worked as a correspondent. The story’s unnamed journalist-narrator is the audience for a tale told by two adventurers named Daniel Dravot and Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan who establish a kingdom in Kafi ristan, an unmapped region of northeastern Afghanistan. The two men successfully crown themselves kings by persuading the pagan Kafi ris of their godliness before a lapse in appropriately godlike behavior turns their subjects against them. Only Carnehan returns alive to the newspaper office two years after the initial meeting to fi nish the tale before dying of sunstroke at a local asylum. It is a remarkable tale. Too remarkable for the newspaper, in fact. Despite its sensational nature, the story never makes it past the newspaper office’s gatekeeper. Kipling’s skeptical narrator is the counterpart to the ruthless journalist, typical of twentieth-century fiction and cinema, who is willing to do anything in order to obtain an exclusive “scoop,” a term fi rst used in the second half of the nineteenth century long before its satirical prominence in the title of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (1938). As in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the frame narrative relates the story as told in retrospect by a witness to events. The narrator is waiting for telegrams from the continent on both occasions when Carnehan visits the newspaper office. The parallel between the telegraph and the adventurer is unmistakable since both deliver news about distant “kings.” Crucially, the telegraphed reports about unnamed kings in Europe (“the other side of the world”) have no more reality to the geographically isolated narrator than do the reports from Kafi ristan.28 The kings in both instances are equally unreal. Momentous events taking place in Europe are merely an “inconvenience” to the narrator, who must remain at the newspaper office until the arrival of news from the continent (250). The only noticeable

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difference between the two telegraphed reports is in the height of the trees outside the newspaper office’s window. Kipling describes a region of the British Empire temporally split between the telegraph and Harun-al Raschid, the Caliph of Baghdad associated with A Thousand and One Nights. Telegraphy versus storytelling: the scenario depicts the tradition of oral storytelling alongside the post-telegraphic world of impersonal intelligence transmitted from an unseen source. It is a measure of the close contact into which the world had been brought by the press in one sense while remaining unknowable in another. The information is available, if not the capacity to make sense of this information without the appropriate means of storytelling. Kipling’s story is noteworthy in that the remarkable tale of the man who would be king appears in the fictional narrative alone. The simple explanation for why the story does not go to press is the absence of verifying evidence—the lost bag containing Dravot’s severed head adorned with a gold crown. Yet reading this tale in the context of the other nineteenth-century fiction presented by this book suggests a more complex understanding of events. Rather than dismissing the tale as improbable, the narrator might be said to preserve the tale precisely for its ring of truth—you couldn’t make this stuff up, as newspaper readers say. The tale’s exclusion from the newspaper ensures that attention will be given to the significance of events rather than to their veracity. In contrast to the factual expectations of the newspaper, Kipling’s framing story allows the tale to stand without “explanation,” to return to Benjamin’s phrase, or even the need to verify the speaker’s mental state in order to determine the tale’s plausibility. Judgment is withheld by the narrator, whose reportorial manner allows events to speak for themselves without the need for explanation. The story notably concludes with a phrase free from any moral: “And there the matter rests” (279). We are not given a steer one way or the other by the framing narrative as to whether we should believe the remarkable tale about the Kingdom of Kafi ristan, for doing so would only distract us from the “higher truth” conveyed by the tale. It highlights the point reiterated in various ways throughout this book that the news is not what happened but rather a story about what happened, a condition that accounts for the interest novelists had in telling their own versions of the stories fi rst told by the press. In the end, Kipling’s story is less a rejection of the newspaper press than an acknowledgment of the ties that bind the two media together. The factual reports of the kings in Europe are a necessary counterpoint to the fabulist account of the kings of Kafi ristan. In marking the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Kipling’s story highlights the ironic way in which fiction and the press were mutually influential even as they sought to defi ne themselves against each other. It has been the goal of this book to show the impact the daily newspaper had over the development of Victorian fiction since the emergence of the commercial press in the early nineteenth century. The newspaper was no longer a peripheral text easily dismissed as irrelevant to the majority

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of readers. Instead, it was accepted as a narrative of world events shared among readers from the public house to Buckingham Palace. By the 1870s, Alexander Innes Shand could plausibly describe the press as an all but inescapable feature of modern life: “there is no getting beyond the reach of the press, unless you should be cast away, like Crusoe, upon some desert island.”29 The press had become synonymous with civilization itself in Shand’s formulation. We might even reverse the terms of this Orwellian contention to say that the modern-day Crusoe is someone insulated from the press rather than an actual castaway on a deserted island. Isolation in the modern understanding of the term has more to do with one’s relation to the news media than actual geography. Nor should it be overlooked that the very metaphor used here is drawn from a novel, itself taken by many to figure Crusoe-like escapism as opposed to engagement with the outside world. It has been the aim of this book to dismantle any such conceptions of the novel and the newspaper as inhabiting separate spheres. Instead, the novelty of newspapers was evident in the newness and literariness of a form of narrative that has shaped the way we read literature since its conception in the nineteenth century. This book’s interest in how the news fi rst became a part of everyday life might be taken as a response to the deceptively simple question about the common reader asked by Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations (1953): “Now what takes place when, say, he reads a newspaper?”30 This question has been taken up here through a range of fictional responses to the news reader, a figure of mounting interest to audiences who watched the news gradually become indistinguishable from public life after its fi rst controversial appearances among the pages of the press in Britain. News has since come to be understood in our own time as “public knowledge,” or information the media bring to everyone’s attention, confer legitimacy upon, and ultimately transform into the cultural form we call news.31 In other words, the regular supply of information about events happening in the world has become such a fundamental part of our everyday lives that we scarcely notice its novelty anymore. The newspaper may be a marker of ordinary life for twentiethand twenty-fi rst-century readers. But it was not always so. The chapters of this book remind us how writers of the Victorian period strove to understand what was, for them, a momentous historical event that seemed at once to promise and to threaten a transformed society.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Andrew Wynter, “Our Modern Mercury,” in Our Social Bees; or, Pictures of Town & Country Life, and Other Papers, 9th ed. (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1867), 304. 2. Alexander Innes Shand (unsigned), “Contemporary Literature. VII. Readers,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 126 (1879): 241. 3. Leonard Courtney, “The Making and Reading of Newspapers,” Contemporary Review 79 (1901): 365. 4. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty. Annotated Text, Sources and Background, Criticism, ed. David Spitz (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 85. 5. Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 1; Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 22. Historians disagree over precise dates for the transition from political patronage to commercial independence: Hannah Barker identifies a degree of independence as early as the 1780s (Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England [Oxford: Clarendon, 1998]), whereas Jean Chalaby aligns it with market changes occurring after 1855 (The Invention of Journalism [Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998]). For a historical perspective challenging efforts to situate news discourse in the nineteenth century, see Mitchell Stephens’s A History of News: From the Drum to the Satellite (New York: Viking, 1988). The confl icting conceptions of news are presented in “Schudson and Stephens Debate: The ‘Invention’ of News, Other Sundry Matters,” Clio 29 (1997): 7–9. 6. Dan Schiller, Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 10. The eighteenth-century separation of news and novels into the conceptual categories of fact and fiction we are familiar with today is addressed by Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); and J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990).

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7. David Vincent’s Literacy and Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) documents the decline of unstamped radical newspapers in competition with apolitical Sunday weeklies. 8. Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (New York: Penguin, 1964), 188. 9. “Newspapers in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties,” in Progress of British Newspapers in the Nineteenth Century, Illustrated, ed. James J. Kane (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co., 1901), 196. Twentieth-century historians have moderated the claims of this naïvely Whiggish view of the political emancipation of journalism. For example, see the account given by James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility (London: Routledge, 1993). The most influential historical accounts of the press include Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press in England, 1855–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1976); Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain (London: Hamilton, 1981); and Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers. Martin Conboy provides an overview to the period’s print culture in Journalism: A Critical History (London: Sage, 2004). 10. Journalism (London: J. Truscott, 1831), 14. 11. Times, 26 December 1834, 2b. 12. Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 124. 13. These figures are taken from A. P. Wadsworth’s “Newspaper Circulations, 1800–1954,” Transactions of the Manchester Statistical Society (1954–55): 1–41. 14. “Cheap Literature,” British Quarterly Review 29 (1859): 316. Many contemporary articles on the topic of Victorian journalism have been reprinted in Popular Print Media, 1820–1900, ed. Andrew King and John Plunkett, 3 vols. (London: Routledge, 2004). 15. See the accounts of how the daily newspaper affected reading habits throughout Europe given by Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 170–203; and Richard Terdiman, “Afterword: Reading the News,” in Making the News: Modernity & The Mass Press in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Dean de la Motte and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 351–76. Mark Turner explains the significance of the temporal rhythms associated with Victorian print in “Periodical Time in the Nineteenth Century,” Media History 8 (2002): 183–96. 16. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (New York: Penguin, 1971), 246. 17. Quoted in William H. Wickwar, The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press 1819–1832 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928), 54. 18. George Augustus Sala, “The Press: What I Have Known of It-1840–1890,” in Progress of British Newspapers in the Nineteenth Century, Illustrated, 202. 19. “The Modern Newspaper,” British Quarterly Review 55 (1872): 351. 20. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 204. 21. A. E. Fletcher, “The Ideal Newspaper. Important Contributions from Leading Editors,” Young Man 14 (1900): 123. 22. Accounts of the hostile attitudes toward mass literacy can be found in John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992); Kelly J. Mays, “The Disease of Reading and Victorian Periodicals,” in Literature in the Marketplace, ed. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten

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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 165–94; and Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in NineteenthCentury British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 23. For more on debates over the relationship between the British press and public opinion, see Aled Jones, Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996); and Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). 24. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973), 29. 25. George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), 396. 26. Horatio Mansfield (unsigned), “Modern Journalism,” Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, new ser., 19 (1852): 354. 27. “Literature of the Day:—The New Magazine,” The Metropolitan: A Monthly Journal of Literature, Science and the Fine Arts 1 (1831): 19. 28. Stanley Morison, The English Newspaper: Some Account of the Physical Development of Journals Printed in London Between 1622 and the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 184. For more on the shift in reading habits at this time, see Reinhard Wittmann, “Was There a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?” in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 284–312. 29. Many of these innovations are associated with the “New Journalism” arising at the end of the nineteenth century. See the accounts given by Joel H. Wiener, ed., Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s to 1914 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988); John Stokes, In the Nineties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); and Kate Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880–1910: Culture and Profit (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). John Tulloch records the displacement of the “old” by the “new” in various phases of journalism history in “The Eternal Recurrence of New Journalism,” in Tabloid Tales, ed. Colin Sparks and John Tulloch (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 131–46. 30. William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 13. 31. Gibbons Merle (unsigned), “Journalism,” Westminster Review 18 (1833): 195. 32. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 33. See also Jonathan Culler on the distinction between imagining and legitimating the nation by way of the novel (“Anderson and the Novel,” Diacritics 29 [1999]: 20–39). This and other essays from a special issue of Diacritics devoted to Anderson’s work have been gathered in Pheng Cheah and Jonathan Culler, eds., Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (New York: Routledge, 2003). 33. Maria Edgeworth to C. Sneyd Edgeworth, 1 May 1813, in Letters from England 1813–1844 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 41. 34. See the discussions of gendered reading practices in Kate Flint, The Woman Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? (London: Routledge, 1996); and Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green, and Judith Johnston, Gender and the Victorian Periodical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). The influence of the press in Edgeworth’s time is discussed in Hannah

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Barker and Simon Burrows, eds., Press, Politics, and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 35. Quoted in Jones, Powers of the Press, 49. 36. For more on the relationship between the press and the British Empire, see Simon J. Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876–1922 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003); and Potter, ed., Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire, c. 1857–1921 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004). 37. See Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). Responses to Habermas’s concept of the public sphere can be found in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992); and Bruce Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Harold Mah provides a detailed bibliography of the secondary literature in “Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of the Historians,” The Journal of Modern History 72 (2000): 153–82. 38. Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), 226. For more on the Victorian preoccupation with readerly comprehension, see Nicholas Dames’s The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 16–22. 39. Michael Warner discusses the rhetorical use of the term “public” in Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books; London: MIT Press, 2002). 40. See Laurel Brake’s account of the hostile reception given to periodical literature by twentieth-century writers, in Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), xi–xv; and Print in Transition, 1850–1910: Studies in Media and Book History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 7–26. 41. Christian Johnstone (unsigned), “On Periodical Literature,” Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (1833): 495. 42. For an introduction to recent work on Victorian print culture, see the essays collected in Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, ed. Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000). This collection is indebted to pioneering research into the periodical press by Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff, eds., The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982); and Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden, eds., Investigating Victorian Journalism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990). 43. J. G. L. (pseud.), “The Newspaper,” Macmillan’s Magazine 87 (1902–3): 434. 44. John M. L. Drew makes this claim in Dickens the Journalist (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 2. 45. Joseph Butwin documents the journalistic aspects of Dickens’s novel in “Hard Times: The News and the Novel,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 32 (1977): 167. 46. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 45.

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47. Letter to Trollope, 28 October 1859, in Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Gordon N. Ray (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1945), 158. On Thackeray’s relationship to the periodical press, see Richard Pearson’s W. M. Thackeray and the Mediated Text: Writing for the Periodicals in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). 48. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (New York: Bantam, 1996), 375. 49. Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 18. 50. “Newspaper Readers,” The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction 34 (1839): 360. 51. Richard Altick, The Presence of the Present (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), 21. 52. Times, 16 December 1864, 1b. 53. Times, 5 June 1860, 1c. 54. Max Weber, “Political Journalists,” in Media Occupations and Professions: A Reader, ed. Jeremy Tunstall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 25. 55. George Henry Lewes, “Farewell Causerie,” Fortnightly Review 6 (1866): 890. 56. “Interviews and Interviewing,” All the Year Round 3rd ser. 8 (1892): 423. 57. Henry James, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 19. 58. Henry James, The Bostonians (New York: Vintage, 1991), 97. 59. James, The Complete Notebooks, 42. 60. Joseph Conrad to Henry-Durand Davray, 10 April 1902, in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, ed. Laurence Davies and Frederick R. Karl, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 2:407. 61. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1988), 33, 68. 62. For example, see Richard Holt Hutton’s comments on the reciprocity between novels and newspapers: “The reader in fact obtains, say in an evening paper, all that he obtains in an ordinary novel. . . . He fi nds as many stories, tragic or comic, as many characters, as many social sketches” (“The Empire of Novels,” The Spectator [9 January 1869]: 43). The American journalist David G. Croly discusses the validity of Hutton’s claim in Views and Interviews on Journalism, ed. Charles F. Wingate (New York: F. B. Patterson, 1875), 92. See also the section “Journalism vs. Literature,” 59–61. 63. “To Advertisers,” The Daily Telegraph, 20 September 1855, 3a. 64. House of Commons, “Report from the Select Committee on Newspaper Stamps,” Parliamentary Papers 558 (London, 1851), v. 65. The most influential discussions of the social construction of news include Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1922); Robert Park, “News as a Form of Knowledge: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge,” American Journal of Sociology 45 (1940): 669–86; Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge, “The Structure of Foreign News,” Journal of Peace Research 1 (1965): 64–90; Stuart Hall, “A World at One with Itself,” New Society 15 (1970): 1056–58; Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978); and Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What’s News (New York: Vintage Books,

Notes to Pages 13–18

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1979). Many of these pieces have been reprinted in News: A Reader, ed. Howard Tumber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Chapter 1 1. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (New York: Penguin, 1986), 559; hereafter cited in text. 2. William Shakespeare, “The Tempest,” in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 1.2.5–6. 3. See the discussions of women’s reading practices in Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London: Routledge, 1989); Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993); Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (London: Routledge, 1996); Martyn Lyons, “New Readers in the Nineteenth Century: Women, Children, Workers,” in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 313–44; and Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green, and Judith Johnston, Gender and the Victorian Periodical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 4. Thomas C. Leonard discusses news readers as interpretive communities in News for All: America’s Coming-of-Age with the Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For more on the history of reading and individualized reading practices, see the work of Roger Chartier, especially The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 5. Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, 16 April 1912, in The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. J. C. Levenson et al., 6 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 6:535. Adams did not go down with the Titanic. He only wished he did. The great statesman felt out of touch with modern deaths by automobile, railway, and airplane and longed for a more dignified—in his mind, more nineteenth-century—death by shipwreck. So upon hearing news of the Titanic he regretted a missed opportunity: “Really I like the way our friends went down. I wouldn’t mind having done it,—I don’t say doing it, because I dislike ice-cold-water in the dark,— but, once done, it is rather inspiring” (Adams to Mary Cadwalader Jones, 20 April 1912, 6:537). 6. Charles Dickens (unsigned), “The Lost Arctic Voyagers,” Household Words 10 (1855): 387. 7. The publication of Henri Savigny and Alexandre Corréard’s survivor narrative Naufrage de la Frégate la Méduse faisant partie de l’expédition du Sénégal (Paris: Hocquet, 1817) renewed Géricault’s interest in the incident by providing material for the five episodes used in preliminary sketches: cannibalism, mutiny, sighting the rescue ship, hailing an approaching boat, and the rescue itself. Lorenz Eitner gives a full account of the painting from conception to exhibition in Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (London: Phaidon, 1972). 8. Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea (New York: Doubleday & Page, 1924), 57. 9. Ibid., 59. 10. This history is drawn from Charles Wright and C. Ernest Fayle, A History of Lloyd’s: From the Founding of Lloyd’s Coffee House to the Present

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Day (London: Macmillan and Company Limited, 1928); M. M. Beeman, Lloyd’s Outline (Kingswood, Surrey: Windmill Press, 1937); and Alan Cameron and Roy Farndon, Scenes from Sea and City: Lloyd’s List 1734– 1984 (London: Lloyd’s of London Press, 1984). 11. Lloyd’s List, 16 Jan 1801, 1d. 12. Ibid., 14 Jan 1823, 2d. 13. Michael Harris, “Shipwrecks in Print: Representations of Maritime Disaster in the Late Seventeenth Century,” in Journeys through the Market: Travel, Travellers and the Book Trade, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Kent: Oak Knoll Press, 1999), 45. 14. “What’s the Use of the Gazette?” Punch 21 (1851): 251. 15. “Ship News,” The Times, 28 October 1842, 7d. 16. “Shipwreck, and Strange Story of the Survivors,” The Times, 29 October 1842, 5b. 17. “The Late Dreadful Storm,” The Times, 28 October 1842, 3c. 18. George Eliot to Charles Bray, 17 April 1852, in The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 2:18. The play referred to by Eliot’s letter is “A Chain of Events” (1852), adapted from the French by George Henry Lewes and Charles James Matthews. 19. Mary Poovey, “Writing about Finance in Victorian England: Disclosure and Secrecy in the Culture of Investment,” Victorian Studies 45 (2002): 22. 20. George Landow, Images of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 17. 21. See Roger Cooter and Bill Luckin’s account of how statistics contributed to the perception of accidents as secular events (Accidents in History: Injuries, Fatalities and Social Relations, ed. Cooter and Luckin [Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1997]). 22. See the fi rst-person account of watching a ship founder in John Fowles, Shipwreck (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974), 9. 23. The story that so captivated Hopkins unfolded through a series of Lloyd’s telegrams printed in The Times under the heading “Loss of the Deutschland” (8 December 1975, 5e, and 11 December 1875, 7b). Norman Weyand has collected accounts of the wreck from The Times and other newspapers for December 1875 in “The Historical Basis of The Wreck of the Deutschland and The Loss of the Eurydice,” in Immortal Diamond: Studies in Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Norman Weyand (London: Sheed & Ward, 1949), 353–92. 24. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” in The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Norman H. Mackenzie (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 125.85–88. 25. Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 42. 26. Gerard Manley Hopkins to Catherine Hopkins, 24 December 1875, in Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Including His Correspondence with Coventry Patmore, ed. C. C. Abbott, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 135. 27. Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, 21 May 1878, in The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 52. 28. See the account of Captain John Wordsworth’s death given by E. L. McAdam, Jr., in “Wordsworth’s Shipwreck,” PMLA 77 (1962): 240–47.

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29. These estimates are taken from the anonymous article “Shipwrecks” in All the Year Round 3rd ser. 65 (1860): 342–46; and Andrew Wynter (unsigned), “Shipwrecks,” Quarterly Review 104 (1858): 170–200. A useful reference on this topic is Charles Hocking’s Dictionary of Disasters at Sea during the Age of Steam, 1824–1962, 2 vols. (London: Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, 1969). 30. “Shipping and Shipwrecks,” The Monthly Review 2 (1838): 132. 31. R. H. Thornton, British Shipping (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 64. Additional information can be found in the following histories of British shipping: Andrew Porter, Victorian Shipping, Business and Imperial Policy: Donald Currie, the Castle Line and Southern Africa (Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1986); Ronald Hope, A New History of British Shipping (London: John Murray, 1990); and J. Forbes Munro, Maritime Enterprise and Empire: Sir William Mackinnon and his Business Network, 1823–93 (Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2003). 32. Report from the Select Committee Appointed to Inquire into the Cause of Shipwrecks, Parliamentary Papers 567 (London, 1836), 373. 33. James Ballingall, Shipwrecks: Their Causes, and the Means of Prevention (Melbourne: William Fairfax & Co., 1857), 11. 34. John Ramsay McCulloch (unsigned), “On the Frequency of Shipwrecks,” The Edinburgh Review 60 (1835): 339. 35. T. Wemyss Reid (unsigned), “Modern Newspaper Enterprise,” Fraser’s Magazine 93 (1876): 708. 36. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, ed. Ronald Blythe (New York: Penguin, 1985), 345. 37. Keith Huntress’s anthology Narratives of Shipwrecks and Disasters, 1586–1860 gathers many of the best-selling “voyages,” as shipwreck narratives were familiarly known, including those of Richard Hakluyt, James Cook, and Basil Hall (Ames: Iowa State Press, 1974). Margarette Lincoln discusses the historical significance of these tales in “Shipwreck Narratives of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century: Indicators of Culture and Identity,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 20 (1997): 155–72. 38. Stoker based the shipwreck in Dracula on a Whitby Gazette article describing the wreck of the Dmitry (renamed the Demeter by Stoker), a Russian schooner run aground the Whitby sands on 24 October 1885 (“Severe Gale at Whitby. Two Vessels Wrecked,” Whitby Gazette, 31 October 1885, 4b). Jennifer Wicke discusses the thematic importance of the press to Stoker’s novel in “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media,” ELH 59 (1992): 467–93. 39. Bram Stoker, Dracula: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Reviews and Reactions, Dramatic and Film Variations, Criticism, ed. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal, 1st ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 85. 40. Jane Austen, Persuasion: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, and Contexts Criticism, ed. Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks, 1st ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 44. 41. Ibid., 44. 42. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 6. 43. Benedict Anderson, “Responses,” in Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson, ed. Pheng Cheah and Jonathan Culler (New York: Routledge, 2003), 228. 44. Jonathan Culler elaborates on Anderson’s distinction between novels and newspapers, few of which in nineteenth-century Britain could

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claim anything close to a genuinely national readership. According to Anderson’s account of print capitalism, both types of narrative are a formal precondition for imagining the nation, although Anderson’s idea has often been mistakenly understood to suggest that thematic representations of nationhood legitimate a particular idea of the nation (“Anderson and the Novel,” Diacritics 29 [1999]: 20–39; reprinted in Grounds of Comparison, 29–52). 45. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998), 22. 46. Elizabeth Gaskell, Sylvia’s Lovers, ed. Shirley Foster (London: Penguin, 1996), 23; hereafter cited in text. 47. Charlotte Yonge, The Heir of Redclyffe (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1964), 249. 48. See Jay Caplan’s discussion of tears as a form of community in Framed Narratives: Diderot’s Genealogy of the Beholder (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). 49. William J. Palmer discusses the allegorical import of shipwreck imagery in seven of Dickens’s novels in “Dickens and Shipwreck,” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 18 (1989): 39–92. 50. Thomas James Wise and John Alexander Symington, eds., The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence, 4 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1932), 4:56. Brontë wrote to George Smith on 26 March 1853: With regard to that momentous point—M. Paul’s fate—in case any one in future should request to be enlightened thereon— they may be told that it was designed that every reader should settle the catastrophe for himself, according to the quality of his disposition, the tender or remorseless impulse of his nature. Drowning and Matrimony are the fearful alternatives. (55–56) Gaskell recounts Brontë’s refusal to substitute a happy ending for Paul Emanuel’s death at sea in The Life of Charlotte Brontë (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 414. 51. Charlotte Brontë, Villette, ed. Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 617. 52. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 130. Michael Freeman documents the cultural impact of rail technology in Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 53. “Every Body’s Column,” Illustrated London News, 15 July 1843, 46c. 54. This figure is cited by the discussion of railway mismanagement in response to the Midland Railway crash in Hornsey, in The Times, 15 September 1851, 4d. 55. The Times, 10 January 1861, 6f. 56. “The Railway Calamity,” The Saturday Review (1868): 281. 57. Quoted in Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 963. A number of contemporary cases are described in “The Influence of Railway Travelling on Public Health: Report of the Commission,” The Lancet (8 February 1862): 155–58. Jill Matus recounts Dickens’s accident in “Trauma, Memory, and Railway Disaster: The Dickensian Connection,” Victorian Studies 43 (2001): 413–36. 58. See Ralph Harrington’s work on traumatic experience in nineteenth-century medical discourse, particularly “On the Tracks of Trauma: Railway Spine Reconsidered,” The Journal of the Society for the

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Social History of Medicine 16 (2003): 209–23; and “The Railway Accident: Trains, Trauma, and Technological Crises in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 31–56. 59. John Eric Erichsen, On Concussion of the Spine, Nervous Shock, and Other Obscure Injuries of the Nervous System, in Their Medical and Medico-Legal Aspects (London: Longmans, Green, 1875), 196. This passage is quoted in Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 143. Peter Sinnema documents how early issues of the Illustrated London News diminished the potential trauma of railway accidents through distanced, sanitized, and even celebratory illustrations (Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News [Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998], 116). 60. Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 23. 61. Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (London: David Campbell Publishers, 1994), 544; hereafter cited in text. 62. Margaret Cohen adapts Benedict Anderson’s idea of the imagined community to the discourse of sentimental fiction in “Sentimental Communities,” in The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel, ed. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 106. 63. On the relationship between sympathy and representation, see David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and Audrey Jaffe, Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 64. See Timothy Peltason on desire and selflessness in “Esther’s Will,” ELH 59 (1992): 671–91, reprinted in Jeremy Tambling, ed., Bleak House (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 205–27. 65. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1967), 219. 66. Wilkie Collins, Armadale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 701. 67. Comte de Lautréamont [Isidore Ducasse], Maldoror & the Complete Works of the Comte De Laturéamont, trans. Alexis Lykiard (Cambridge, Mass.: Exact Change, 1994), 95. 68. E. P. Davies, The Reporter’s Hand-Book and Vade Mecum (London: F. Pitman, 1884), 76–77.

Chapter 2 1. Bret Harte, “No Title,” in Sensation Novels Condensed (London: J. C. Hotten, [1871]), 198. 2. “Prospectus of a New Journal,” Punch 44 (1863): 193. 3. Harte, “No Title,” 198–99. 4. See D. A. Miller’s account of how Anne’s touch initiates the physiological experience of the sensation novel (The Novel and the Police [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], 146–91). For more on the role played by the senses in sensation fiction, see Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 34–55. 5. Henry Mansel (unsigned), “Sensation Novels,” Quarterly Review 113 (1863): 501. 6. Ibid., 502.

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Notes to Pages 38–48

7. E. S. Dallas (unsigned), “Lady Audley’s Secret,” The Times, 18 November 1862, 4c. 8. John Richard de Capel Wise (unsigned), “Belles Lettres,” Westminster Review 86 (1866): 270; William Fraser Rae (unsigned), “Sensation Novels: Miss Braddon,” North British Review, new ser., 4 (1865): 204. Contemporary responses to the sensation novel have been reprinted in Sensationalism and the Sensation Debate, the fi rst volume of the series Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction, 1855–1890, ed. Andrew Maunder, 6 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004). 9. “Women’s Novels,” The Broadway, new ser., 1 (1868): 508. 10. “Sensation Novels,” The Medical Critic and Psychological Journal 3 (1863): 514. 11. Richard Altick, Deadly Encounters: Two Victorian Sensations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 145. 12. Patrick Brantlinger notes that many novelists accused of sensationalism were merely making fiction out of the contents of the daily papers, in “What Is ‘Sensational’ about the ‘Sensation Novel’?” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37 (1982): 1–28. 13. Collins describes stumbling upon the idea for the encounter between Walter Hartright and Anne Catherick in “How I Write My Books: Related in a Letter to a Friend,” The Globe, 26 November 1887, 6a. Reade refers to The Times as a literary source in a letter to the editor entitled “Facts Must Be Faced,” The Times, 31 August 1871, 4f. John Coleman recalls Reade’s interest in using news items for fictional plots in Charles Reade as I Knew Him (London: Treherne & Company, 1903), 263. 14. John Sutherland, “Wilkie Collins and the Origins of the Sensation Novel,” in Wilkie Collins to the Forefront: Some Reassessments, ed. Nelson Smith and R. C. Terry (New York: AMS Press, 1995), 78. 15. Many notable contemporary news reports are documented by Thomas Boyle’s Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism (New York: Viking, 1989). Dallas Liddle compares newspaper coverage of Reverend Benjamin Speke’s disappearance in 1868 with the period’s fiction in “Anatomy of a ‘Nine Days’ Wonder’: Sensational Journalism in the Decade of the Sensation Novel,” in Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation, ed. Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 89–103. 16. Henry James, “Miss Braddon,” The Nation (1865): 594. 17. Wilkie Collins, No Name, ed. Mark Ford (London: Penguin, 2004), 251. 18. Quoted in Philip Howard, We Thundered Out: 200 Years of the Times 1785–1985 (Maplewood, N.J.: Hammond, 1985), 86. The Times replaced advertisements with headlines on the front page in 1966. For a contemporary’s account of the newspaper’s first column, see J. Holt Schooling, “Hatches, Matches, and Despatches,” The Pall Mall Magazine 10 (1896): 180–88. 19. H. W. Massingham, The London Daily Press (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1892), 92. 20. The Universal Daily Register, 1 January 1785, 4a. 21. “Advertisements of the Times,” Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, new ser., 3 (1845): 201. 22. These figures are taken from Emily Symonds’s “The Advance of Advertisement,” Cornhill Magazine, new ser., 25 (1895): 512. For more on the development of advertising, see T. R. Nevett’s Advertising in Britain: A History (London: Heinemann, 1982). 23. Alexander Innes Shand (unsigned), “Contemporary Literature. VIII. Newspaper Offices,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 126 (1879): 490, 488.

Notes to Pages 48–51

179

For more on advertising in the nineteenth century, see Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 24. William Smith, Advertise. How? When? Where? (London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1863), 127. 25. Stephen Winkworth describes Queen Victoria as a devotee of the personal advertisements in Room Two More Guns: The Intriguing History of the Personal Column of The Times (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1986), 7. A survey commissioned by The Times in the 1980s to determine the actual reading practices of its audience confi rmed the enduring popularity of the personal advertisements (“The Agony Column: An Essential Keyhole on Life,” The Times, 4 October 1985, 8c). 26. Selections from the Victorian agony column can be found in Alice Clay’s anthology, The Agony Column of the “Times” 1800–1870 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1881). For more on the twentieth-century version of this column, see Robin Kent’s Aunt Agony Advises: Problem Pages through the Ages (London: W. H. Allen, 1979); and Margaret Beetham’s “The Agony Aunt, the Romancing Uncle and the Family of Empire: Defining the Sixpenny Reading Public in the 1890s,” in Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, ed. Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 253–70. 27. The Times, 20 October 1865, 1b. 28. “ ‘The Times’ Agony Column,” The Times, 25 June 1914, 4a. 29. “The Agony Column,” All the Year Round, new ser., 43 (1888): 275; “Our Wants,” Punch 3 (1842): 140. 30. “New News of the Old.—II,” Once a Week 12 (1873): 447. Agonystyle advertisements appeared as early as 16 January 1740 in the Daily Post, according to S. Rolt, “Agony Columns,” Notes and Queries 4th ser. 10 (1872): 449. The Times uses the term to describe its second column as early as 1868, although the term was in popular use well before then (“Our Second Column,” The Times, 7 December 1868, 6d). See the section “Agony Column” in Howard, We Thundered Out, 130. Earl Derr Biggers wrote a novel titled The Agony Column (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1916), and Ernest H. Rann recalls the chorus of an Edwardian music-hall song about the agony column sung by Charles Du-Val, in “Reading ‘The Times,’ ” Letter to the Editor, The Times, 9 November 1937, 17f. 31. Abraham Hayward (unsigned), “The Advertising System,” Edinburgh Review 77 (1843): 35. 32. “Our Wants,” 140. 33. “Advertisements,” The Spectator 15 (1842): 1045. For a contrast to the highly suggestive messages found among the advertisements, see Roland Barthes’s description of the miscellaneous news items found among the French press in “Structure of the Fait-Divers,” in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 185–96. 34. The Times, 15 July 1850, 1b. This advertisement is reprinted on 18, 22, and 25 July 1850. 35. The Times, 26 November 1850, 1c. 36. Charles Reade, Hard Cash: A Matter-of-Fact Romance (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927), 472. Reade preserved advertisements from various newspapers under the heading “The Practical Advertiser” in the notebooks held in Princeton University Library’s Parrish Collection.

180

Notes to Pages 51–53

37. Reade, Hard Cash, 471. 38. Joseph J. Belcher, “Newspaper Advertisements,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 33 (1866): 783. 39. Andrew Wynter (unsigned), “Advertisements,” Quarterly Review 97 (1855): 214. 40. Andrew Wynter, “The ‘Times’ Advertising Sheet,” in Our Social Bees; or, Pictures of Town & Country Life, and Other Papers, 9th ed. (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1867), 329. 41. Ella J. Curtis (unsigned), “The Essence of Agony,” The Dublin University Magazine 88 (1876): 762. 42. Williams describes the “knowable community” in The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), 16; Anderson uses the phrase “community in anonymity” in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 36. 43. “Punch’s Agony Column,” Punch 68 (1875): 86. Punch capitalized on public interest in the advertisements by promising to explain their mysteries in features such as “A Cry from the ‘Agony Column,’ and the Interpretation Thereof,” Punch 74 (1878): 85. 44. “Advertisements of the Times,” 199. 45. The Times, 4 April 1859, 1b. 46. Ouida [Marie Louise de la Ramée], Under Two Flags: A Story of the Household and the Desert, 3 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1867), 1:166. 47. “Divorce Case—Walker v. Walker,” The Scotsman, 14 July 1870, 5. 48. The Times, 2 January 1854, 1d. 49. “Cipher in Agonies,” Truth 1 (1877): 281. See Winkworth’s chapters “The One-Winged Dove Must Die” and “The Collinson Cryptograms” on the elaborate codes found in personal advertisements (Winkworth, Room Two More Guns, 78–125). 50. H. G. Cocks, “Peril in the Personals: The Dangers and Pleasures of Classified Advertising in Early Twentieth-Century Britain,” Media History 10 (2004): 3–16. 51. James Curtis, The Mysterious Murder of Maria Marten, in Suffolk (London: Thomas Kelly, 1828; reprint, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928), 255. 52. John Walter, “To the Public,” The Daily Universal Register, 1 January 1785, 2a. 53. “Execution of William Corder,” The Scotsman, 16 August 1828, 3. 54. Douglas Jerrold, Wives by Advertisement: Or, Courting in the Newspapers (London: J. Duncombe & Co., 1828), 4–5. 55. Interest never waned when it came to reading about the risks involved in meeting a spouse through the advertisements. This was a favorite topic for fictional tales such as “Matrimonial Advertisements,” Bentley’s Miscellany 63 (1868): 491–502; and “Matrimony by Advertisement,” Chambers’s Journal 4th ser. 7 (1870): 753–56 in subsequent decades. 56. “The Agony Column,” 275. 57. The Times, 2 December 1864, 1b. 58. Arthur MacDonald, Girls Who Answer Personals: A Sociologic and Scientific Study of Young Women, Including Letters of American and European Girls in Answer to Personal Advertisements, with a Bibliography (Washington, D.C: n.p., 1897), xv. 59. G. Stanley Ellis, “ ‘Agony’ Advertisements,” Good Words 41 (1900): 828; Robert Smith Surtees, “Plain or Ringlets?” (London: Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., 1860), 162.

Notes to Pages 54–65

181

60. Alfred Austin (unsigned), “Our Novels: The Sensational School,” Temple Bar 29 (June 1870): 417. 61. The Yelverton trial and other prominent divorces are described in Jeanne Fahnestock, “Bigamy: The Rise and Fall of a Convention,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 36 (1981): 47–71; and Anne Humpherys, “Coming Apart: The British Newspaper Press and the Divorce Court,” in Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, ed. Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 220–31. Mrs. Yelverton’s advertisement appeared in The Times, 4 August 1864, 1b. Barbara Leckie discusses the relevance of divorce court journalism to the novel in Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law, 1857–1914 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 62. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, ed. David Skilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 222; hereafter cited in text. For recent work on Braddon and other sensation novelists, see Marlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Aeron Haynie, eds., Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); and Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre, ed. Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006). 63. Quoted in Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 121. 64. Annie Thomas, The Cross of Honor (New York: Follett, Foster & Co., 1864), 269. 65. William Thomas Stead, “The London Morning Dailies That Are and Are to Be,” Review of Reviews 4 (1891): 413. 66. Rhoda Broughton, Belinda (London: Virago, 1984), 410. 67. Jennifer Carnell and Graham Law have documented the serial publication of Braddon’s fiction in American, Australian, and British newspapers through syndicates headed by W. F. Tillotson and W. C. Leng in “ ‘Our Author’: Braddon in the Provincial Weeklies,” in Tromp, Gilbert, and Haynie, Beyond Sensation, 127–63. 68. Belcher, “Newspaper Advertisements,” 786. 69. The Times, 13 May 1861, 1b. 70. Sharon Marcus, “The Profession of the Author: Abstraction, Advertising, and Jane Eyre,” PMLA 110 (1995): 209. 71. Servants were among the most vulnerable since they lacked the resources to recover from fraudulent advertising schemes. The advertising costs borne by servants had long been a grievance among unstamped newspapers including the Poor Man’s Guardian, which complained in an editorial, “Why should an unfortunate servant or needy governess be obliged to part with, perhaps, her last half sovereign—for the insertion of an advertisement, which an unstamped New York paper would publish for a sixth part of the sum?” (“Prosecution and Imprisonment of Mr. Hetherington,” Poor Man’s Guardian, 12 January 1833, 2a). 72. Wilkie Collins, Armadale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 168. For more on the sources for the novel’s criminal characters, see Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 147–58. 73. Collins, Armadale, 345. 74. Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 147–63.

182

Notes to Pages 65–71

75. Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 120. 76. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 12. 77. Thomas Hardy considered placing an advertisement in the Australian newspapers to locate a missing friend in the fi nal months of his life. Florence Emily Hardy recalls the conversation in The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1928 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1962), 443. 78. “ ‘The Times’ Agony Column,” The Times, 25 June 1914, 4a. 79. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, John Marchmont’s Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 237. 80. The Times, 21 September 1859, 1b. 81. Collins, No Name, 151; Collins, Armadale, 76. 82. Mortimer Collins, “Mrs. Harris,” Belgravia: A London Magazine (December 1870): 158. 83. Robert Lee Wolff provides the complete background to the marriage in Sensational Victorian: The Life & Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1979), 104–8. The most recent biography is Jennifer Carnell’s The Literary Lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon: A Study of Her Life and Work (Hastings: Sensation Press, 2000). 84. For example, see “Miss Braddon as a Bigamist,” New York Times, 22 November 1874, 1a. 85. E. B. Leonard, “Pigeon Voyagers,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 46 (1872–73): 659–68. 86. Alice Clay, The Agony Column, v–xvi. 87. “The ‘Agony’ Column,” The Times, 1 January 1935, 24e.

Chapter 3 1. Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn: The Irish Member, ed. Jacques Berthoud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 2.73; hereafter cited in text. 2. See Henry James’s “Anthony Trollope” published in the Century Magazine a year after Trollope’s death (new ser., 4 [July 1883]: 385–95) and reprinted in The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Roger Gard (New York: Penguin, 1987), 174–80. 3. “Everybody’s Column,” Illustrated London News, 24 May 1845, 334a. 4. See Raymond Williams’s refutation of the standard history of the Education Act of 1870 in The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 173–213. Accounts of the New Journalism include Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s to 1914, ed. Joel H. Wiener (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988); John Stokes, In the Nineties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); and Kate Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880–1910: Culture and Profit (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). 5. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993). Peter D. McDonald discusses the relevance of Bourdieu’s work to the literary marketplace in British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 6. Graham Hope, “Women in Journalism,” The Woman Journalist 21 (1914): 2b. 7. Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard, ed. Alexander Dru (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 481.

Notes to Pages 72–85

183

8. George Henry Lewes (unsigned), “Farewell Causerie,” Fortnightly Review 6 (1866): 890. 9. The Times, 19 July 1844, 6a. 10. Hugh Gilzean Reid, “The Press,” in The Civilisation of Our Day: A Series of Original Essays on Some of Its More Important Phases at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, ed. James Samuelson (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1896), 276. 11. The connotations associated with the term “journalism” at this time are discussed in Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, 1875–1914 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989), 293; and Mark Hampton, “Defi ning Journalists in Late-Nineteenth Century Britain,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22 (2005): 138–55. 12. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: A. Wilson, 1812), 361. Compare this entry with that for “news-monger”: “One that deals in news” (429). The following provide accounts of the journalist in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Arthur Aspinall, “The Social Status of Journalists at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century,” The Review of English Studies 21 (1945): 216–32; Lenore O’Boyle, “The Image of the Journalist in France, Germany, and England, 1815–1848,” Comparative Studies in Society and History: An International Quarterly 10 (1967): 290–317; Philip Elliott, “Professional Ideology and Organisational Change: The Journalist Since 1800,” in Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, ed. George Boyce, James Curran, and Pauline Wingate (London: Constable; Beverly Hills: Sage, 1978), 172–91; and Michael Harris, “Journalism as a Profession or Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” in Author/Publisher Relations During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1983), 37–62. 13. Max Weber, “Political Journalists,” in Media Occupations and Professions: A Reader, ed. Jeremy Tunstall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 25. 14. Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister, ed. Jennifer Uglow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2.152. 15. John Stuart Mill, The Early Letters of John Stuart Mill 1812–1848, vol. 12, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 33 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 38. 16. C. Williams, Modern Idolatry—or—Editors and Idols (London: W. N. Jones, 1814). 17. Samuel Johnson, “Scheme for News-Writers,” in The Idler and the Adventurer, vol. 2, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. John M. Bullitt, W. J. Bate, and L. F. Powell, 18 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 94. 18. Leigh Hunt, Leigh Hunt’s “Rules for Newspaper Editors”: Wisdom for the Wicked (London: Ingpen & Grant, 1930), 3. 19. Jones documents how journalism became a profession in Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England (Hants: Scolar Press, 1996), 122. 20. See Anthony Michael Carr-Saunders and Paul Alexander Wilson, “Journalists,” in The Professions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933), reprinted in Media Occupations and Professions, 37–41; and Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London: Routledge, 2002). 21. William Makepeace Thackeray, The Adventures of Philip (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908), 61; George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), 346. For more on Thackeray’s journalists

184

Notes to Pages 85–88

including Pendennis, Gobemouche, Molony, Hadjee Aboo Bosh, and the Fat Contributor, see Richard Pearson, W. M. Thackeray and the Mediated Text: Writing for the Periodicals in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 152–76. 22. Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right, ed. John Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 62. 23. See Dallas Liddle’s “Who Invented the ‘Leading Article’?: Reconstructing the History and Prehistory of a Victorian Newspaper Genre,” Media History 5 (1999): 5–18. 24. Thomas Gibson Bowles, “Newspapers,” Fortnightly Review 36 (1884): 26. 25. Anthony Trollope, The New Zealander, ed. N. John Hall (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 46. 26. Anthony Trollope, The Three Clerks (London: Penguin, 1993), 559. 27. Liddle provides an overview to the debates over press anonymity in “Salesmen, Sportsmen, Mentors: Anonymity and Mid-Victorian Theories of Journalism,” Victorian Studies 41 (1997): 31–68. This article characterizes Trollope’s own position toward the anonymity debates as “fence– sitting” (33). 28. Thomas Barnes to Benjamin Disraeli, 1 March 1836, quoted in Derek Hudson, Thomas Barnes of the Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943), 95. 29. See Joel H. Wiener on the rise of the Grub Street printer into one of the era’s most influential professions (Innovators and Preachers: The Role of the Editor in Victorian England, ed. Joel H. Wiener [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985]). 30. Anthony Trollope, An Editor’s Tales (London: Strahan & Co., 1870), 147. On Trollope’s relationship to the periodical press, see Mark Turner, Trollope and the Magazines: Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). 31. Anthony Trollope, “On Anonymous Literature,” Fortnightly Review 1 (1 July 1865): 491. 32. Ibid., 493. Trollope repeats his position toward signature in An Autobiography, ed. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 191–94. 33. Anthony Trollope, The Warden, ed. David Skilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 179; hereafter cited in text. John Sutherland documents the novel’s sources in “Trollope, the Times, and The Warden,” in Victorian Journalism: Exotic and Domestic, ed. Barbara Garlick and Margaret Harris (Queensland: Queensland University Press, 1998), 62–74. 34. Henry James, Partial Portraits (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), 113. 35. Margaret Oliphant, “Anthony Trollope,” in Trollope: Interviews and Recollections, ed. R. C. Terry (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 103. 36. John Hagan, “The Divided Mind of Anthony Trollope,” NineteenthCentury Fiction 14 (1959–60): 1–26; Ruth apRoberts, Trollope: Artist and Moralist (London: Chatto & Windus, 1971), 46; and D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 131. 37. J. Hillis Miller, Victorian Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 266. 38. Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds, ed. Stephen Gill and John Sutherland, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 2004), 265.

Notes to Pages 88–94

185

39. Albert Schweitzer, The Animal World of Albert Schweitzer: Jungle Insights into Reverence for Life, ed. and trans. Charles R. Joy (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1958), 190. 40. Trollope, An Autobiography, 317. 41. George Butte examines Trollope’s attitude toward political orators of the day in “Trollope’s Duke of Omnium and the ‘Pain of History’: A Study of the Novelist’s Politics,” Victorian Studies 24 (1981): 209–27. 42. Charles Buxton, The Ideas of the Day on Policy, 3rd ed. (London: John Murray, 1868), 2. 43. For example, see the comments about the misleading nature of editorial opinion in John Chapman (unsigned), “The London Daily Press,” Westminster Review, new ser., 8 (October 1855): 494–95. 44. Pierre Bourdieu, On Television and Journalism, trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (London: Pluto Press, 1996), 46. 45. Anthony Trollope, Phineas Redux, ed. John C. Whale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1.202. 46. Trollope, The New Zealander, 106. For more on the press as a fourth estate, see Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 106–29. 47. Trollope, Phineas Redux, 1.240–41. 48. Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” in De Profundis and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 1973), 40. 49. Trollope, The Prime Minister, 1.344. 50. Trollope, Phineas Redux, 1.197. 51. See Lucy Brown on the declining space given by the press to Parliamentary debates from the mid-century (Victorian News and Newspapers [Oxford: Clarendon, 1985], 149). This trend would culminate in one evening newspaper’s controversial declaration: “We believe that the reader of the daily journal longs for other reading than mere politics” (“Our Confession of Faith,” The Star, 17 January 1888, 6f). 52. Anthony Trollope, The Duke’s Children, ed. Hermione Lee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 113. 53. The interest in personality at this time is best described by T. P. O’Connor’s “The New Journalism,” The New Review 1 (1889): 423–34. For more on the personal relationship cultivated by the press with readers at this time, see Richard Salmon’s “ ‘A Simulacrum of Power’: Intimacy and Abstraction in the Rhetoric of the New Journalism,” in NineteenthCentury Media and the Construction of Identities, ed. Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 27–39. 54. Trollope, The New Zealander, 43. Max Pemberton later credited the success of the Daily Mail to its adherence to the following principle: “The morning newspaper which does not reach the breakfast table is born dead” (Lord Northcliffe: A Memoir [London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922], 75). 55. Arthur Waugh, “The Tyranny of the Paragraph,” The National Review 20 (1893): 745. 56. Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds, 131. 57. Trollope, The Prime Minister, 2.243. William Newman’s “The Politician” appeared in Punch 2 (1842): 74. 58. Trollope, Phineas Redux, 1.250. 59. Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, trans. Herbert J. Hunt (London: Penguin, 1971), 338. 60. See Courtney C. Berger’s discussion of Palliser’s impersonal politics in “Partying with the Opposition: Social Politics in The Prime Minister,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 45 (2003): 315–36.

186

Notes to Pages 95–103

61. Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? ed. Andrew Swarbrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1.228. 62. Trollope, The Prime Minister, 2.5; hereafter cited in text. 63. The most influential version of this argument remains Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 64. The Times, 19 January 1843, 4a. 65. The invocation of Hegel in these terms can be found in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), 35. 66. James Fitzjames Stephen (unsigned), “Journalism,” Cornhill Magazine 6 (1862): 55. 67. John Boyd Kinnear, “Anonymous Journalism,” The Contemporary Review 5 (1867): 331. 68. Joseph Pulitzer, “The College of Journalism,” North American Review 178 (1904): 659. 69. William Makepeace Thackeray, The Adventures of Philip (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908), 281.

Chapter 4 1. Henry James, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 86. 2. Ibid., 19. 3. Henry James, The Bostonians (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 116. 4. Ibid., 131. 5. Stephen Stapleton, “Society Journalism,” The Monthly Review 21 (1905): 102. 6. There have been numerous studies of James and newspaper journalism since Abigail Ann Hamblen’s “Henry James and the Press: A Study of Protest,” The Western Humanities Review 11 (1957): 169–75. Recent studies not mentioned elsewhere in this chapter include Allan Burns, “Henry James’s Journalists as Synechdoche for the American Scene,” Henry James Review 16 (1995): 1–17; Marc DaRosa, “Henry James, Anonymity, and the Press: Journalistic Modernity and the Decline of the Author,” Modern Fiction Studies 43 (1997): 826–59; and Michael Reid, “The Repressing of the Journalistic in The Wings of the Dove,” Henry James Review 19 (1998): 239–44. 7. See Brook Thomas, “The Construction of Privacy in and around The Bostonians,” American Literature 64 (1992): 719–47; and Richard Salmon, Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 8. Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet with the Dictionary of Received Ideas, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin, 1976), 297. 9. James, The Portrait of a Lady: An Authoritative Text, Henry James and the Novel, Reviews and Criticism, ed. Robert D. Bamberg (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), 82. 10. Ibid., 84. 11. James, The Bostonians, 97. 12. For one of the most controversial accounts of the confessional aspects of journalism, see Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer (New York: Vintage, 1990). 13. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1977), 262.

Notes to Pages 103–111

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14. Jaber Gubrium and James Holstein, “From the Individual to the Interview Society,” in Handbook of Interview Research: Context & Method (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2002), 3. 15. Nils Gunnar Nilsson, “The Origin of the Interview,” Journalism Quarterly 48 (1971): 708. 16. Michael Schudson, “Question Authority: A History of the News Interview,” in The Power of News (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 74. 17. Horace Townsend’s distinction appears in “Interviewing as a Factor in Journalism,” North American Review 148 (1889): 522–23. 18. Julian Ralph, The Making of a Journalist (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1903), 40. 19. References to the interview as an American “invention” and to the “Americanisation” of the British press were common in writing about nineteenth-century journalism, as in J. R. Dennett’s “Interviewing,” The Nation 8 (1869): 66–67; and W. T. Stead’s The Americanization of the World (New York: Horace Markley, 1902). 20. Alfred Arthur Reade, Literary Success: Being a Guide to Practical Journalism (London: Wyman & Sons, 1885), 72. 21. “Interviews and Interviewing,” All the Year Round 3rd ser. 8 (1892): 423. 22. See the detailed account of Stead’s interviews given by Raymond L. Schults’s Crusader in Babylon: W. T. Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 61–87. Lucy Brown documents the interview’s earliest use in England in Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 160–66. 23. “Interviews and Interviewing,” 422. 24. “American Journalism II.—Interviewers,” The Journalist, 7 January 1887, 12a. 25. “Interviewing the Queen,” New York World, 17 June 1883, 1g. 26. John B. Mackie, Modern Journalism: A Handbook of Instruction and Counsel for the Young Journalist (London: Crosby Lockwood and Son, 1894), 58. 27. Alexander Innes Shand (unsigned), “Contemporary Literature. II. Journalists and Magazine-Writers,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 125 (1879): 78. 28. Arnold Bennett, How to Write for the Press: A Practical Handbook for Beginners in Journalism (London: Horace Cox, 1899), 55. 29. Shand, “Contemporary Literature,” 78. 30. John B. Lane, “Confessions of an Interviewer,” Pall Mall Magazine 2.7 (1893): 307. 31. Julian Hawthorne (unsigned), “Lowell in a Chatty Mood,” New York World, 24 October 1886, 9a. George Knox describes the press coverage of this incident in “The Hawthorne-Lowell Affair,” New England Quarterly 29 (1956): 493–502. 32. James Russell Lowell, quoted in “A Card from Mr. Lowell,” New York World, 27 October 1886, 4e. 33. “The Lowell Interview,” New York World, 28 October 1886, 4c. 34. Lowell, quoted in “Another Card from Mr. Lowell,” New York World, 1 November 1886, 5b. 35. James, The Complete Notebooks, 41. 36. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Biographical Illusion,” in Identity: A Reader, ed. Paul du Gay, Jessica Evans, and Peter Redman (London: Sage Publications, 2000), 297. 37. “Interviews and Interviewing,” 425.

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38. Quoted in Eliza Lynn Linton et al., “Are Interviewers a Blessing or a Curse?” The Idler 7 (1895): 491. 39. Rollo Ogden (unsigned), “The Interview as Literature,” The Nation 65 (1897): 124. 40. “The Interviewer’s Vade Mecum,” Punch 108 (1895): 112. The parodic interview was a regular feature in the magazine. For a representative example, see “An Ideal Interviewer,” Punch 98 (1890): 310. 41. See the accounts of the author profi le given by Daniel Borus, Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 118–29; and Salmon, Henry James and the Culture of Publicity, 106–10; and more broadly in Salmon, “Signs of Intimacy: The Literary Celebrity in the ‘Age of Interviewing,’ ” Victorian Literature and Culture 25 (1997): 159–77. 42. See Jonathan Freedman’s account of how rejecting the marketplace could itself be a highly marketable strategy at this time, in Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). 43. Florence Brooks, “Henry James in the Serene Sixties,” New York Herald, 2 October 1904 [magazine supplement], 1. 44. John Gross describes the growing interest in biographical information about authors at this time in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: A Study of the Idiosyncratic and the Humane in Modern Literature (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 200. James’s interviews include Florence Brooks’s “Henry James in the Serene Sixties”; Witter Bynner’s “A Word or Two with Henry James,” The Critic and Literary World 46 (1905): 146–48; and Preston Lockwood’s (misleadingly titled) “Henry James’s First Interview,” New York Times, 21 March 1915 [Magazine Section], 3–4. The Brooks and Lockwood interviews are reprinted in Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Scene, ed. Pierre A. Walker (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 35–41 and 138–45. More recently, Cynthia Ozick’s “An (Unfortunate) Interview with Henry James” has imagined what James’s fourth interview might have been like (The Threepenny Review 100 [2005]: n.p. Available: http://www.threepennyreview.com/ samples/ozick_w05.html [3 May 2006]). 45. Quoted in Robert Barr (unsigned), “A Chat with Conan Doyle,” The Idler 6 (1894): 340. 46. “The Literary Review,” The Bookman 21 (1905): 567. 47. Henry James, “John Delavoy,” in Complete Stories 1898–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1996), 3. 48. For more on James’s attitude toward biographical inquiry, see Gary Scharnhorst, “James, ‘The Aspern Papers,’ and the Ethics of Literary Biography,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 36 (1990): 211–17. 49. Henry James, “The Death of the Lion,” in Complete Stories 1892– 1898 (New York: Library of America, 1996), 360. 50. Quoted in Lockwood, “Henry James’s First Interview,” 3. 51. James, “The Death of the Lion,” 366. 52. James, The Complete Notebooks, 87. 53. J. Hillis Miller discusses the ethics of the narrator’s behavior in “History, Narrative and Responsibility: Speech Acts in Henry James’s ‘The Aspern Papers,’ ” Textual Practice 9 (1995): 243–67. 54. Henry James, “Preface,” in The Aspern Papers; the Turn of the Screw; the Liar; the Two Faces (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1971), ix. 55. For more on the origins of celebrity journalism during this period, see Charles L. Ponce de Leon’s Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism

Notes to Pages 117–120

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and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 56. Paul Atkinson and David Silverman, “Kundera’s Immortality: The Interview Society and the Invention of the Self,” Qualitative Inquiry 3 (1997): 319. 57. Barr, “A Chat with Conan Doyle,” 341; “Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 70 (1885): 971. 58. James, The Complete Notebooks, 41. 59. Henry James, The Reverberator (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 61; hereafter cited in text. 60. James, The Complete Notebooks, 41. 61. This is Daniel J. Boorstin’s classic formulation of the tautological nature of celebrity in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1964). Both Boorstin and Leo Braudy, in The Frenzy of Renown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), attribute the separation of achievement and acclaim to the mass media arising at the beginning of the twentieth century. 62. Rebecca B. Rubin and Michael P. McHugh document this behavior in “Development of Parasocial Interaction Relationships,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 31 (1987): 279–92. For a discussion of how social interaction with new media may be more widespread than many observers believe, see Byron Reeves and Clifford Naas, The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 63. Schudson, “Question Authority,” 75. 64. Quoted in Linton, “Are Interviewers a Blessing or a Curse?” 498. 65. Erving Goffman, Strategic Interaction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969), 13. 66. For more on wordless communication between James’s characters, see Sharon Cameron’s Thinking in Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 67. Thomas F. Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 55. 68. The model of the implied reader used here comes from Garrett Stewart’s idea of the “conscripted audience” encoded in the narrative through the rhetorical devices of interpolation (direct address) and extrapolation (scenes of reading). Stewart cites the following statement by Henry James in order to distinguish his analysis of the nineteenthcentury audience from the limited models offered by reader response and cultural studies: “In every novel the work is divided between the writer and the reader; but the writer makes the reader very much as he makes his characters” (quoted in Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996], 6). 69. See Jacques Derrida’s remarks on the reception appropriate to mediated interviews in “Artifactualities,” in Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity Press; Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 1–28. 70. Dodie Smith, Letter from Paris (London: William Heinemann, 1954), 77. 71. See Barbara Hochman’s discussion of how the widespread practice of “reading for the author” conflicted with the goal of impersonal narration espoused by James, Frank Norris, Edith Wharton, and others writing

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at the end of the nineteenth century (Getting at the Author: Reimagining Books and Reading in the Age of American Realism [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001]). 72. James, The Complete Notebooks, 86. 73. Atkinson and Silverman, “Kundera’s Immortality,” 305. 74. Lady Broome [Mary Anne Barker], “Interviews,” Cornhill Magazine, new ser., 10 (1901): 473. 75. See the accounts of changes to the press during this period given by Joel H. Wiener, ed., Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s to 1914 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988); John Stokes, In the Nineties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); and Kate Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880– 1910: Culture and Profit (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). 76. Matthew Arnold, “Up to Easter,” Nineteenth Century 21 (1887): 638. Paul Starr discusses the New Journalism in The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 233–66. 77. T. P. O’Connor, “The New Journalism,” The New Review 1 (1889): 423. 78. Stapleton, 111. 79. Edward Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 319. 80. Jeff Weintraub provides an overview of the four organizing frameworks used in discussions of “public” and “private” as well as key differences among the public spheres of Alexis de Tocqueville, Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Norbert Elias, Richard Sennett, and Philippe Ariès (“The Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction,” in Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy, ed. Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997], 1–42). 81. James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1873), 160. 82. For more on the legal history of the right to privacy in America, see Judith Wagner DeCew, In Pursuit of Privacy: Law, Ethics, and the Rise of Technology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). On the relevance of these arguments for British legislation, see Walter F. Pratt, Privacy in Britain (London: Associated University Presses, 1979). 83. Louis D. Brandeis and Samuel D. Warren, “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review 4 (1890): 196. 84. The Saturday Evening Gazette reported that “—Mrs. S[amuel] D[ennis] Warren, Jr., gave a dinner for twelve on Wednesday, at 151 Commonwealth Avenue” (“Out and About,” Saturday Evening Gazette, 22 March 1890, 3b). Alpheus Mason refers to this account as the “lurid details” motivating the defense of privacy (Brandeis: A Free Man’s Life [New York: Viking, 1946], 70). This account has since been disputed, as Lewis J. Paper notes in Brandeis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1983). 85. Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History, 1690–1960, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 44. 86. Thomas locates James’s fiction within the context of contemporary debates over privacy rights (“The Construction of Privacy in and around The Bostonians,” 719–47). See the recent approaches to the issue of privacy discussed in the collection Privacies: Philosophical Evaluations, ed. Beate Rössler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

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87. Edward Lawrence Godkin (unsigned), “The Right to Privacy,” The Nation 51 (1890): 497. 88. Edward Lawrence Godkin, “The Rights of the Citizen. IV.—To His Own Reputation,” Scribner’s Magazine 8 (1890): 65. 89. James, “The Papers,” in Complete Stories, 1898–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1996), 549; hereafter cited in text. 90. See, for example, David Howard’s “Henry James and ‘The Papers,’ ” in Henry James: Fiction as History, ed. Ian F. A. Bell (London: Vision Press; Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble Books, 1984), 49–64. 91. On the discursive power of celebrity, see P. David Marshall’s Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 92. See Barbara Onslow’s Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Macmillan, 2000). 93. The figure of the female journalist, including Henrietta Stackpole, is discussed in Jean Marie Lutes, Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 94–118; and Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 140–80. 94. See David Kramer’s account of the gendering of journalism in “Masculine Rivalry in The Bostonians: Henry James and the Rhetoric of ‘Newspaper Making,’ ” Henry James Review 19 (1998): 139–47. 95. Lauren Berlant discusses the genealogy of this term in “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 281–88. These essays were reprinted afterward in the essay collection Intimacy, ed. Lauren Berlant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 96. Witter Bynner, “A Word or Two with Henry James,” 147. 97. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 302. 98. Bynner, “A Word or Two with Henry James,” 148. For further details about the publication history of this interview, see Salmon, Henry James and the Culture of Publicity, 192–93. 99. See also Olga Antsyferova’s “Three Interviews of Henry James: Mastering the Language of Publicity,” Henry James Review 22 (2001): 81–92. 100. Quoted in Linton, “Are Interviewers a Blessing or a Curse?” 493.

Chapter 5 1. Quoted from Henry Stanley, “Dr. Livingstone,” New York Herald, 22 December 1871, 3a. As with much of Stanley’s narrative, the veracity of this version of events has been difficult to verify and called into question by subsequent historians. 2. James Gordon Bennett, Jr., gave the assignment to Stanley on 28 October 1869. The famous meeting took place on 10 November 1871, although the news did not reach Europe until 2 May 1872, the same year as the publication of Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone in England and America. Conrad was thirteen years old and living in Cracow, Poland, at the time of Livingstone’s discovery. For a complete account of Stanley’s correspondence from Africa, see Norman R. Bennett, ed., Stanley’s Despatches to the New York Herald, 1871–1872, 1874–1877 (Boston: Boston University Press, 1970). 3. Joseph Conrad, Last Essays (New York: Doubleday & Page, 1926), 14.

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4. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 323. 5. Joseph Conrad, Chance, ed. Martin Ray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 87. 6. See Michael Palmer’s discussion of Reuters news agency, “The British Press and International News, 1851–1899: Of Agencies and Newspapers,” in Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, ed. George Boyce, James Curran, and Pauline Wingate (London: Constable, 1978), 205–19. 7. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 65. Mitchell Stephens documents changes to the profession throughout the nineteenth century in A History of News: From the Drum to the Satellite (New York: Viking, 1988). 8. Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 210–28. Phillip Knightley documents the earliest war correspondents in The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq, rev. ed. (London: André Deutsch, 2003). For more on the relationship between the press and the British Empire, see Simon J. Potter’s News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial System 1876–1922 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003). 9. For more on Conrad’s relation to journalism, see Stephen Donovan’s Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and “Prosaic Newspaper Stunts: Conrad, Modernity and the Press,” in Conrad at the Millennium: Modernism, Postmodernism, Postcolonialism, ed. Gail Fincham (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 53–72. Studies of Conrad’s fiction in relation to journalism have tended to focus on The Secret Agent. See, for instance, Peter Nohrnberg’s “ ‘I Wish He’d Never Been to School’: Stevie, Newspapers and the Reader in The Secret Agent,” Conradiana 35 (2003): 49–61; and Peter Lancelot Mallios’s “Reading The Secret Agent Now: The Press, the Police, the Premonition of Simulation,” in Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2005), 155–72. 10. Joseph Conrad, letter to Abbé Joseph de Smet, 23 January 1911: “My fi rst English reading was the Standard newspaper” (in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, ed. Laurence Davies and Frederick R. Karl, 7 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], 4:409). 11. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 32. 12. W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998), 114. 13. Quoted in Norman Sherry, Conrad’s Western World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 5. 14. Quoted in Edward Garnett, Letters from Joseph Conrad 1895–1924 (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1928), 15. 15. V. S. Naipaul, “Conrad’s Darkness,” in The Return of Eva Peron, with the Killings in Trinidad (New York: Penguin, 1981), 226. 16. Joseph Conrad, Notes on Life and Letters (New York: Doubleday & Page, 1923), 141. 17. Ibid., 141, 90. 18. Ibid., 90. 19. J. H. Stape documents the marginal note in Joseph Conrad: Notes on Life and Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 268. This note was expurgated from the essay’s pamphlet proofs.

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20. Ernest Hemingway, “Voyage to Victory,” in By-Line: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades, ed. William White (London: Grafton Books, 1968), 363. 21. Standard, 31 January 1905, 5b. 22. Conrad, Notes on Life and Letters, 84. 23. Conrad, Chance, 4. 24. Ibid., 87. 25. See Peter Brooks on how the readable report disingenuously supplies narrative coherence to a situation characterized by contradiction and ambiguity (Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative [New York: A. A. Knopf, 1984], 242). 26. Conrad, Under Western Eyes (London: David Campbell, 1991), 137. 27. Ibid., 138. 28. Ibid., 141–42. 29. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (London: David Campbell, 1992), 245; hereafter cited in text. 30. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Continuum, 1973), 59. See V. A. C. Gatrell’s discussion of press coverage for executions during the nineteenth century, in The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 31. For more on Stanley’s life and accomplishments, see Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 32. Frederick Karl attributes much of Conrad’s interest in Africa to Stanley’s “celebrity status,” in Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives—A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979), 275; Andrea White identifies Conrad’s stays in England between 1891 and 1895 as likely times for him to have read discussions of imperial expansion in the papers (“Conrad and Imperialism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, ed. J. H. Stape [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 185). Gérard Jean-Aubry’s The Sea Dreamer: A Definitive Biography of Joseph Conrad (trans. Helen Sebba [Hamden: Archon Books, 1967], 154) and Zdzislaw Najder’s Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle (trans. Halina Carroll-Najder [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983], 117) propose that sensational news coverage of Stanley’s Emin Pasha Relief Expedition renewed Conrad’s interest in African travel. 33. Stanley is a familiar name in Conrad scholarship. Albert Guérard (Conrad the Novelist [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958], 34) and Molly Mahood (The Colonial Encounter: A Reading of Six Novels [London: Rex Collings, 1977], 4–36) propose Stanley as one model for Kurtz, as does Ian Watt, who points to the founding of the Congo Free State by Leopold and Stanley as a historical model for Conrad’s narrative (Conrad in the Nineteenth Century [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979], 145); Sherry sees Stanley as a model for the managing director in “An Outpost of Progress” (Norman Sherry, Conrad’s Western World [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971], 127); Eloise Knapp Hay suggests Stanley’s search for Livingstone may have been the basis for the Russian’s relationship with Kurtz (The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963], 112); Jacques Darras argues that Marlow’s quest for Kurtz tells in reverse order the story How I Found Livingstone (Joseph Conrad and the West: Signs of Empire, trans. Anne Luyat and Jacques Darras [Totowa: Barnes & Noble Books, 1982], 63–69); and Mary Golanka describes Marlow as a fictional version

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of Stanley (“Mr. Kurtz, I Presume? Livingstone and Stanley as Prototypes of Kurtz and Marlow,” Studies in the Novel 17 [1985]: 194–202). 34. For Livingstone’s life and history, see Tim Jeal, Livingstone (London: Heinemann, 1973); Meriel Buxton, David Livingston (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); and Andrew C. Ross, David Livingstone: Mission and Empire (London: Hambledon and London, 2002). The meeting between the two explorers is recounted in Claire Pettitt, Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?: Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers and Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). 35. Henry Stanley, How I Found Livingstone (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1890), 51. 36. For more on nineteenth-century exploration narratives, see Peter Knox-Shaw’s The Explorer in English Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987). 37. Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, 51. 38. See Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 180–88. 39. Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, 10. 40. Adam Hochschild describes the pattern of disillusionment experienced by Conrad and other visitors to the Congo in King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, updated ed. (Basingstoke: Pan Books, 2006), 140–49. Hochschild also discusses possible sources for Kurtz (144–46). 41. Conrad, Last Essays, 16. 42. Ibid. 43. See the visual images reproduced in David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 1996). 44. Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, 329, 331. 45. Ibid., lviii. The famed explorer’s death was memorialized by all the major newspapers, including more than three columns in the Herald. The arrival of Livingstone’s body at Southampton received a full-page engraving in the Illustrated London News. Stanley held an honored position as pallbearer at a commemorative ceremony in which Livingstone’s remains were installed in Westminster Abbey. See Norman R. Bennett (Stanley’s Despatches to the New York Herald), Jeal, and Ross (David Livingstone) on the press coverage of Livingstone’s death. 46. Conrad, Last Essays, 17. 47. A press statement for the joint Herald-Telegraph expedition (1874–77) announced Stanley as “the ambassador of two great powers, representing the journalism of England and America, and in command of an expedition more numerous and better appointed than any that has ever entered Africa” (quoted from Bennett, Stanley’s Despatches to the New York Herald, xxviii). 48. The phrase is taken from Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 132. Guérard and other commentators have pointed out that Livingstone, Pasha, and Kurtz had no intention of being rescued from Africa. For accounts of the Emin Pasha expedition, see Iain R. Smith, The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, 1886–1890 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977); and Tim Youngs, Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). 49. Quoted in Bennett, Stanley’s Despatches to the New York Herald, xxxvi.

Notes to Pages 147–150

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50. See Beau Riffenburgh’s discussion of the role of newspapers in creating explorer reputations in The Myth of the Explorer: The Press, Sensationalism, and Geographical Discovery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 5. 51. Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, 7. 52. Ibid., 334. 53. Ibid. 54. Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 145. 55. Conrad, letter to Henry-Durand Davray, 10 April 1902: “Histoire farouche d’un journaliste qui devient chef de station à l’intérieur et se fait adorer par une tribu de sauvages” (in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, 2:407). 56. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1988), 71; hereafter cited in text. 57. Frederick Greenwood, “The Newspaper Press. Half a Century’s Survey,” Blackwood’s Magazine 161 (1897): 719. 58. The phrase is taken from Ivan Kreilkamp’s “A Voice Without a Body: The Phonographic Logic of Heart of Darkness,” Victorian Studies 40 (1997): 211–43. A version of this article appears in Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 179–205. 59. Pierre Bourdieu, On Television and Journalism, trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (London: Pluto Press, 1996), 1. 60. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 88, 89. 61. Discussions of Conrad in the context of Benjamin’s essay can be found in Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 238–63; Kreilkamp, “A Voice Without a Body,” 212–14; Edward Said, “Conrad: The Presentation of Narrative,” Novel 7 (1974): 116–32; and Allon White, The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism (London: Routledge, 1981), 108–29. Brooks writes, “Kurtz is he who has already turned experience into Benjamin’s ‘wisdom,’ turned story into well-formed narrative plot, matter into pure voice, and who stands ready to narrate life’s story in significant form” (246–47). 62. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 69. 63. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 238. 64. Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, 344. 65. For example, see Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 169–83. 66. Conrad, “An Outpost of Progress,” 73. 67. Ibid. For more on the press in colonial territories, see the essays in Media and the British Empire, ed. Chandrika Kaul (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 68. These phrases are recorded in Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, 476. 69. Quoted in David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa, 35. 70. More on the contemporary responses to Stanley’s journalism can be found in Driver, who argues: “It was the campaign against Stanley’s ‘Congo atrocities’ in 1890 which marked the turning point in liberal England’s attitude towards Leopold’s state” (Geography Militant, 143). 71. The following sources discuss Conrad’s relationship with Casement: Jeffrey Meyers, “Conrad and Roger Casement,” Conradiana 5

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Notes to Pages 151–156

(1973): 64–69; Benjamin Reid, The Lives of Roger Casement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Hunt Hawkins, “Joseph Conrad, Roger Casement, and the Congo Reform Movement,” Journal of Modern Literature 9 (1981–82): 65–80; Jane Ford, “An African Encounter, A British Traitor and Heart of Darkness,” Conradiana 27 (1995): 123–34; Henryk S. Joseph Zins, “Conrad and the Early British Critics of Colonialism in the Congo,” Lubelskie Materialy Neofilologiczne 22 (1998): 155–69; Alan Simmons, “The Language of Atrocity: Representing the Congo of Conrad and Casement,” in Conrad in Africa: New Essays on Heart of Darkness, ed. Attie de Lange, Gail Fincham, and Wieslaw Krajka (Boulder, Colo.: Social Science Monographs; Lublin: Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, 2002), 85–106; and Anthony Bradley, “Hearts of Darkness: Conrad, Casement, and the Congo,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 34 (2003): 197–214. 72. Conrad would write to J. M. Dent on 27 March 1917: “But journalists can’t speak the truth,–not even see it as other men do. It’s a professional inability, and that’s why I hold journalism for the most demoralizing form of human activity, made up of catch phrases, of mere daily opportunities, of shifting feelings” (in Jean-Aubry, Joseph Conrad Life and Letters, 2 vols. [Garden City: Doubleday, Page, & Co., 1927], 2:186–87). 73. Much of the debate over events in the Congo took place in newspapers including The Times and West African Mail. For a detailed history of the relation between the press and reform, see Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, 185–252. 74. See Peter Keating on the professional status of journalism at this time, in The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, 1875– 1914 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989), 293. 75. Greenwood, “The Newspaper Press,” 714.

Conclusion 1. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contents Criticism, ed. Peter Shillingsburg (New York: Norton, 1994), 169. 2. E. S. Dallas (unsigned), “Popular Literature—The Periodical Press,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 85 (January 1859): 100. 3. J. G. L. (pseud.), “The Newspaper,” Macmillan’s Magazine 87 (1902–3): 429. 4. On the value of speed, see Joel H. Wiener, “ ‘Get the News! Get the News!’—Speed in Transatlantic Journalism, 1830–1914,” in AngloAmerican Media Interactions, 1850–2000, ed. Joel H. Wiener and Mark Hampton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 48–66. 5. “A Curious Fact for the History of Newspaper Literature in the Reign of Queen Victoria,” Illustrated London News, 8 June 1850, 416a. 6. Max Nordau, Degeneration, trans. George L. Mosse (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 541. 7. Gibbons Merle estimated that one-eighteenth of the population of Great Britain were newspaper readers in 1829 (Merle [unsigned], “Weekly Newspapers,” Westminster Review 10 [April 1829]: 466–81). 8. “Cheap Literature,” British Quarterly Review 29 (April 1859): 319. 9. For more on the royal family’s use of publicity, see John Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Notes to Pages 156–160

197

10. The phrase is taken from Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), viii. 11. Quoted in Max Pemberton, A Northcliffe Memoir (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1922), 80, 83. 12. George Saintsbury, “Dullness,” in The Criterion 1922–1939, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), 5. 13. See Lamartine’s letter to the editor of the Revue Européene in 1831: “The only book possible from today is a newspaper.” Quoted in Marshall McLuhan, “Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press,” in Essential McLuhan, ed. Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (Ontario: Anansi, 1995), 60. 14. Declan Kiberd, “Ulysses, Newspapers and Modernism,” in Irish Classics (London: Granta Books, 2000), 463. 15. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960), 29. 16. Recent reconsiderations of the relationship between modernism and mass culture include Patrick Collier, Modernism on Fleet Street (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); David Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Mark S. Morrison, The Public Face of Modernism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000); Pamela Caughie, ed., Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (New York: Garland, 2000); and Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt, eds., Marketing Modernisms (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 17. See Michael Robertson’s discussion of newspapers and fiction in Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 18. Morrison, The Public Face of Modernism, 6. 19. Collier, Modernism on Fleet Street, 9–10. 20. See the examples collected in the anthology The New Journalism, ed. Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). Phyllis Frus elaborates on the distinction between journalism and fiction in twentieth-century literature in The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 21. Charles Reade, “Facts Must Be Faced,” letter to the editor, The Times, 31 August 1871, 4f. 22. Ibid. 23. Quoted in John Coleman, Charles Reade As I Knew Him (London: Treherne & Company, 1903), 263. 24. Quoted in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), 496. 25. Wilde’s behavior is discussed in these terms by John Stokes, In the Nineties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), xx. 26. Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in Oscar Wilde, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 222. 27. This line was excised from the published version of the essay. Walter Benjamin, “Little Tricks of the Trade,” in Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996–2003), 2:730. 28. Rudyard Kipling, “The Man who would be King,” in The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories, ed. Louis L. Cornell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 258; hereafter cited in text.

198

Notes to Pages 162–166

29. Alexander Innes Shand (unsigned), “Contemporary Literature. VII. Readers,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 126 (1879): 239. 30. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), 61. 31. Michael Schudson, “Introduction: News as Public Knowledge,” in The Power of News (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 3.

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Index

Page numbers in italic type indicate illustrations; page numbers in bold type indicate chapter headings. accidents railway, 33, 36–37, 38, 39 see also shipping intelligence “actuality, shock of,” 48 Adams, Henry, 25, 174 Addison, Joseph, 85 Adorno, Theodor W., 10, 187 Advertisements, 8, 16 see also personal advertisements Advertiser (Boston), 115 aesthetic legitimacy concept, 84 Africa see Congo; foreign correspondence age of newspapers, 3–22 different voices, 4–9 nation of news readers, 9–14 newspaperized world, 14–19 agony column see personal advertisements Alden, W. L., 116, 125 All the Year Round, 17, 30, 51, 61–2, 113 Altick, Richard, 14, 48, 172, 179 America interviews in, 17, 109–14, 124–9 penny press, 5 see also James, Henry Anderson, Benedict, 9, 33, 55, 143, 171, 176–77, 178, 181, 187, 193 anonymity, 84–85, 89

apRoberts, Ruth, 185 Antsyferova, Olga, 192 Arendt, Hannah, 191 Ariès, Philippe, 191 Arnold, Matthew, 10, 130, 191 Aspinall, Arthur, 184 Atkinson, Paul, 120, 129, 190 Austen, Jane, 24 Persuasion, 32–33, 36, 176 Austin, J. L., 72, 183 back page, 159–68, 197–99 amount of paper used, 160 auctions of household goods, 159 book replaced by newspaper, 162–63 “Great Divide” diminishing, 163 press and its inadequate explanatory powers, 163–66 royalty and commoners share reading matter, 160–62, 161 telegraph/telegram, role of, 166–67 use of “Express” in newspaper titles, 160 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 141, 193 Balzac, Honoré de, 103, 165, 186 Banks, Elizabeth, 135 Barker, Hannah, 169, 171–72

223

Barker, Mary Anne see Broome, Lady Barnes, Thomas, 89, 90, 185 Barr, Robert, 135, 189, 190 Barsetshire Chronicles series (Trollope), 83 Barthes, Roland, 180 Beetham, Margaret, 171, 174, 180 Belcher, Joseph, 54, 69, 181 Belgian Congo see Congo Bell’s Life, 48 Benjamin, Walter, 8, 167, 198 “The Storyteller,” 153, 165–66, 196 Bennett, Arnold The Card, 44 How to Write for the Press, 115, 188 Journalism for Women, 135 Bennett, James Gordon, 112, 192 Bennett, Norman R., 195 Berger, Courtney C., 186 Berlant, Lauren, 192 bigamy novels, 65–66, 69 “biographical illusion,” 116 births, marriages, and deaths sections, 50, 70–71, 72–73 Bismarck, Otto von, bribery by, 84 Blackwood’s Magazine, 18, 89, 115, 152, 157 Blumenberg, Hans, 29–30, 175 Bly, Nellie, 142 Bolter, Jay, 12, 172 book replaced by newspaper, 162–63 The Bookman, 118 Boorstin, Daniel J., 190 Borthwick, Algernon, 87–88 Borus, Daniel, 189 Bourdieu, Pierre, 18, 196 aesthetic legitimacy, 84, 183 conversational format, 116, 188 journalists’ influence, 96, 186 Bowles, Thomas Gibson, 89, 185 Boyle, Thomas, 179 Braddon, Mary, 4, 60, 62, 182 Aurora Floyd, 65 Belgravia, 77 Henry James on, 49, 179 inadvertent bigamist, 77, 78 John Marchmont’s Legacy, 38–39, 65, 73, 183 Lady Audley’s Secret, 16, 65–77 passim, 182

224

Index

Bradley, Anthony, 197 Brake, Laurel, 172 Brandeis, Louis D., 130, 131, 191 Brantlinger, Patrick, 71, 148, 171, 179, 182, 195 Braudy, Leo, 190 breakfast, reading newspaper at, 100–7 British Quarterly Review, 6, 7 Broadsides, 25 Brontë, Charlotte, 4 Jane Eyre, 13, 69, 165 letter to George Smith, 177 Villette, 36 Brooks, Florence, 189 Brooks, Peter, 153, 194, 196 Broome, Lady (Mary Anne Barker), 129, 191 Broughton, Rhoda, 49, 182 Belinda, 66–68 Brown, Lucy, 5, 142, 169, 170, 186, 188, 193 Bruce, James, 149 Burnand, Francis, 93 Burns, Allan, 187 Burton, Richard, 148, 149 Butte, George, 186 Buxton, Charles, 95, 186 Buxton, Meriel, 195 Buzzard, Thomas, 38 Bynner, Witter, 189, 192 Cameron, Sharon, 190 Camps, William, 38 Canetti, Elias, 194 Carey, John, 170 Carlyle, Thomas, 160 Carnell, Jennifer, 182, 183 Carr-Saunders, Anthony Michael, 184 Casement, Roger, 142, 155–56, 196–97 Caughie, Pamela, 198 Chalaby, Jean, 169 Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, 55 Chambers’s Journal, 50 chapbooks, 25 Chapman, John, 186 Chartier, Roger, 171, 174 Chinitz, David, 198 Chronicle (Newcastle), 10 The Chronicle, 164 Cicero, 95

Clairmont, Claire, 119, 120 Clay, Alice, 78, 180, 183 Cobbett, William, 6 Cocks, H. G., 59–60, 181 codes in newspapers, 57 Coffee House, 26 Collier, Patrick, 163, 198 Collins, Wilkie, 4, 15, 24, 69, 77 Armadale, 43–44, 65, 70, 165, 178, 182 missing persons, 74 No Name, 65, 179 Parodied, 47 The Woman in White, 16, 47, 49, 62–63, 65, 179 communal activity, reading as, 160 newspapers, 6–7, 7 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 118, 142, 190 Conboy, Martin, 170 Congo River area, 141, 142, 151, 154, 155, 194, 195, 196 see also Livingstone; Stanley Conrad, Joseph, 4 Autocracy and War, 143–44 Chance, 142, 144–45, 193 “Geography and Some Explorers,” 149 on journalists, 144, 197 Last Essays, 192 and Livingstone, 148, 149 The Mirror of the Sea, 26, 174 newspaper reading, 141–43 Notes on Life and Letters, 193, 194 “An Outpost of Progress,” 154–55 Poland Revisited, 143 The Secret Agent, 146, 194 Under Western Eyes, 145–46 see also foreign correspondence; Heart of Darkness contemporaneity, 4 Contemporary Review, 89 conventions, narrative, 4, 12 Cooter, Roger, 175 Coppola, Francis Ford, Apocalypse Now, 153–54 Corder, William, 60–61 Cornhill, 13, 105 “correspondent” as generic term, 142 see also foreign correspondence

cosmetics, 71–72 cost of newspapers reduced, 6 Court Journal, 77 Courtney, Leonard, 4, 169 courtship plots in novels, 36–39 Cowen, Joseph, 10 Crane, Stephen, 156, 163 “credulity, feverish,” 144 Culler, Jonathan, 171, 176–77 cultural displacement, 143 see also Conrad Curtis, Ella J., 55, 181 Curtis, James, 181 Daily Chronicle, 7, 164 Daily Mail (launched 1896), 6, 10, 162 Daily Telegraph (earlier Telegraph), 49 advertisements, 51, 57 as penny daily, 6 and search for Stanley, 17, 150, 195 warns of newspaperised citizens, 4 Dailygraph (Whitby), 32 Dallas, Eneas Sweetland, 48, 159, 179, 197 Daly, Nicholas, 38, 178 Dames, Nicholas, 172 DaRosa, Marc, 187 Darras, Jacques, 194–95 Davies, Emily, 66 Davies, E. P., 44, 178 Davis, Lennard J., 169 Davis, Richard Harding, 142 Davray, Henry-Durand, 196 deaths see births, marriages and deaths DeCew, Judith Wagner, 191 Defoe, Daniel, 31, 85 Delane, John Thadeus, 89 delivery of newspapers, slow, 3 Dennett, J. R., 188 Dent, J. M., 197 Derrida, Jacques, 190 Dettmar, Kevin J. H., 198 Deutschland, wreck of, 29 Dickens, Charles, 4, 6 All the Year Round, 116 Bleak House, 15, 23–24, 38, 41–42, 45, 57, 174 David Copperfield, 13, 36, 98 Dombey and Son, 39–42, 165, 178

Index

225

Dickens, Charles (continued) Eatanswill Gazette/Independent, 87 Hard Times, 12 Household Words, 12, 25–26 Keyhole Reporter, 113 link with Lloyds, 26 Oliver Twist, 73 Peeper and Private Listener, 113 The Pickwick Papers, 5 rail accident, 38 disaster narratives see shipping intelligence Disraeli, Benjamin, 84, 90, 185 Divorce, 65 Donovan, Stephen, 193 double state of existence, 54–64 Dove and Crane, glimpse of, 53 Dreiser, Theodore, 163 Driver, Felix, 150, 195, 196 Du Maurier, George, 67 Edgeworth, Maria, 10, 171 Edinburgh Review, 31 Education Act (1870), 84 Elias, Norbert, 191 Eliot, George, 4, 84, 162, 175 Daniel Deronda, 66 Middlemarch, 9, 88, 165, 184 on shipwreck on stage, 28 Eliot, T. S., The Criterion, 10, 162 Elliott, Philip, 184 Ellis, G. Stanley, 181 Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (1887), 150, 195 ephemeral texts see newspapers Erichsen, John E., 38, 178 Evans, J.W., photograph by, 8 executions described, 146, 194 explanatory power of newspapers inadequate, 163–66 “Express” used in newspaper titles, 160 fact and fiction, discrepancy between, 12–13 Fayle, C. Ernest, 174 Ferdinand, Archduke Francis: assassinated, 143 fiction see novels Field, C. F., 57 fi lm, competition from, 10 fi nancial journalism, shipping news as, 29

226

Index

Flaubert, Gustave, 110, 187 Fletcher, A. E., 7, 170 Flint, Kate, 171, 174 Ford, Ford Madox, 10 Ford, Jane, 197 foreign correspondence and Conrad’s “Wild Story of a Journalist,” 4, 15, 141–58, 192–97 Kurtz’s letters from Africa, 151–58 phrases, rhythm of, 143–46 Stanley’s journalism by warfare, 147–51 Forster, W. E., 113 Fortnightly Review, 89, 90 Fowles, John, 28, 175 Franco-Prussian War, 142 Fraser, Hilary, 171, 174 Freedman, Jonathan, 189 Freeman, Michael, 177 front page, 15–19 see also personal advertisements; shipping intelligence Frus, Phyllis, 198 Furniss, Harry, 90, 91, 113, 114 Garnett, Edward, 143, 193 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 4 Sylvia’s Lovers, 33, 34–35, 36, 177 Gatrell, V. A. C., 194 Géricault, (Jean-Louis-André) Théodore, 25, 26, 174 Gilbert, W. S., 118 Gissing, George, 84, 102, 162 God absent, 29 Godkin, Edward Lawrence, 117, 131, 192 Goffman, Erving, 125, 190 Golanka, Mary, 194–95 Good Words, 65 Gordon, General Charles George, 113, 150 The Graphic, 148, 150, 156 “Great Divide” diminishes, 163 Greeley, Horace, 112 Green, Stephanie, 171, 174 Greenwood, Frederick, 152, 157, 196 Gross, John, 189 Grusin, Richard, 12, 172

Gubrium, Jaber, 188 Guérard, Albert, 194, 195 Habermas, Jürgen, 10, 172, 191 Hagan, John, 185 Hall, Francis Montague, 96, 97 Hamblen, Abigail Ann, 187 Hampton, Mark, 171, 184 handwriting, 72, 118 Hardy, Thomas, 183 Desperate Remedies, 65 Far from the Madding Crowd, 31, 176 Jude the Obscure, 13, 165 Harmsworth, A. C. W., see Northcliffe Harrington, Ralph, 177–78 Harris, Michael, 27, 175, 184 Harte, Bret, 47, 49, 178 Harvard Law Review, 130 Hawkins, Hunt, 197 Hawthorne, Julian, 115–16, 123, 188 Headlines, 9, 12 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 17–18, 142, 145, 147, 196 Kurtz’s letters from Africa, 151–58 Hemingway, Ernest, 144, 163, 194 Henry, Princess of Battenberg, 160, 161 Henty, G. A., 157 Herodotus, 165 heroic actions, 31–36, 38–39 hero, elimination of need for, 38 see also shipping intelligence Hill, Leonard Raven, 86 Hillis Miller, J., 94, 185, 189 Hochman, Barbara, 127, 128, 190 Hochschild, Adam, 195, 197 Holmes, Sherlock, 57–58 Holstein, James, 188 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 29, 30, 175 “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” 29 Horkheimer, Max, 187 How, Harry, 118 Howard, David, 192 Hunt, Leigh, 87, 184 Hunter, J. Paul, 169 Huntress, Keith, 176 Hutton, Richard Holt, 100, 173 Huyssen, Andreas, 198

Illustrated London News, 84, 161 railway accidents, 37, 39 shipping intelligence, 25, 28, 29, 31 Stanley and Livingstone, 147, 148, 195 vast amount of paper used, 160 “imagined communities,” 33 impression management, 125 industrial accidents, 38 information, cheap see newspapers inner pages see foreign correspondence; leading article; personal interview interview see personal interview Jackson, Kate, 171, 183, 191 James, Henry, 4, 190, 191 Interviews, 189 on Mary Braddon, 49, 179 overhearing audience of, 124–9 personal interview, 124–29 on publicity of life, 17 on Trollope, 83, 94, 183 works The Ambassadors, 127 The Aspern Papers, 119 The Better Sort, 131 The Bostonians, 109–10, 111, 133, 134, 135, 187 The Complete Notebooks, 187 “The Death of the Lion,” 110, 117, 118, 119, 133 “John Delavoy,” 110, 118 “The Papers,” 17, 110, 111, 130, 131–39 passim Partial Portraits, 185 The Portrait of a Lady, 110, 135, 187 The Wings of the Dove, 110 see also The Reverberator Japan: war with Russia, 144 Jeal, Tim, 195 Jean-Aubry, Gérard, 194 Jerrold, Douglas, 61, 181 John, wreck of, 28 Johnson, President Andrew, 112 Johnson, Samuel, 87, 184 Johnston, Judith, 171, 174 Johnstone, Christian, 11 Jones, Aled, 88, 171, 172, 184 Joseph de Smet, Abbé, 193 Journal des Débats, 26

Index

227

Journalism (Anon), 5 The Journalist, 114 journalists/journalism in fiction, 83–107 as invaders of privacy, 13, 17, 113 language of, 143–46 as “pariahs,” 16 term, meaning of, 9, 157 warfare, 147–51 see also foreign correspondence; leading article; newspapers Joyce, James, 10 Dubliners, 165 “A Painful Case,” 165 Ulysses, 44, 162–63 Karl, Frederick, 194 Keating, Peter, 184, 197 Kent, Robin, 180 “Khabari Kisungu” (white man’s news), 155 Kiberd, Declan, 198 Kierkegaard, Søren, 84–85, 183 Kinnear, John Boyd, 106, 187 Kipling, Rudyard, 4, 157, 166–67, 198 Knapp Hay, Eloise, 194 Knightley, Phillip, 193 Knowles, Richard Brinsley, 77–78 Knox-Shaw, Peter, 195 Korzienowski, Apollo, 143 Koss, Stephen, 170 Koven, Seth, 192 Kramer, David, 192 Kreilkamp, Ivan, 196 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 162, 198 Landow, George, 28, 175 Lane, John B., 188 Law, Graham, 182 leading articles, 4, 14, 15, 16, 83–107, 183–87 newspapermen, horror of, 85–88 as thunderbolts from Mount Olympus, 88–94 Times at breakfast, 100–7 Trollope’s whispering conscience, 94–100 see also Palliser novels Leavis, F. R., 10 Leavis, Q. D., 10, 172 Lee, Alan J. 170 Leech, John, 52

228

Index

Lejeune, Philippe, 72, 183 Leonard, E. B., 78, 183 Leonard, Thomas C., 174 Leopold II, King of Belgium, 151, 154, 156 Lewes, George Henry, 17, 85, 89, 175, 184 Liddle, Dallas, 179, 185 Lighthorse, wreck of, 27 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 84, 116–17, 189, 192 Lippmann, Walter, 18 The Little Review, 162 Livingstone, David, 17 found see under Stanley portrayed, 148, 149, 156 death, 149, 195 Lloyd’s of London Lloyd’s List, 15, 26–31, 45 Merchants’ Room at Royal Exchange, 25 Lockwood, Preston, 189 Loeb, Lori Anne, 180 London Female Preventive and Reformatory Institution, 59–60 London Missionary Society in Africa, 147 see also Livingstone London “News-letter,” 3 Low, Frances H., 135 Lowell, James Russell, 115–16, 123, 188 Luckin, Bill, 175 Lutes, Jean Marie, 192 Luyat, Anne, 194–95 Lyons, Martyn, 174 Lytton, Edward Bulwer, 160 McClellan, May, 116, 121, 124 McCullagh, Joseph, 112 MacDonald, Arthur, 63–64, 181 McDonald, Peter D., 183 McHugh, Michael P., 190 McKeon, Michael, 169 Mackie, John, 114–15, 188 McLuhan, Marshall, 198 Macmillan’s Magazine, 11, 121 Madden, Lionel, 172 magazines, 25 major see Blackwood’s; Illustrated London News; Macmillan’s; Punch; Quarterly Review; Strand

Mah, Harold, 172 Mahood, Molly, 194 Malcolm, Janet, 187 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 10 Mallios, Peter L., 193 Mansel, Henry, Dean of St. Paul’s, 47–48, 178 Mansfield, Horatio, 171 Marcus, Sharon, 69, 182 Maria Marten and the Red Barn, 60 “Marine List,” 26–27 marriage catastrophe leading to, 36 see also births, marriages and deaths Marshall, David, 178, 192 Mason, Alpheus, 191 Matadi (Congo), 155 matriarchy, 41–42 Maxwell, John, 77, 78 Mayhew, Henry, 43–44, 178 Mays, Kelly J., 170 Medical Critic and Psychological Journal, 48 La Méduse: shipwrecked, 25–26 Meredith, George, 84, 101 Merle, Gibbons, 9, 171, 197 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 192 Meyers, Jeffrey, 196–97 Mill, John Stuart, 4, 87, 160, 169, 184 Miller, Christopher, 196 Miller, D. A., 178, 185 miserable life, short history of, 50–54 missing people, 57, 73–74 Missionary Travels, 149 “modernisms,” 163 Moniteur Universel, 26 Montaigne, Michel de, 166 Moore, Mary, 60–61 Morel, E. D., 142 Moretti, Franco, 33, 177 Morison, Stanley, 9, 171 Morning Advertiser, 53, 70, 77 Morning Herald, 6, 60 Morning Post, 6 Morrison, Mark S., 198 Mott, Frank L., 191 Mouvement Géographique, 154 murder in Red Barn, 60–61 Naas, Clifford, 190 Naipaul, V. S., 143, 193

Najder, Zdzislaw, 194 names changed to start new life, 68 Napoleon I, Emperor, 84 narrative conventions, 4, 12 The Nation, 131 National Association of Journalists, 86 The National Review, 102 New Journalism (1880s–90s), 66, 84, 171 New York Herald see Stanley The New York Interviewer, 110–11 New York Tribune, 112, 131 Newman, William, 64, 102 News-letter, London, 3 newspapers, 12–13 categories, 14–19 in different voices, 4–9 horror of men of, 85–88 increased size, 9 major see Daily Mail; Daily Telegraph; Times news as commodity, 4–5 “Newspaper Novel,” 48 “newspaperized world,” 17 as primary subject of novel see Reverberator see also age of newspapers; back page; foreign correspondence; journalists; leading article; personal interview; shipping intelligence Nile, source of, 149 Nilsson, Christine, 115 Nilsson, Nils Gunnar, 112, 188 Nineteenth Century, 89 Nohrnberg, Peter, 193 Nordau, Max, 160 North British Review, 48 Northcliffe, Lord Alfred C. W. Harmsworth, 10, 50, 162, 163 novels fiction and fact, discrepancy between, 12–13 and newspapers as plot sources, 48–49, 55 resemblance to, 9–10 novelists see in particular Austen; Braddon; Brontë; Collins; Conrad; Dickens; Eliot; Gaskell; Hardy; James; Joyce; Kipling; Reade; Stoker; Thackeray; Trollope; Wood

Index

229

novels (continued) sensation see sensation novels serialized, 9, 11 obituaries, 67–68, 72, 73 fake, 70–71 O’Boyle, Lenore, 184 O’Connor, T. P., 130, 186, 191 Ogden, Rollo, 117, 189 Oliphant, Margaret, 94, 185 Olympus, Mount see thunderbolts Once a Week, 51 Onslow, Barbara, 192 Ouida (Marie de la Ramé), 49, 56, 65, 181 Ozick, Cynthia, 189 Paget, Sidney, 58 Pain, Barry, 116 Pall Mall Gazette, 100, 113 Palliser novels (Trollope), 16–17, 18, 83–107, 95 and journalists, 83–107 Can You Forgive Her?, 83 The Duke’s Children, 83, 100, 105 The Eustace Diamonds, 83, 102 Phineas Finn, 83, 95–96, 97–99, 183 Phineas Redux, 83, 97 The Prime Minister, 83, 91, 103–5 see also leading article Palmer, Michael, 193 Palmer, William J., 177 Paper, Lewis J., 191 paper, huge amount used, 160 paragraph, 9 “pariah caste” of journalism, 16 Park, Mungo, 149 Patti, Adelina, 117 Peltason, Timothy, 178 Pemberton, Max, 198 penny press, 18 Penny Prometheus, 93 Perkin, Harold, 184 personal advertisements/agony column, 4, 14, 15, 16, 18, 47–79, 178–83 dangerous and fake, 61–62, 65 double state of existence, 54–64 importance of, 50 see also age of newspapers misused, 68–69

230

Index

perusal as proof of adultery, 56–57 as sensation novel in embryo, 64–79 as short history of miserable life, 50–54 “small ads,” 57–58 in Times, 48, 50, 53, 54, 57, 59, 61, 65, 69, 73–74, 78 two thirds of paper devoted to, 50 wartime use, 78 personal interview, 4, 9, 14–15, 16, 18, 109–39, 187–92 age of, 129–39 in America, 17, 109–14, 124–29 beginnings and acceptance of, 111–13 as invasion of privacy, 109–10, 114–20 methods and styles, 111–20 overhearing audience, James’, 124–29 rise of interview society, 120–24 Pettit, Claire, 195 Phillips, Evelyn March, 117 Phillips, Henry Wyndham, 149 photography, 9 Plimsoll, Samuel, 30 Plunkett, John, 197 Poland see Conrad political bias, 5 Pollaky, Mr., 57 Ponce de Leon, Charles L., 189–90 Poor Man’s Guardian, 182 Poovey, Mary, 28, 175 Potter, Simon J., 172, 193 Pound, Ezra, 10, 163, 198 Pratt, Walter F., 191 press see journalists; newspapers privacy expression enabled by public media see shipping intelligence journalism as invasion of, 13, 17, 113 personal interview as invasion of, 109–10, 114–20 public responsible for loss of, 132 private investigators, 57 Public Ledger, 6 Public Opinion, 77

public sphere enabling expression of private grief see shipping intelligence participation in, 10, 125 Pulitzer, Joseph, 187, 196 Punch, 181 advertisements, 47, 51, 55, 63 anti-advertisement, 55 cartoons, 52, 56, 59, 60, 67 journalist then and now, 86 “Object of Suspicion,” 63, 64 interviews, 117, 189 leading articles, 91, 93, 101 Quarterly Review, 18, 30 condemns “newspaper novels,” 47–48 radio, competition from, 10 railway accidents, 33, 36–37, 38, 39, 177 Ralph, Julian, 112, 188 rats, Conrad sees journalists as, 144 Reade, Alfred Arthur, 113, 188 Reade, Charles, 4, 53–54, 62, 65, 180–81 newspapers as source, 49, 163–64, 179, 198 Red Barn murder, 60–61 Reeves, Byron, 190 Reid, Benjamin, 197 Reid, Hugh Gilzean, 86, 184 Reid, Michael, 187 “relative distance,” 33 “remediation,” 12 Reuters, 142 The Reverberator (Henry James), 17, 111, 116, 133, 163 overhearing audience, 124–29 rhythm of journalistic phrases, brains pulsating to, 143–46 Richard, Thomas, 180 Riffenburgh, Beau, 196 Robertson, Michael, 198 Robin Goodfellow, 65 Ross, Andrew C., 195 royalty, 151, 154, 156 and commoners share reading matter, 160–62, 161 Queen Victoria, 51, 114, 160, 161, 180 Rubin, Rebecca B., 190 Russell, William Howard, 142 Russo-Japanese war, 144

Said, Edward, 196 Saint Paul’s Magazine, 90 Saintsbury, George, 162, 198 Sala, G.A., 6, 170 Salmon, Richard, 110, 186, 189 Sambourne, Edward Linley, 93 Saturday Review, 37 “Scène de Naufrage,” 26 Scharnhorst, Gary, 189 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 37, 177, 178 Schudson, Michael modern concept of news “invented,” 5, 142, 169, 199 interviews, 110, 124–25, 186, 193 Schults, Raymond L., 188 Schweitzer, Albert, 95, 186 “scoop” fi rst used, 166 Scotsman, 57 Scribner’s Magazine, 131 sea as theme see shipping intelligence Sebald, W. G., 143, 193 secret tears for lost ships, 39–45 Select Committees on Newspaper Stamps, 18 on Shipwrecks (1836), 30 Sennett, Richard, 111, 187, 191 sensation novels, 63 agony column as embryo of, 64–79 sexual predators, 58–61 Shadwell, Arthur, 117 Shakespeare, William, 24, 48, 135, 174 Shand, Alexander Innes on advertisements, 50–51, 179–80 on interviews, 115, 186 on shrinking time, 3, 4, 169 on ubiquity of press, 168, 188 Shattock, Joanne, 172 Sherry, Norman, 193, 194 Shevelow, Kathryn, 174 Shils, Edward, 130, 191 Shipping Gazette, 26 shipping intelligence (shipwrecks and storms), in novels, 4, 14, 15–16, 23–45, 174–78 heroines’ reasons for reading, 31–36 secret tears, 39–45 wrecks and courtship plot, 36–39

Index

231

short history of miserable life, 50–54 Silverman, David, 120, 129, 190 Simmons, Alan, 197 Sixpenny Magazine, 65 Smith, Dodie, 190 Smith, Iain R., 195 Spectator, 53 Speke, Reverend Benjamin, 179 Speke, John Hanning, 148, 149 Stamp Duty, repeal of (1855), 6, 49, 66 The Standard, Conrad and, 143, 144, 145, 193 Stanley, Henry (of New York Herald), 17 Depicted, 148, 149, 150, 156 journalism by warfare, 147–51 fi nds Livingstone, 17, 141, 142, 147, 148, 150, 151, 153–56, 192, 194–95 Stanley Falls, 149 Stape, J. H., 193 Stapleton, Stephen, 110, 187 Starr, Paul, 6, 130, 170, 191 Stead, William T., 66, 113, 116, 182, 187, 88 Stephen, James Fitzjames, 105, 130, 187, 191 Stephens, Mitchell, 169, 193 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 15, 24, 32, 45, 157 Stewart, Garrett, 13–14, 190 Stoker, Bram, 4, 15, 24 Dracula, 32, 33–4, 44, 165, 176 Stokes, John, 171, 183, 191 storms see shipping intelligence The Strand Magazine, 58, 113, 114, 118 Strychacz, Thomas, 125, 190 suicide, 146 Sun, 77, 112 Sunday papers, 5 Sunday Times, 60 Surtees, Robert Smith, 65, 181 Sutherland, John, 49, 179, 185 Symonds, Emily, 179 tabloid format, 162 Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 9 taxable commodity, news as, 6, 18 “technological accident,” 37

232

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see also railway accidents; shipwrecks Telegraph see Daily Telegraph telegraph/telegram, role of, 166–67 television, competition from, 10 Temple Bar, 65 Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 34–35 Enoch Arden, 34, 36 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 4, 13, 84 The Adventures of Philip, 106–7, 184–85, 187 Pendennis, 98, 165 Swamp Town Gazette and Swamp Town Sentinel, 87 Vanity Fair, 159, 197 Thomas, Annie, 48, 65, 66, 182 Thomas, Brook, 110, 187 Thomas, Richard, 191 Thornton, R. H., 30, 176 thunderbolts from Mount Olympus, leading articles as, 88–94 Thunderer see under Times The Times, 26, 37, 164 early versions, 3, 4, 5, 15, 16 Agony Column and advertisements, 48, 50, 53, 54, 57, 59, 61, 65, 69, 73–74, 78 back page, 159, 164 circulation, 6 on image of press, 86 on Livingstone, 155 missing people, 73–74, 75 obituaries, 72 railway accidents, 37 shipping news, 27–28, 29, 31, 43 siege of Paris, (1870–71) 78 “sovereignty of,” 5–6 as Thunderer, 16, 83, 85, 89, 91 as Universal Daily Register, 50 Titanic, 174 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 191 Townsend, Horace, 112, 188 Townsend, Rosina, 112 Trollope, Anthony, 4, 184, 185, 186, 187 Autobiography, 95, 185 Barsetshire Chronicles series, 83 An Editor’s Tales, 90, 185 Fortnightly Review, 89, 90

He Knew He Was Right, 88, 185 James on, 83, 94 The New Zealander, 89, 97, 185, 186 Nina Balatka, 89 The Three Clerks, 89, 185 The Warden, 13, 90, 91–92, 93, 105, 165, 185 whispering conscience of, 94–100 see also Palliser novels True Briton, 6 Turner, Mark, 185 Twain, Mark, 117, 142 United States see America Universal Chronicle (Weekly Gazette), 87 The Universal Daily Register (later Times), 50 Unyanyembe, 155, 156 upside down reading, 164 “verbal perception, new worlds of,” 141 Victoria, Queen, 51, 114, 160, 161, 180 Vincent, David, 170 Walter, John, 50, 61 warfare casualty numbers, 144 Conrad on, 143–44 Franco-Prussian, 142 journalism by, 147–51 Warren, Mabel, 131 Warren, Samuel D., 130, 131, 191 Watt, Ian, 151, 194, 196 Watt, Stephen, 198 Waugh, Arthur, 102, 186 Waugh, Evelyn, 87, 166 Weber, Max, 16, 87, 184 Weekly Political Register, 6 Weintraub, Jeff, 183, 191

Wells, H. G., 84, 156, 165 West, Rebecca, 163 Westminster Review, 9, 18, 48 Whitby, 32, 33 White, Allon, 196 White, Andrea, 194 Wiener, Joel H., 171, 185, 191, 197 “Wild Story of a Journalist” (Conrad) see foreign correspondence Wilde, Oscar, 77, 98, 163, 164, 165, 186, 198 Williams, C., 184 Williams, George Washington, 142 Williams, Raymond, 10, 55, 170, 183 Williamson, Alice Muriel, 135 Wilson, Paul Alexander, 184 Winkworth, Stephen, 180, 181 Winter, John Strange, 116 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 168, 199 Wittmann, Reinhard, 171 Wives by Advertisement (Jerrold), 61 Wolfe, Tom, 198 Wolff, Michael, 172 Wolff, Robert Lee, 77, 183 Wood, Ellen, East Lynne, 16, 38, 49, 65, 66, 68, 77, 165 Woolf, Virginia, 162 Wordsworth, William, 28, 30 The World, 113, 115, 116, 121 Wright, Charles, 174 Wynter, Andrew, 54, 169, 176, 181 Yates, Edmund, 113 Yelverton divorce trial, 65, 182 Yonge, Charlotte, 15, 24 Heir of Redclyffe, 35–36, 177 Young, Brigham, 112 Youngs, Tim, 195 Zins, Henryk S. Joseph, 197

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