Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940 Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms
Edited by
Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier
Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940
Also by Ann Ardis MODERNISM AND CULTURAL CONFLICT, 1880–1922 WOMEN’S EXPERIENCE OF MODERNITY, 1875–1945 (co-editor) VIRGINIA WOOLF TURNING THE CENTURIES (co-editor) NEW WOMEN, NEW NOVELS: Feminism and Early Modernism
Also by Patrick Collier MODERNISM ON FLEET STREET
Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940 Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms Edited by
Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier
Editorial matter and selection © Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier 2008 Individual chapters © contributors 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–55426–9 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–55426–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Transatlantic print culture, 1880–1940 : emerging media, emerging modernisms / edited by Ann L. Ardis and Patrick Collier. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–55426–9 1. Journalism – United States – History – 20th century. 2. Journalism – United States – History – 19th century. 3. Journalism – Great Britain – History – 20th century. 4. Journalism – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 5. Press – United States – History – 20th century. 6. Press – United States – History – 19th century. 7. Press – Great Britain – History – 20th century. 8. Press – Great Britain – History – 19th century. I. Ardis, Ann L., 1957– II. Collier, Patrick. PN4867.T73 2008 071⬘.30904—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
2008020659
Contents List of Figures
vii
Acknowledgements
viii
Notes on Contributors
ix
Introduction Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier
Part I
1
History, Culture, and the Public Sphere: Discipline, Theory, Methodology
1. Representing the Public Sphere: The New Journalism and Its Historians Mark Hampton 2. Staging the Public Sphere: Magazine Dialogism and the Prosthetics of Authorship at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Ann Ardis 3. Transatlantic Print Culture: The Anglo-American Feminist Press and Emerging “Modernities” Lucy Delap and Maria DiCenzo 4. Feminist Things Barbara Green
Part II
15
30
48 66
The Cultural Work of Print Media: Markets, Institutions, and Audiences
5. Philanthropy and Transatlantic Print Culture Francesca Sawaya
83
6. John O’London’s Weekly and the Modern Author Patrick Collier
98
7. “Women are News”: British Women’s Magazines 1919–1939 Fiona Hackney v
114
vi
Contents
8. Christopher Morley’s Kitty Foyle: (Em)Bedded in Print Margaret D. Stetz
134
Part III Modernism on/in Print Media, Print Media in/on Modernism 9. Journalism and Modernism, Continued: The Case of W.T. Stead Laurel Brake 10. Journalism, Modernity, and the Globe-Trotting Girl Reporter Jean Marie Lutes
149 167
11. The Fine Art of Cheap Print: Turn-of-the-Century American Little Magazines Kirsten MacLeod
182
12. The Newspaper Response to Tender Buttons, and What It Might Mean Leonard Diepeveen
199
Part IV An Experiment in Pedagogy 13. Modernist Periodicals and Pedagogy: An Experiment in Collaboration Suzanne W. Churchill
217
Index
237
List of Figures 6.1 7.1 7.2 7.3 9.1 11.1 11.2 11.3
A Corona typewriter advertisement from 1922 “Girls Who Just Miss Marriage: the Lipstick Girl!” Front Cover Woman “That Vote of Ann’s” Cover, “2+2=4,” Review of Reviews Annual 1893 A selection of turn-of-the-century American little magazines The aesthetic appearance of the turn-of-the-century little magazine Ad for Ayer’s Vigour, Bradley, His Book 1.2 (1896)
vii
107 122 125 130 160 183 188 194
Acknowledgements We take this opportunity to thank the following for their generous sponsorship of the symposium in April 2006 at the University of Delaware that first brought our contributors into orbit: the Center for Material Culture Studies, the Departments of English and History, the Women’s Studies Program, the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, and the University of Delaware Library. Special thanks go to both the Center for International Studies, for the grant that enabled us to cover the hotel costs of our nine international speakers, and the College of Arts and Sciences, for allowing Julie Demgen, Cindy Bendler, Nancy Koller, and Laura Pawlowski to aid us in various ways in planning this event. The support for this symposium provided by the Delaware Art Museum, the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library, and the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, which is associated with the Special Collections Department of the University of Delaware Library, is gratefully acknowledged as well. Since the symposium, it has truly been a pleasure to work with all of our contributors on drafts and revisions of their essays. Their responsiveness to constructive criticism, and their willingness not simply to read each other’s work but to re-imagine their own projects in relation to those of other contributors, makes this anthology a far more collective intellectual enterprise than is often the case with edited collections. For assistance with the details of publishing the volume, our thanks go out to Murray Montague, Nicole Williams, the Publishing and Intellectual Properties Committee at Ball State University, and to Palgrave-Macmillan’s reader as well as to Paula Kennedy, Christabel Scaife, and Steven Hall. Permission to quote in Chapter 3 from the clipping service file on Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons granted by the Beinecke Library, Yale University. Permission to quote in Chapter 7 from the Mary Ware Dennett Papers and the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers granted by the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Permission to reprint images in Chapter 12 from Home Chat and Woman granted by IPC.
viii
Notes on Contributors Ann Ardis is Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities and Professor of English at the University of Delaware and the author of New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (Rutgers, 1990) and Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880–1922 (Cambridge, 2002). With Leslie W. Lewis, she edited Women’s Experience of Modernity, 1875–1945 (Johns Hopkins, 2002); with Bonnie Kime Scott, she edited Virginia Woolf Turning the Centuries (Pace, 2000). She is currently working on a book, tentatively entitled, “Before the Great Divides,” about British and American magazines at the turn of the twentieth century that sought to engage an increasingly diverse public in discussions of “modern” literature, art, and politics. Laurel Brake is Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include Subjugated Knowledges, Walter Pater, and Print in Transition, as well as co-edited volumes on the nineteenth-century press and Pater. Her recent work includes articles on Blackwood’s, Chambers’s Journal and other Scottish weeklies, and Vernon Lee and the Pater circle. She is director of NCSE, an electronic edition of six nineteenth-century journals in partnership with King’s College and the British Library, and funded by the AHRC (www.ncse.org.uk); and co-editor, with Marysa Demoor, of the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (Academic Press and British Library, 2008; ProQuest, 2008). Suzanne W. Churchill is Associate Professor of English at Davidson College, where she teaches courses in modernism and twentieth century poetry and works with undergraduates to expand the website, Little Magazines & Modernism: a select bibliography. She is the author of The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry (Ashgate, 2006) and co-editor, with Adam McKible, of Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches (Ashgate, 2007). She has published articles in American Periodicals, Criticism, Journal of Modern Literature, and Sagetrieb. Patrick Collier is Associate Professor and Assistant Chair of the Department of English at Ball State University, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature. He is the author of Modernism on Fleet Street (Ashgate, 2006) and is currently working on a study of British poetry and print culture, 1900–1940. ix
x
Notes on Contributors
Lucy Delap is a fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and a member of the History Faculty, University of Cambridge. Her book The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007. It explores the intellectual history and cultural politics of feminism, set within early-twentieth-century Anglo-American transatlantic exchanges. She has recently published a collection of primary sources, Feminism and the Periodical Press, 1900–1918 (Routledge, 2006), co-edited with Maria DiCenzo and Leila Ryan. She is also an associate editor of History and Policy, and is currently working on a cultural history of modern British domestic service. Maria DiCenzo is Associate Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. She is co-editor, with Lucy Delap and Leila Ryan, of Feminism and the Periodical Press, 1900–1918 (Routledge, 2006) and has published on feminist media history and the British suffrage press in journals such as Media History, Women’s History Review, and Victorian Review. Leonard Diepeveen is Professor of English at Dalhousie University. He is the author of The Difficulties of Modernism (Routledge, 2003) and Changing Voices: The Modern Quoting Poem (Michigan, 1993). As well, he is co-author, with Timothy van Laar, of Art with a Difference: Looking at Difficult and Unfamiliar Art (Mayfield, 2001) and Active Sights: Art as Social Action (Mayfield, 1998). Barbara Green is an associate professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where she teaches courses in gender and modernism. She is the author of Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage 1905–1938 (St. Martin’s, 1997) and is currently working on feminist periodical culture and everyday life. Fiona Hackney runs an MA in Twentieth Century Art & Design at University College Falmouth, U.K. She has contributed essays on magazines, gender, and domestic practice to a number of publications, including The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Homedressmaking (Berg, 1999) and A Woman’s Place (Agder Research Series, 1998). A recent essay, “ ‘Use Your Hands for Happiness’: Home Craft and Make-doand-Mend in British Women’s Magazines in the 1920s and 1930s,” appeared in the Journal of Design History Special Issue, “Do It Yourself: Democracy and Design.” Mark Hampton is Associate Professor of History at Lingnan University (Hong Kong), and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is the
Notes on Contributors xi
author of Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (University of Illinois Press, 2004) and co-editor with Joel Wiener of Anglo-American Media Interactions, 1850–2000 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). He is a co-editor of the journal Media History and modern reviews editor for H-Albion. He is currently preparing a book manuscript on “Hong Kong and Britishness, 1945–1997.” Jean Marie Lutes is Assistant Professor of English at Villanova University, where she teaches modern American fiction. She is the author of FrontPage Girls: Women Journalists in American Literature and Culture (Cornell University Press, 2006). Kirsten MacLeod is an adjunct professor in the English and Film Studies Department at the University of Alberta. She is the author of Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Culture and the Fin de Siècle (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), editor of Marie Corelli’s Wormwood (Broadview, 2004), and has written several articles on late nineteenth century British and American literature. Francesca Sawaya is Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Modern Women, Modern Work: Domesticity, Professionalism, and Women’s Writing, 1890– 1940 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) and is currently at work on a book analyzing the relation between American literature and philanthropy. Margaret D. Stetz is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware. Her recent books include Facing the Late Victorians: Portraits of Writers and Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection (University of Delaware Press, 2007), Gender and the London Theatre, 1880–1920 (Rivendale Press, 2004); British Women’s Comic Fiction, 1890–1990 (Ashgate, 2001). Her next book, Oscar Wilde, New Women, the Bodley Head and Beyond is forthcoming from Rivendale Press.
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Introduction Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier
With levels of literacy in this period reaching about 80 percent, England boasted a potential “reading public” of about twenty million adults. What these millions read, for the most part, were newspapers and magazines. Chris Baldick, Oxford English Literary History, 1910–1940 (17) The turn of the twentieth century saw a sea change in the world of Anglo-American1 book, newspaper, and periodical publishing. More newspapers, magazines, and books were published annually than ever before, in a variety of new venues and mixed-media formats. Many newspapers, magazines, and books were also reaching wider – and different – readerships than ever before, as both population growth and literacy rates in the United Kingdom and the United States soared and publishers scrambled to transform this aggregate of readers into new markets. Between 1885 and 1905, 7,500 new periodicals were established in the United States (Mott 11). Between 1890 and 1900, both the number and the circulation of newspapers increased hugely in Great Britain, peaking in 1900 with the publication of 172 daily newspapers (Lee 131). In 1922 (that durable touchstone of modernist literary history), more than 50,000 periodicals were published in Great Britain, and there were more than ten national daily newspapers, catering to millions of readers widely varying in class, political interest, and reading ability (Collier 202). The visuality of periodicals was also changing dramatically. With improvements in printing technology that allowed for lithography and, later, half-tone printing, and variations in layout such as banner headlines and the now-familiar “jigsaw” newspaper page, periodicals were also becoming increasingly 1
2 Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940
complex visual texts, changing the reading experience in hard-tofathom ways even as the rise of a modern advertising industry contributed to the transformation of older business models in publishing. 2 Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms begins with the assumption that studying the culture of this period requires renewed attention to this radically transforming print ecology, and that new theoretical models and methodologies are required to make sense of it. Building on recent work on Victorian print culture as well as the turn toward material historical research in modernist studies, the contributors to this collection seek to extend the frontiers of scholarship on the “Atlantic scene” of English-language publishing at the turn of the twentieth century as they imagine, elucidate, and practice new ways of grappling with this expanding and changing universe of print.3 For writers and intellectuals in both the United Kingdom and the United States, this transforming landscape could be seen as a field of opportunity or an object of anxious cultural critique. Many saw it as both at once. As Henry James perceived, for example, the expanded and segmented print marketplace provided an opportunity to find and target one’s own proper audience in the “chess board” of emerging market segments even as it presented sobering evidence of the limitations of the serious novelist’s cultural reach (197–204). This “revolution” of the printed text (Carey 5) was a subject of great concern for intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic, who voiced their hostilities and anxieties about the emergence of mass culture in any number of forums, and argued fiercely about whether the periodical press had placed the profit motive, served by selling readers a mix of lowbrow distraction and frivolity, above the purported social responsibility and political commitments of mid-Victorian journalism. Broad social concerns and questions loomed behind these arguments: was continued democratization possible, or desirable, in societies whose print culture seemed to be dominated by pulp? Was mass publication producing – or pandering to – a public unfit for self-governance and inattentive to serious literature? What, if anything, was to be the role of the arts in a print-saturated, democratic society?4 This strain of cultural anxiety is undeniable, but it is crucial to note that it co-existed with far more optimistic readings of print media’s rapid expansion and visual, technological, and editorial transformations at the turn of the twentieth century. Examples include early modernists who, as Mark Morrisson has shown, saw revolutionary potential in the new technologies of advertising and mechanical reproduction, as did suffragists (and, later,
Introduction
3
veterans of suffragism) and African American and socialist activists, who successfully harnessed the press to achieve historic political goals. As Lucy Delap and Maria DiCenzo usefully suggest in this volume, literary scholarship’s historical emphasis on modernism, the literary, and such intellectual and establishment sites of print production as Bloomsbury, Leavisite Cambridge, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Atlantic Monthly have retrospectively reinforced narratives of anxiety and cultural decline during this period. Delap and DiCenzo’s caveat about narratives of cultural decline exemplifies the kinds of conceptual and methodological shifts that the contributors to this volume make as they offer fresh perspectives on what we are calling the print culture of the period.5 Though admittedly vague, the term print culture will suffice, allowing us to accommodate our contributors’ varied points of entry into the vast publishing scene of this period. These points of entry include: an interest in periodicals as entities in their own right, not “contexts” for primary source materials; a concern for the materiality of literature, its status as a socially constituted category, worked up in real material practices and traded in a diverse, complex, and changing marketplace; and a willingness to test the adequacy of key theoretical models – of the public sphere, of the economics of literary patronage, of modernism’s centrality in this cultural landscape. Our contributors variously work towards, advocate, and practice such conceptual shifts as they expand the focus of material historical research on the transformations of printed media in Britain and the United States between 1880 and 1940. Those years – 1880–1940 – inscribe the first of three disciplinary border-crossings that this volume both advocates and practices. These are collaboration and dialogue between: nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury scholars; historians and literary scholars; and scholars of American and British literature and culture. The first two of these border-crossings are closely related. As Laurel Brake argues in “On Print Culture: the State We’re In,” the emergent field of Victorian print culture studies has for some time challenged the narrow “literary” focus of Victorian studies by including in its purview the entire ecology of print media in nineteenth-century Britain: the organization of the newspaper industry, the hierarchy and circulation of weekly and monthly periodicals, the book publishing industry, and the evolving dynamics among literary agents, reviewers, authors, and their increasingly diverse audiences. Early-twentieth-century studies has been slower to embrace this particular kind of interdisciplinary reorientation: more reluctant to relinquish the “subjugation” of journalism that was part and parcel of
4 Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940
the professionalization of English studies in the early twentieth century,6 more wedded to the “rules of scarcity” that continue to organize literary reputation, restricting the number of names and texts that “remain in heavy rotation” in modernist studies, in spite of several decades worth of extensive revisionary work (Jaffe 1). Moreover, the kind of meticulous bibliographic scholarship that has been the backbone of periodical research in Victorian studies for at least twenty years exists for modernist “little magazines” but is barely underway for a broader spectrum of twentieth-century periodicals.7 While a concern with literary works – and with the discursive constitution of literary value and “the literary” itself – informs chapters by Margaret Stetz, Patrick Collier, Jean Lutes, and Leonard Diepeveen here, the volume as a whole widens the field of inquiry, placing such previously marginal print artifacts as suffrage journals (Barbara Green, Delap and DiCenzo), popular women’s magazines of the 1930s (Fiona Hackney), advertisements (Ann Ardis), and cheap literary weeklies (Collier) at the center of inquiry. If an orientation towards print culture requires a more “thickly” historical (and therefore less conventionally literary) orientation, the historical realities of the period’s print culture also call for a BritishAmerican border-crossing. While scholarly emphasis has long fallen on the cosmopolitanism of modernism – on its celebratory tropes of exile, multi-lingual heteroglossia, and the international circuitry of New York/ London/Paris/Berlin/Vienna – this anthology deliberately sets aside such modelings of metropolitan modernity and cosmopolitan high modernism in order to foreground foundational economic connections and networks of circulation and reception between the national print cultures of Britain and America. As essays here by Francesca Sawaya, Brake, Delap and DiCenzo, and Lutes illustrate, both the marketplace for print artifacts and the dialogue among their writers and readers were decidedly and complexly transatlantic. Andrew Carnegie pursued a dream of Americanizing Europe by subsidizing periodicals in England (Sawaya). After his epoch-making journalism career derailed in England, W. T. Stead fashioned political/literary/periodical hybrids as ways of advocating the “Americanization of the world” (Brake 163). Suffragists in England re-appropriated the (to American readers) dated feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Delap and DiCenzo). Henry James fashioned the American Henrietta Stackpole as an image of the anxiety-provoking “globe-trotting girl reporter” and set her loose among the English aristocracy in Portrait of a Lady, re-working her character in the New York edition to register his “recoil from the newly standardized, increasingly abstract notions of space and time”
Introduction
5
associated with a modern “publicity machine” without national borders (Lutes 243). Elsewhere in this volume, Hackney finds that English women’s magazines of the 1930s followed the lead of the American Good Housekeeping. Kirsten MacLeod traces the influence of British and European innovators in book production and magazine design on American little magazines of the 1890s. And Margaret Stetz considers how the popular American novelist Christopher Morley turns his back on his British roots and Anglocentric upbringing in writing fiction about Cyrus Curtis’s Philadelphia-based middlebrow publishing empire. Our contributors thus map an Atlantic scene of English-language publishing at the turn of the twentieth century, venturing to ask: what manner of “borrowings, shared considerations and preoccupations,” and professional as well as personal networks, entailing both “rivalries and friendships,” existed circum-Atlantically during this period? What “dynamic cultural exchanges” can be traced that challenge not only conventional “models of nationhood” (Beer and Bennett 2) but also the paradigms of highbrow cosmopolitanism that scholarship on modernism has sustained and reinforced? By choosing 1880 as the historical starting point for this anthology’s focus on Anglo-American print media; by inviting newspaper historians, literary studies scholars, and media history specialists to address the print culture of this period as most broadly defined; by bringing together, too, a group of scholars who identify themselves variously as Americanists, Victorianists, modernist studies scholars, and/or media historians, Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940 assembles the kind of cross-disciplinary research team that Sean Latham and Robert Scholes insist is required for “modern periodical studies.” The placement of periodicals other than the much-studied modernist little magazines at the center of critical inquiry represents the final conceptual shift both advocated and enacted by this volume. Treating periodicals not conventionally linked to modernism as their primary objects of study (or consciously de-emphasizing these links), many of our contributors develop case studies of specific publications whose histories are particularly illustrative for the period. Ardis and Delap and DiCenzo raise crucial problematics of existing conceptions of print culture, Ardis by focusing on the New Age under A. R. Orage’s editorship (1907–1922) and the Crisis during its first year of operation (1910), Delap and DiCenzo by triangulating Dora Marsden’s Freewoman (1911–1913), Margaret Sanger’s Woman Rebel (1914), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Forerunner (1909–1916). Collier examines tensions in the concepts of authorship and literary value evinced in John O’London’s Weekly (1919–1964). Suzanne Churchill
6 Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940
chronicles and critiques her own audacious experiment in periodical pedagogy as she describes her students’ analyses of images of Japan in the New Yorker and generational dialogue and conflict between the Harlem Renaissance magazines Crisis and Fire!!. Illuminating the rewards and challenges inherent in using periodicals in the classroom, she makes a strong case that doing so is uniquely appropriate to today’s undergraduates, who offer a paradoxical combination of comfort with new media (including digital formats) and naiveté in evaluating information. Hackney finds in such popular British women’s magazines as Modern Woman and Woman’s Weekly a discursive modeling of new possibilities of independence for women – one articulated through but not overdetermined or irredeemably compromised by consumer culture. As these summaries suggest, our contributors’ micro-histories of specific periodicals constitute a means of attending to broad cultural debates about the dizzyingly diverse, constantly transforming print marketplace and its consequences for democracy, literacy, social order, national identity, and gender politics. By embracing what William Ulricchio calls “the mundane specificity of historical practice,” these focused studies seek in part to “disrupt and reconfigure” historical generalizations (30). The stubborn recalcitrance of historical data exposes the limitations of abstract theoretical and/or methodological models, fueling the need for further empirical research and theoretical reconceptualizations. For example, Sawaya’s chapter on Andrew Carnegie’s transatlantic dialogues with Matthew Arnold on American gift-giving and his considerable investments in English newspapers and magazines invites us to think in new ways about transatlantic exchanges in which “capital and ideas are inextricably linked” (125). Green’s essay, “Feminist Things,” asks us to consider the caveats we need to heed as the methods of analysis developed in print culture studies are brought into dialogue with thing theory, which she uses to analyze such Edwardian feminist collectibles as tea-sets, postcards, and jewelry. Her essay raises the tantalizing, even revolutionary question of how (or whether) models of the public sphere predicated on an ideal of disembodied rationality can accommodate the purportedly irrational nature of modern advertising, spectacle, and consumption. Ardis asks us to think further about both how we conceptualize a magazine’s contributions to the public sphere and how the ideals of participatory democracy are at stake in the interplay of anonymous, pseudonymous, and signed publications in some early twentieth century magazines. Mark Hampton concludes that both “theoretical and empirical” answers are needed in order for us to make progress on such questions as how the popularization of press
Introduction
7
content relates to the exercise of political power, and whether mass periodicals devoted to providing non-political content need be viewed as “sheer top-down manipulation” or whether, alternatively, popular readers can be credited with making informed choices. While literary modernism remains an organizing principle, even a preoccupation, for several of our contributors (and a point of contention for others), this volume strives to “recalibrate the measure of modernity” that necessarily exceeds the scope of research on modernisms, even as most inclusively defined.8 This collection in its totality raises the question of whether the field of modernist studies – newly invigorated as it is, and newly focused on the production of “thick” histories – is prepared to accommodate what we find when we focus our inquiry on the more anonymous, more collaborative, less coherent authorial environments of magazines like John O’London’s Weekly or such highly contingent archives as the clipping service reviews of a modernist masterwork such as Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Leonard Diepeveen focuses on the latter here, finding in such unlikely locations as the Minneapolis Bellman and the Toledo Blade a textual archive which, though it does not behave in the ways we demand of literary criticism, nonetheless mobilizes the categories through which modernism would have to validate itself: “mimesis, pragmatism, imitability, theory, and the self-evident nature of art” (288). Taking different tacks while still calling for adjustments in scholarly focus, Laurel Brake asks whether W. T. Stead’s late journalism might – in its generic hybridity, its aesthetic experimentation, and its transnationality – constitute yet another “New Modernism,” while Margaret Stetz makes a case for the contribution of middlebrow fiction to the study of modernity and the history of print media. If our contributors’ positions on such questions vary greatly, their collective work on print culture at the turn of the twentieth century nonetheless represents the next frontier of material historical research in the field. Heeding the insights and recognizing the accomplishments of the scholars of Victorian Britain whom this book acknowledges as collaborators and exemplars, we recognize the vastness of the task of mapping this print culture and interpreting its artifacts in suitably rich, empirically grounded contexts while using theoretically sound methods. Among many other activities, this endeavor entails accounting for: the diversification of print media made possible by changes in the cost and technologies of paper production and fueled by rapidly expanding literacy rates; the development of new technologies of illustration in print media; the redesign of periodicals to accommodate coverage of “human interest” stories, crime, gossip, and sports as journalism consolidated a
8 Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940
mass readership; the rise of a “modern” advertising industry and its impact on the bibliographic codes as well as the production economies of newspaper, periodical, and book publishing; the development of systems of patronage that allowed some magazine editors and artists to operate outside the pressures of the commercial marketplace (while also creating new linkages between economic capital and the realm of ideas); and the development of alternative media systems, such as those associated with Edwardian feminist publishing networks. Finding our way in this shifting print media ecology pushes us to think anew about what Margaret Stetz here calls “the culture of print culture”: that is, not simply the visual, technological, and editorial “mediamorphis” (Fidler) of print media at the turn of the twentieth century but the reading(s) of modernity that emerge from attending to the “relationship between notions of modernity and market conditions, ... the ways in which print was created and consumed, and ... the ideologies and agendas that it enabled and enforced” (Stetz 144). For the editors, this collection marks the conclusion of a process that began in the fall of 2005, with a roundtable on “Modernism Beyond the Little Magazines” at a Modernist Studies Association conference, the success of which led then to the planning of a symposium on transatlantic print culture held in April 2007 at the University of Delaware. The essays included here are developed from some of our symposium contributors’ presentations. But while this volume’s appearance brings one project to a close, our hope is that it will function, for its readers and contributors, as a beginning, a moment of dialogue, focus, and partial consolidation that will continue to bear fruit. In addition to the single-authored, book-length works that are sure to emerge from some of the work represented here, we envision future symposia and future volumes like this one. It makes sense, then, to take a moment to acknowledge some omissions: issues that must form an important part of the new field we envision here but which, through the contingencies of time, space, and availability, are notably absent from this volume. Like Victorian Studies, Irish Studies has an admirable record of empirically grounded work on print culture. While this volume contains no work on the Irish scene, a further border-crossing to Irish studies is essential, so that Irish print culture – rich with local particularities but multiply connected to both England and America – can be probed for its continuities with and complications of the transatlantic model. What, for instance, are the stakes for Irish writers of affiliation with the emergent nationalist press at the fin-de-siècle versus the desire to play on the bigger stage of London? And what sorts of liaisons – political,
Introduction
9
artistic, journalistic, and economic – were available with the diasporic community in such publishing hotbeds as Boston and Philadelphia? Similar questions could be asked of Wales and Scotland, both of which saw movements for national self-definition carried out through print culture in the period, to say nothing of Canada, which remains surprisingly invisible in discussions of print culture in English.9 Finally, while race informs several essays here, a collaborative, large-scale attempt to account for Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940 must engage far more deeply than this volume does with questions of race, among them how the literary marketplace is oriented to black writing (and vice versa), what sort of print artifacts beyond the much-discussed little magazines engage fruitfully with race questions, what transatlantic circuits of exchange and periodical communities existed for black writers, and how the larger print culture is itself racialized. Further reachings-out to the Caribbean and the (now former) English colonies of Africa – entailing further disciplinary border-crossings – hold out the promise of cross-fertilization between our transatlantic model and Paul Gilroy’s durable notion of the “Black Atlantic.” For such an account, the current volume’s focus on a relatively narrowly defined historical “moment” and a relatively limited articulation of the Atlantic scene is neither entirely appropriate nor heuristically productive, as collections such as Todd Vogel’s The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays (2001) and Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel’s Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (2005) suggest. Recent attempts to account for the global ambitions of English-language publishing at the turn of the twentieth century point out the need for further historical work on Australia, South Africa, and the Indian subcontinent.10 What all such studies underscore, however, is the value of the disciplinary border-crossings being enacted in current research on the history of print culture as the focus of our interests expands to include previously under-explored issues, genres, artifacts, and patterns of circulation, all of which bear on what Michael Warner calls the “cultural meaning of printedness” at the turn of the twentieth century (xi).
Notes 1. We use the potentially problematic term “Anglo-American” here not to imply a shared racial, cultural, or ethnic heritage but to acknowledge a unique material relationship, marked by innumerable, complex connections and networks, between the print cultures of Britain and America. 2. For a concise summary of these changes, see Williams, The Long Revolution 222–236.
10 Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940 3. A short list of works exemplifying the turn towards material historical research in modernist studies would include Joyce Wexler’s Who Paid for Modernism? Art, Money and the Fiction of Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997); Lawrence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites & Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); George Bornstein’s Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Mark Morrisson’s The Public Face of Modernism (2001), Aaron Jaffe’s Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (2005), and important essay collections such as Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt’s Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, and Rereading (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press 1996); and Ian R. Willison, Warwick Gould and Warren Chernaik’s Modernist Writers and the Marketplace (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). 4. See Collier, Modernism on Fleet Street 1–6. 5. Andrew King and John Plunkett argue that the term “print media” stresses activity and movement and process while “print culture” “risks systemization” – and therefore doesn’t do justice to the “transactional and transitive nature” of the Victorian print materials they feature in their recent collection (5). For reasons to be discussed further below, we have opted for the term “print culture” rather than “print media” not because our contributors aren’t interested in the visual, technological, and editorial transformations of print media during this period – they are – but because “culture” itself, as Raymond Williams has argued so effectively on so many occasions, is a key word through which to map changes in patterns of thinking about “modern” life. In using “culture” we are thus heeding Williams’s insistence that scholars constantly stay conscious of, and consciously move between, the three meanings of “culture” – as the pursuit of perfection, as the created material preserved and passed forward in time, and as a historically specific “particular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behavior” (57). Particularly by facilitating the move towards “institutions and ordinary behavior,” “print culture” defines a more inclusive field of study than either “print media” or “book history,” thereby providing the most useful critical option for the study of this particular historical period. 6. For further discussion of evaluative distinctions between properly “literary” materials and periodical press writing, see Laurel Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994). Examples of recent scholarship on the early-twentieth-century that productively erodes such divides include Collier, Wollaeger, and Campbell. 7. See Sean Latham and Robert Scholes,“The Rise of Periodical Studies” (PMLA 121, 2 [March 2006]: 517–531) for an important discussion of the challenges that copyright law and twentieth-century archiving practices present to further research on modern periodicals as well as to the digitization of these historical materials. Foundational studies of modernist little magazines include: Elliott Anderson and Mary Kinzie, eds, The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History (New York: Pushcart, 1978); Edward E. Chielens, American Literary Magazines: The Twentieth Century (Westport: Greenwood, 1992); Joseph R. Conlin, ed., The American Radical Press, 1880–1960, v. 1 (Westport: Greenwood, 1974); Frederick
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Hoffman, Charles Allen and Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946); and Alvin Sullivan, ed., British Literary Magazines v. 3 & 4 (Westport: Greenwood, 1983–1986). Examples of recent and forthcoming work that expands the study of modern periodicals beyond the modernist little magazines include: Anne E Carroll, “Protest and Affirmation: Composite Texts in the Crisis” (American Literature 76 [March 2004]: 89–116); Russ Castronovo, “Beauty Along the Color Line: Lynching, Aesthetics, and the Crisis.” (PMLA 121 [October 2006]: 1443–1590); David Earle, Re-Covering Modernism: Pulp Modern and the Prejudice of Form (forthcoming, Ashgate, 2008); Jane Garrity, “Selling Culture to the ‘Civilized’: Bloomsbury, British Vogue and the Marketing of National Identity” (Modernism/Modernity 6. 2 [April 1999]: 29–58); and Sharon Hamilton, “The First New Yorker? The Smart Set Magazine, 1900–1924,” (The Serials Librarian. 37. 2 [1999]: 89–104). Recent and forthcoming reconsiderations of the history of little magazines include: the multi-volume Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines that Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker are currently editing; Suzanne W. Churchill, The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of American Poetry (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006); Mark S. Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Literary Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); Churchill and Adam McKible, eds., Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (forthcoming, Ashgate, 2008) essays by Valentine Cunningham, David Finkelstein, and Hermione Lee in Jeremy Treglown and Bridget Bennett’s Grub Street and the Ivory Tower (1998); Lyn Pykett’s revisitation of Rebecca West’s early mass journalism in Kate Campbell’s Journalism, Literature, and Modernity (2000); and Joel H. Wiener and Mark Hampton, eds., Anglo-American Media Interactions, 1850–2000 (2007). The modern periodicals listserve that Robert Scholes and Sean Latham have launched is an important recent initiative to articulate and consolidate a more inclusive research field (
[email protected]). 8. We borrow phrasing here from Michael Leja, expanding the scope of his remarks from the history of modernism in the visual arts to the broader history of print culture at the turn of the twentieth century (15). 9. An exception is Ross F. Collins and E. M. Palmegiano’s The Rise of Western Journalism, 1815–1914, which includes a chapter on Canada. 10. See for instance recent work by Alpana Sharma and Peter Kalliney in Works cited.
Works cited Baldick, Chris. The Oxford English Literary History. Volume 10. 1910–1940. The Modern Movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Beer, Janet and Bridget Bennett, ed. Special Relationships: Anglo-American Affinities and Antagonisms, 1854–1936. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press/Palgrave, 2002. Brake, Laurel. “On Print Culture: The State We’re In.” Journal of Victorian Culture 6 (2001): 125–136.
12 Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940 Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. Chicago: Academy Press, 1992. Collier, Patrick. Modernism on Fleet Street. Burlington and Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Collins, Ross F. and E. M. Palmegiano, ed. The Rise of Western Journalism, 1815–1914: Essays on the Press in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States. Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland & Co., 2007. Doyle, Laura and Laura Winkiel, eds. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Fidler, Roger. Mediamorphosis: Understanding New Media. London: Sage, 1999. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Jaffe, Aaron. Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. James, Henry. “The Question of the Opportunities.” The American Essays. Ed. Leon Edel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956. 197–204. Kalliney, Peter. “Metropolitan Modernism and its West Indian Interlocutors: 1950s London and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature.” PMLA 122.1 (January 2007): 89–104. King, Andrew and John Plunkett, eds. Victorian Print Media: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Lee, Alan J. The Origins of the Popular Press in England 1855–1914. London: Croom Helm; Totowa, N. J.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1978. Leja, Michael. Looking Askance: Scepticism in American Art from Eakins to Duchamp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Morrisson, Mark S. The Public Face of Modernism: Literary Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines 1885–1905. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P, 1957. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker. Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Volume 3. (Forthcoming, Oxford: Oxford University Press). Sharma, Alpana. “In-Between Modernity: Toru Dutt (1856–1877) from a Postcolonial Perspective.” Women’s Experience of Modernity, 1875–1945. Ed. Ann L. Ardis and Leslie W. Lewis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 97–110. Uricchio, William. “Historicizing Media in Transition.” Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Eds. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003: 23–38. Vogel, Todd. The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001. Broadview Encore Editions. Repr. London: Chatto and Windus, 1961. Wollaeger, Mark. Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative From 1900 to 1945. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Part I History, Culture, and the Public Sphere: Discipline, Theory, Methodology
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1 Representing the Public Sphere: The New Journalism and Its Historians Mark Hampton
Although the heuristic concept of the “public sphere” has been frequently used by historians and media scholars of Britain and North America since the translation of Jürgen Habermas’s 1962 book into English in 1989, what we mean by the concept often remains hazy and, as Joad Raymond among others has noted, generally unsatisfactory. This stems from two causes. On the one hand, though Habermas’s account arguably remains the best general theory of the public sphere available, scholars have found much to criticize in it. Some have pointed out that Habermas was eliding normative and historically descriptive categories, and that in fact the idealized Habermasian public sphere, in which private citizens came together to discuss matters of public concern in an influential venue, has never existed in reality (Schudson, Eley). Others have taken Habermas to task for positing a unitary public sphere associated with a rising bourgeoisie as the public sphere. Rather, it should be recognized that there have been multiple publics that have always been oppositional; to characterize the dominant public sphere as the public sphere is itself a political, hegemony-seeking act (Fraser, Mah). In the face of such critiques we might be forgiven for wondering whether the term is even worth saving. On the other hand, scholars who do not necessarily intend to capture a Habermasian argument often employ “public sphere” rather uncritically.1 This problem is particularly acute for historians of Britain’s New Journalism.2 Not only is the media – the singular noun speaks what Gitlin calls “the truth of a grammatical error” (7) – a primary site for any really existing public sphere3 but the New Journalism also involved changes in content and form that would seem to embody what Habermas called the public sphere’s “structural transformation”; moreover, these 15
16 Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940
changes happened, albeit gradually, during the approximate period in which Habermas situates this, in his view, unfortunate transformation. In fact, given the obvious connections the New Journalism has with Habermas’ much-discussed meta-historical category, it is, if anything, surprising that the public sphere hasn’t been even more central in the scholarship concerning the New Journalism. However under-theorized its view of the public sphere might be, scholarship about the New Journalism focuses at least implicitly on this concept – and indeed did so even before the appearance of Structural Transformation in English promoted the greater use of the term. In doing so, moreover, this scholarship is working within categories that the New Journalism’s contemporary critics employed. This is not surprising: although Habermas brought a new analytical sophistication to the concept, the heart of his idea of the public sphere comprises norms that date to the Enlightenment and were central to nineteenth-century understandings of the British press. In particular, commentators on the daily press very often attributed to it a central role in the creation of an imperfect and limited, but increasingly inclusive, politics by public discussion. The changes of content, form, and political economy associated with the New Journalism, and the perception that a once serious political and cultural medium was becoming a mere commodity provoked contemporary criticisms that were, in essence, Habermasian. Such themes as the fragmentation of a common political discourse and the trivialization and depoliticization of press content can be seen, for example, in the sophisticated contemporary arguments of R. A. Scott-James and G. Binney Dibblee.4 Since most scholarly examinations of the New Journalism focus on content analysis, changes in form, and economic reorganization – with a few attempting the more difficult task of analyzing reader response – understandings of the public sphere are at the center of this topic. As Craig Calhoun has noted, “a public sphere adequate to a democratic polity depends upon both quality of discourse and quantity of participation” (2). Although this seems unobjectionable, when we look at how scholars of the New Journalism have understood the nature of the public sphere, it becomes clear that neither of Calhoun’s criteria means the same thing to everyone. Rather, scholars differ, first, in the extent to which they will regard increasing incorporation of content other than parliamentary politics and “questions of the day” into daily newspapers as evidence of, on the one hand, a democratically expanded public sphere or, on the other, a distracting culture of consolation that facilitated a pseudo-democratic manipulation of an increasingly literate but unevenly enfranchised populace. One need look no further than
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Laurel Brake’s exploration of W. T. Stead’s politically activist annuals in this volume to see that an easy alignment of the techniques of New Journalism with the apolitical and “popular” can be inadequate in characterizing individual editors and publications. This dichotomy between the serious, public-spirited “old” journalism and the commercial and consolatory “New” closely relates to a second one: scholars disagree on whether or not to follow Habermas in categorizing the public sphere strictly in terms of rational discourse. If they do, then much of the New Journalism is viewed as a pseudo-democratic manipulation, broadly reinforcing Habermas’s argument; if not, then the New Journalism’s diversification of content and expansion of readership looks like a healthy expansion of the public sphere – an altogether different “structural transformation” than the one Habermas envisioned. The dichotomy forecloses the question of whether discursive interventions that are self-consciously political but not obviously “rational” – for instance, the attempts of first-wave feminists and women’s suffrage activitists to create community through a commodity culture that engages women’s fantasy lives, as discussed in Barbara Green’s chapter in this volume – can or should be viewed as partaking in a public or counter-public sphere. Third, scholars of the New Journalism differ in the extent to which they consider the public sphere in the singular or in only plural terms. For scholars in the latter group, audience fragmentation or narrowcasting is, presumably, no threat to the concept of a “public sphere.” Yet it would seem that those who insist on plural terms unwittingly make at least part of Habermas’s point for him: whatever we may say about the nineteenth-century public sphere, by the fin de siècle any hope for a unified public sphere by means of the press was seriously undermined by the multiplicity of audiences. This point, of course, begs the question of whether the idea of a common political culture ever had any plausibility, or whether the concept of a fragmenting public sphere through the New Journalism is already undermined by the fragmentation of even the mid-Victorian press. These dichotomies can be seen concretely in some of the impressive recent scholarship on the New Journalism, which I will examine selectively in this essay. Jean Chalaby’s stimulating 1998 book, The Invention of Journalism, is one of the strongest recent statements of the New Journalism’s complicity in a Habermasian transformation of the public sphere from rational, political, and (potentially) unitary to manipulative, depoliticized, and fragmented. Moreover, while some of the scholars treat the public sphere implicitly and loosely, Chalaby, a
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sociologist, is both explicit and theoretically sophisticated in his treatment. For example, in his analysis of W. T. Stead’s foundational New Journalism articles from 1886, “Government by Journalism” and “The Future of Journalism,” Chalaby presents them as the “first journalistic interpretation of the notion of public opinion” (138). For Chalaby, journalism is a modern, post-1855 field of discursive production in which economic competition is “not the only form of struggle within the field, but the most important”; economic competition is “a chief determinant of journalists’ discursive practices and thus of the philological characteristics of the texts they write” (34). Accordingly, Stead’s “journalistic interpretation” of public opinion is poll-based, which is to say that it entails (in Chalaby’s words) “unrelated and separate opinions which are artificially combined by the pollster,” opinions that are “personal and remain those of unrelated individuals who did not express them collectively,” and that are “private, because individuals who hold them did not plan to publicly voice them” (138). Chalaby presents Stead as the prescient articulator of a journalistic definition of public opinion that became common in the twentieth century, when journalists used opinion polls both to legitimate their discourse and to undermine politicians’ legitimacy – a definition of public opinion that sharply contrasts with the Enlightenment notion of a progressive and rational public opinion that was “deliberately and collectively made public by an organized and collective group” (138). In Chalaby’s account, the New Journalism is important as a transitional stage between what he calls “publicity” and what he calls “journalism.” Although not all of the features of contemporary journalism were instantly mature in the late nineteenth century, the New Journalism can thus be analyzed by means of journalistic practices that became clear only later. In this regard, Chalaby’s use of Warren Breed’s concept of the press as a “magic mirror” is of most interest. In Chalaby’s words: Newspapers, those reaching a popular audience in particular, may try to influence or even manipulate their readers, but they will never attempt to educate them. Unlike publicists, journalists never address the possible consciousness of their readers. Journalists safely remain within the boundaries of what they think their readers already know and already believe. Chalaby continues, claiming that the magic-mirror function provides “the comfort of knowledge without the substance” (191).
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For Chalaby, then, the public sphere, properly defined, is rational, educational, and political, qualities that he associates with a prejournalistic press given to “publicity.” The New Journalism entails the erosion of this sort of public sphere. His vision of the public sphere is, moreover, mainstream and potentially inclusive and unitary; he analyzes what he sees as the depoliticization of the mainstream press, giving little attention to the publicist characteristics of the smallcirculation alternative press. In addition, it is worth pointing out that Chalaby draws a firm line between the political and the commercial; he does not register the interrelationship between commerce and political activism, commodity culture and “publicity,” that chapters in this present collection make visible through discussions of Votes for Women and New Age cigarettes, for example, or feminist collectibles like tea-sets and jewelry.5 Martin Conboy, in The Press and Popular Culture (2002), similarly restricts himself to the mainstream press. Like Chalaby, Conboy is interested in journalistic discourse, but he does not make similarly hard distinctions between publicity and journalism, or between political and commercial, or active and passive. Indeed, although paying attention to the political economy of journalism, Conboy offers a more complex view of the interplay between commercialized discourse and the public sphere. For Conboy, the New Journalism’s style depended upon “the confluence of other features such as technology, market economics and the politics of the popular and political democracy.” He continues, arguing that The dialogue between readers and popular newspapers, whether literal, as in the letters pages, or part of the textualization of the readership in the layout, language and advertising of the newspaper, became a critical and a dynamic component in the legitimation of its popular appeal and thereby its commercial success. (96) Which is to say that democratic dialogue, style, and marketing are all mutually reinforcing. Although, like Chalaby, Conboy sees the New Journalism as part of a longer-term trend toward aligning media with the “economic status quo,” and even refers to the late twentieth-century press as “hegemony in action” (162), he insists on the subversive potential of a journalistic discourse that is dependent upon popular appeal, and argues that the late twentieth-century anxieties over tabloidization or dumbing down represent fears that the ever-fragile
20 Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940
hegemony, based upon incorporating the popular into the political, might be slipping (181). More importantly for my present purposes, Conboy sees the popular as quite distinct from the norms of the Habermasian bourgeois public sphere, and sees the mid-century working-class Sunday press – which is the widely acknowledged predecessor of the New Journalism – as including “many elements of the carnivalesque and sensational narratives which had been the staple of popular culture for centuries” (86). To consider the New Journalism as part of a “structural transformation of the public sphere,” then, misses the point; rather, the New Journalism belongs within a long tradition of folk and popular culture onto which some critical elements of a bourgeois public sphere are now grafted.6 Whereas for Chalaby, the New Journalism – or what he calls, simply, the creation of journalism itself – is a direct challenge to a popular public sphere embodied in the unstamped press, the Northern Star, and other radical papers of the early nineteenth century, for Conboy it is indicative of a hegemony-creating, but nonetheless authentic, popular public sphere that does not follow Habermasian norms. The radical, politically engaged working-class press of the 1820s–1840s is the historical anomaly, not the New Journalism.7 Despite substantive differences between their arguments, both Chalaby and Conboy agree in attributing to the New Journalism the origins of a discursive and functional gap between the elite and popular presses, and in characterizing the popular press as an agent of hegemony.8 By contrast, Michelle Tusan’s Women Making News and Kate Jackson’s George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain both emphasize the opportunities for educational and politically counter-hegemonic journalistic values to flourish in the commercial atmosphere of the New Journalism. In their tellings, a Habermasian, rational and politically engaged public is able to withstand the commodification that Jean Chalaby sees as producing escapism. Both achieve this rehabilitation of the New Journalism’s public sphere, though, only by acknowledging market or audience segmentation. Their public spheres are decidedly plural, which is to say they do not regard it as a problem that segmented audiences would not engage with each other in a common discussion. In Tusan’s case, this result is achieved by, at least implicitly, writing off the mainstream press and focusing on the explicitly suffragist press as what Fraser would call a counter-public sphere. Tusan’s protagonists engage with significant “questions of the day,” and they challenge the political status quo, even while borrowing conventions from the commercialized New Journalism; on the other hand, they are a small number, their
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papers tend to survive largely through charitable contributions, and their accomplishments do nothing to challenge Chalaby’s conclusions about the mainstream press. Jackson’s book, by contrast, focuses on the publishing empire of one of the leading entrepreneurs of the New Journalism, and so its implications for a mainstream public sphere are more pronounced. She argues that Newnes was able to combine “culture and profit,” to make an educational press commercially successful. He was able to blend qualities of the New Journalism – including stylistic innovations as well as non-political content – with serious political discussion. His success, though, depended upon carving out separate market niches, and the balance between culture and profit, or between what we might call engaged public sphere and escapism, varied from one title to the next. The Westminster Gazette, with a small, elite liberal public, could engage more directly and more extensively with public affairs than could Tit-Bits, which had a larger and less educated audience; but the Gazette was run as a loss leader supported by revenues from other parts of Newnes’s publishing empire.9 Jackson insists that even Tit-Bits was educational, and elevated the tone found in the mid-century popular press, but it certainly would not meet Chalaby’s Habermasian standard of a critical public sphere. Both Tusan and Jackson maintain, convincingly I think, that the changes in content, form, and marketing techniques associated with the New Journalism are not inherently incompatible with a political culture of public discussion. Both, moreover, emphasize the function of niche papers – whether politically devoted or largely commercial – in building communities. For both Jackson and Tusan, the public sphere is, in effect, made up of separate communities that organize around distinct papers. According to Jackson, “all of Newnes’s magazines represented the attempt to maintain an interactive relationship with readers and to manufacture a community of interest, through editorials, correspondence columns, competitions and other features, in place of the organic neighbourhood in which rural people had enjoyed close personal involvement” (272). This is a comparison to rural community, but not, notice, to village government; by contrast, R. A. Scott-James, writing in 1913, compared the elite press to a polis, in other words to a political community. More specifically, Jackson compares the Strand readership to a professional community and a middle class club, while the Westminster Gazette “appealed to a close-knit circle of educated and like-minded gentleman readers” (273). Tusan’s public, on the other hand, is defined as an engaged political community, one self-consciously defined against the mainstream press
22
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in which “current events, political commentary, and an open forum for debate over contemporary issues simply did not have a place” (33). But not only are these readers a small number, they also self-consciously defined themselves as an alternative community: As Tusan says, “periodicals like the English Woman’s Journal attempted to redefine its audience’s relationship to the news by claiming political topics as ‘women’s concerns’ ” (34). Citing Kate Flint and Benedict Anderson, Tusan emphasizes the community-building aspect of reading: “Through the ‘ritual’ act of regularly reading advocacy journals, women participated in a new kind of woman-centered political community that helped create a collective gender-based identity” (34). While making this statement in the context of discussing the English Woman’s Journal, however, she also points out that men read it, and that it was read as far away as New Zealand; pre-dating the New Journalism, its circulation peaked in 1858 at about 1000 per month. A generation later, in the era of the New Journalism, Tusan finds the same community-building function in reading the women’s advocacy press. Describing the Edwardian paper, Votes for Women, Tusan argues that the journal was both critical and sensationalistic, making use of “human interest stories” to highlight social injustice suffered by women. Using rhetorical devices associated with the New Journalism, Votes for Women “played a crucial role both in creating an informed community of women radicals and in directing their activities” (160). At the same time, its rival, Common Cause, published foreign and domestic general news as well as information about the sponsoring organization, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (160–161); in political terms it embodied the “constitutionalist” alternative to the militance of Votes for Women, while in journalistic terms it countered the sensationalism of Votes with an earnestness (though not a perspective) that could have made Matthew Arnold proud. Which is to say that an already small and distinctly alternative public, one devoted to suffrage, was further segmented. Without claiming that these four texts exhaust the field, we can take stock of what they suggest about the range of understandings of the public sphere in the scholarship of the New Journalism. First, they present a significant spectrum between optimism and pessimism about the possibility for an engaged critical public to persist in a journalistic field driven by increasingly competitive market pressures, rising barriers to entry, and the rising importance of advertising as a patronage system for journalism. Tusan and Jackson allow greater room for optimism than do Chalaby or Conboy, particularly because of their appreciation
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for the ways that sensationalist discourse could be employed critically or educationally; both Chalaby and Conboy tend to see dichotomous pseudo-controversies masking a (sub-rational) consensus-building. Yet in another way Tusan does not contradict these communication scholars. Hegemony is not the same thing as unanimity, and the mass readerships earned by the popular press between 1880 and 1950 were not threatened by small-circulation journals that facilitated counterpublics. Tusan argues, however, that the importance of these journals rested in the networks and movements they helped to sustain, rather than in the sheer numbers who read them. This is a fruitful approach, and it invites us to pursue further the ways in which – or the extent to which – smaller activist publics interacted with mainstream, depoliticized or hegemonic journals. Nancy Fraser posits a multiplicity of publics coming together in “an additional, more comprehensive arena in which members of different, more limited publics talk across lines of cultural diversity” – a matter she wisely argues is “better treated as an empirical question than as a conceptual question” (17).10 In the context of the New Journalism’s small-circulation alternative press, we might ask which mainstream papers took notice of them, how often, and in what ways? And what mainstream newspapers did members of these reading communities also read? In addition to questions about changing media content, in the context of the New Journalism, a Habermasian argument for the structural transformation of the public sphere depends upon a particular view of readers. Even if one accepts Chalaby’s notion of a depoliticized, manipulative journalistic field, it does not follow that non-elite readers helplessly read in the hegemony-supporting manner in which the text is intended. Later contexts, whether through opinion polls or controlled academic studies, provide ambiguous evidence on this question. Evidence from Mass-Observation suggests that working-class readers in the 1930s read their newspapers skeptically, but it also suggests that many – especially women – read for escapism, so that their newspapers’ politics were incidental (Hampton, Visions 157–158).11 Critics were famously surprised to discover that the character Archie Bunker in All in the Family, created as a liberal send-up of a conservative working-class idiot, was re-appropriated by audiences who identified with his illexpressed opinions (Baughman 145–147). In the middle of the twentieth century, American “limited effects” research suggested that the role of the media in influencing opinion was vastly overstated, but more recent research has countered that media are more influential in opinionformation concerning topics about which the audience member has less
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prior knowledge (Corner). In addition, Marco Calavita’s recent work suggests that although the limited effects researchers showed minimal short-term influence of the media on specific opinions, the cumulative influence of media on political formation is considerable. Moreover, beyond the issue of opinion-formation, we are still confronted with questions of media’s role in engendering passive consent or distraction. Unfortunately, we are rarely in a position to learn how non-elite readers understood the New Journalism; most scholars necessarily depend upon inferences from the text, evaluating the reading methods that are implied by the construction of community in the journal itself.12 Jonathan Rose’s empirically rich Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes is a rare glimpse into the reading process of serious workingclass readers, while Christopher Hilliard’s To Exercise our Talents uncovers an extensive range of working- and lower-middle class writers, something Hilliard says amounts to a “democratization of writing.” Clearly the protagonists in these works are strong counter-examples to the most extreme version of Frankfurt school images of a highly suggestible mass audience passively imbibing escapist fare or, worse, militarist propaganda.13 Yet it is worth pointing out that not only are both books concerned with a fairly small segment of the non-elite population, but that those protagonists’ reading and writing was generally not directly political. Rose’s intellectuals are often concerned with cultural matters less ephemeral than mere politics (and with texts less ephemeral than periodicals, though periodicals do appear throughout Rose’s book), while Hilliard’s embrace the market and their generally modest place within it. Chalaby argues that the press defined by the “journalistic field” tends to refrain from challenging popular readers’ conventional thinking; Hilliard’s writers seem to have internalized and embraced this line of thinking, having no patience for those who thought themselves too elevated to write for the market. Rose and Hilliard present a public sphere that is participatory, and in theory open to all, qualities that belie the Habermasian “structural transformation,” but one that is also in practice sharply limited in membership and, in its non-political emphasis, a public sphere that is safely removed from the notion of politics by public discussion. Their accounts valuably show that the New Journalism not only responded to new reading markets, but also (particularly in Hilliard’s story) provided numerous opportunities for non-elite writers to write for the press both in paid and unpaid capacities. As in the Habermasian model, readers could become writers. Yet the type of public sphere in these accounts does not inherently cause problems for Chalaby’s argument.
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First, as stated above, it does not particularly address the depoliticization argument. Second, the existence of non-elite, including amateur, copy in an expanding press says nothing about questions of power and editorial decision-making. Arguably, the threshold for a “public sphere adequate to a democratic polity” (to return to Calhoun’s phrase) is not met simply because the papers provide space, at the editors’ discretion, for a number of non-professional contributions that (mostly) follow norms set by the editors. Third, there is the question of numbers: Chalaby’s “magic mirror” argument does not depend on everybody’s looking in the mirror, nor does Conboy’s “hegemony in action” require uniform acquiescence. In addition, the opportunities for non-elite and amateur writers in the “marketplace” of journalism can be read, contrary to Hilliard’s more optimistic portrayal, as a proprietorial/editorial tactic not only for acquiring cheap copy, but also for resisting incipient moves toward the professionalization of journalism.14 Whether or not we explicitly use the phrase “public sphere,” this concept is central to the discussion of the New Journalism. Even with the now widespread rejection of the idea that the New Journalism was a sharp break from an older, more elevated model, the sheer scale of circulation increases, multiplication of titles and genres, transformation of publishing into large-scale businesses, and changes in newspaper and periodical style and content – coinciding temporally with a dramatic 50-year process of creating a mass electorate – prompts us to look for connections between these transformations. We often talk past each other by not hammering out both theoretical and empirical answers to specific questions that I will present in clusters: First, does the kind of democratization that comes from including more features that popular readers want, sold at more affordable prices thanks to economies of scale and advertising subsidies, and presented in a popular vernacular, have a function that is related to the exercise of political power? If so, then what is that function? Second, as a theoretical matter, is an expansion of the journalistic public via journals with content that is largely non-political to be taken as evidence of the audience’s distraction from more properly “public” affairs – itself a frequently contested category, as Fiona Hackney’s essay in this book illustrates?15 If so, then (still theoretically) do we take this as top-down manipulation and governmentality, or give the non-political public credit for being broadly content with the status quo – a defensible position – and through the democracy of the market choosing nuances within this acceptable status quo? The latter position has its attractiveness, but is it compromised by unequal access to the journalistic
26 Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940
products of the market-mediated public sphere? Third, how do activist journals and segmented markets relate to a wider public sphere? Can we connect them empirically, by documenting overlapping audiences and which journals take notice of which others, or are they best understood as distinct communities within a fragmented public sphere in which a common “conversation,” a democratic politics by public discussion, is hopeless? The chapter by Lucy Delap and Maria DiCenzo in the present book suggests a fruitful approach to demonstrating such connections, showing in particular that initially obscure debates in low-circulation journals could be taken up by mass-circulation papers and, even more originally, that papers that were solidly “alternative” on one side of the Atlantic could introduce mainstream political discussions on the other. As I said, such questions require both empirical and theoretical answers, and will depend in large part on the political temperament of the historian, particularly with respect to the question of whether the optimistic side of Habermas’s universal public sphere can transcend its origins as a political tool of particular dominant groups. But if our (sometimes hidden) assumptions are engaged, then historians of Britain’s New Journalism have an important contribution to make to evolving understandings of the really existing public sphere and the prospects of a democratic politics by public discussion.
Notes 1. In this regard, “public sphere” may be compared to similar uses of such terms as “imagined community,” “paradigm shift,” “habitus,” and “discourse.” 2. In keeping with the range of scholarship under discussion, this essay takes a broad view of the New Journalism. In essence, it refers to such changes of style and focus as an increasing emphasis on news, particularly human interest rather than overtly political, a turning to shorter paragraphs and sentences, the use of pictures and headlines, and the courting by the daily press of new classes of readers, all in the context of increasing industrialization and ownership concentration. Though the debates about these changes exploded in the 1880s (and the term itself was coined by Matthew Arnold in 1887), it has been convincingly shown that the transformations were more gradual than most contemporaries believed. See Williams, 1961: 215–229; Wiener, “How New” 1988. 3. For examinations of the relevance of the concept of a public sphere to mass media more broadly, see Curran, 1991; Dahlgren, 1991; Garnham, 1992; Thompson, 1995: 69–75. 4. For the broader history of this political discourse, see Hampton, Visions; Collier, 2006.
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5. See also Örnebring, 2006 for an incisive discussion of the ways in which mainstream tabloid journalism can, in certain contexts, contribute to constructing an alternative public sphere; one of his case studies is W. T. Stead’s notorious “Maiden Tribute” campaign. 6. For Chalaby, this role is filled by such devices as crusades, pseudocontroversies, and the press’s watchdog role. 7. For a more optimistic assessment of the late-nineteenth-century changes in British and American journalism, see Wiener, “Get the News!” 8. Conboy goes to greater lengths to emphasize the two-way, dialogic elements of this discourse, but the hegemonic result is not very different. 9. The mass circulation papers providing a subsidy for papers engaging critically with “questions of the day” might be compared to early network television public affairs programs in the United States, which were similarly thought of as cost centers subsidized by profitable programs. The latter example, of course, was a product of direct regulation by the state. 10. Fraser gives the late twentieth-century example of domestic violence against women moving from an issue seen as a public concern only by a feminist minority, to a mainstream “common concern” (19–20). 11. We should keep in mind that Mass-Observation files are not the unmediated views of their respondents, but are filtered through social researchers. 12. This is Jackson’s primary approach. On the other hand, for examinations of the debates on working-class readers and reading, see Flint, 1993; Sumpter, 2006. Altick, 1957 and McAleer, 1992 remain indispensable guides to the wider history of popular reading. 13. See Schiller, 1996: 39–87 for a historical examination of the idea of the media as a tool of “domination.” For a recent articulation of the “domination” thesis, see Hardt, 2004. 14. To be sure, treating journalism as a profession with credentials for participation is problematic in its own way with respect to a Habermasian public sphere. For the relationship between the public sphere and professionalization during the era of the New Journalism, see Hampton, “Journalists” 2005; Hampton, “Defining.” See also Collini, 1991: 199–250 for the argument that an increasing number of public matters were redefined in the late nineteenth century as technical questions for experts, rather than questions to be decided by “public” debate. 15. As Hackney shows, issues such as marriage, women’s wages, and other formerly “private” or “domestic” matters became important public questions in the interwar commercial women’s magazines. A defender of the classic public sphere might regard such topics as purely “private,” but the interwar magazines Hackney describes clearly regarded that perspective as unfairly seeking hegemony, by depoliticizing and normalizing the gender status quo.
Works cited Altick, Richard Daniel. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983.
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Baughman, James L. The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America since 1941. 2nd ed. Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Calavita, Marco. Apprehending Politics: News Media and Individual Political Development. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Calhoun, Craig. “Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere.” Habermas and the Public Sphere. Ed. Craig Calhoun. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. 1–48. Chalaby, Jean. The Invention of Journalism. London: Macmillan, 1998. Collier, Patrick. Modernism on Fleet Street. Burlington and Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Collini, Stefan. Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Conboy, Martin. The Press and Popular Culture. London: Sage Publications, 2002. Corner, John. “ ‘Influence’: The Contested Core of Media Research.” Mass Media and Society, 3rd ed. Eds. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch. London: Arnold, 2000. 376–397. Curran, James. “Rethinking the Media as a Public Sphere.” Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the Public Sphere. Eds. Peter Dahlgren and Colin Sparks. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. 27–57. Dahlgren, Peter. “Introduction.” Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the Public Sphere. Eds. Peter Dahlgren and Colin Sparks. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. 1–24. Dibblee, G. Binney. The Newspaper. London: Williams & Norgate, 1913. Eley, Geoff. “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century.” Habermas and the Public Sphere. Ed. Craig Calhoun. 1992. 289–339. Flint, Kate. The Woman Reader, 1837–1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” The Phantom Public Sphere. Ed. Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 1–32. Garnham, Nicholas. “The Media and the Public Sphere.” Habermas and the Public Sphere. Craig Calhoun. 1992. 359–376. Gitlin, Todd. Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2002. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, (1962). Trans. Thomas Burger (with the Assistance of Frederick Lawrence). Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. Hampton, Mark. “Defining Journalists in Late-Nineteenth Century Britain.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22 (June 2005): 138–155. ——. “Journalists and the ‘Professional Ideal’ in Britain: the Institute of Journalists, 1884–1907.” Historical Research 72 (June 1999): 183–201. ——. Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Hardt, Hanno. Myths for the Masses: An Essay on Mass Communication. London: Blackwell, 2004. Hilliard, Christopher. To Exercise our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2006. Jackson, Kate. George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880–1910: Culture and Profit. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.
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McAleer, Joseph. Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914–1950. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992. Mah, Harold. “Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians.” The Journal of Modern History 72 (March 2000): 153–182. Örnebring, Henrik. “The Maiden Tribute and the Naming of Monsters: Two Case Studies of Tabloid Journalism as an Alternative Public Sphere.” Journalism Studies 7 (No. 6, 2006): 851–868. Raymond, Joad. “Seventeenth Century Print Culture.” History Compass 2 (2004) BI 123, 1–12. Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. Schiller, Dan. Theorizing Communication: A History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Schudson, Michael. “Was There Ever a Public Sphere? If So, When? Reflections on the American Case.” Habermas and the Public Sphere. Ed. Craig Calhoun. 1992. 143–163. Scott-James, R. A. The Influence of the Press. London: Partridge and Co., 1913. Sumpter, Caroline. “The Cheap Press and the ‘Reading Crowd’: Visualizing Mass Culture and Modernity, 1838–1910.” Media History 12 (December 2006): 238–252. Thompson, John B. The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Tusan, Michelle Elizabeth. Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Wiener, Joel H. “ ‘Get the News! Get the News!’ Speed in Transatlantic Journalism, 1830–1914.” Anglo-American Media Interactions. Eds. Joel H. Wiener and Mark Hampton. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. 48–66. ——. “How New was the New Journalism?” Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s to 1914. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. 47–71. Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution (1961). Revised ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
2 Staging the Public Sphere: Magazine Dialogism and the Prosthetics of Authorship at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Ann Ardis
Although film is often described as the first new media form of the twentieth century, recent scholarship on the “mediamorphosis” of print at the turn of the twentieth century suggests that we should also be thinking of print as a new media form during this period.1 Complexly related to both the dazzlingly, distractingly visual cultures of modernity and the world of things, print media are center-stage in the period’s conversations about the possibility of radical democracy in a mass society, the function of the arts in a republic, and the intellectual “health” of modern culture. A point that Patrick Collier makes specifically about newspapers in Britain in the early twentieth century is thus germane to the larger field of transatlantic print media studies that is this anthology’s focus. Newspapers, he writes in Modernism on Fleet Street, were “the most controversial medium of the age of modernism” (1). By 1922 cultural commentators “had been arguing for more than two decades that transformations in British newspapers posed a peril to the nation ... [and] that newspapers had declined from Victorian traditions of ‘sober, restrained and responsible journalism’ to an intellectually bankrupt, profit-driven pursuit of ever-increasing circulations” (1). As Collier goes on to note, broader social concerns loom behind such arguments: namely, “in a public sphere dominated by advertising, mass circulation dailies, and pulp serials, [is] continued democratization possible, or desirable? [Does] mass publication produc[e] – or cate[r] to – a public not only inattentive to serious literature but incapable of selfgovernment, increasingly prone to irrational mob thinking?” What is the
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role of the arts “in a print-saturated, democratic society” in which the “viability of participatory democracy” is fundamentally at question (6)? That such questions were raised on both sides of the Atlantic, not just in a British context, begins to suggest why a transformed culture of print, not film, is the first as well as the most important new media form of the twentieth century; they also fuel my interest in magazines that treat politics, literature, and the arts organically rather than honoring the logic of “modern” disciplinary specialization in imagining their scope of interest. In this chapter I draw my examples mainly from three magazines: the New Age under A.R. Orage’s editorship (1907–1922); the Crisis in the first year of W.E.B. DuBois’s editorship (1910); and Dora Marsden’s New Freewoman (June–December 1913). These magazines share several things: confidence in the “educational ideal” of the periodical press, which some scholars have argued is a residual rather than a primary function of the press by the early twentieth century, but which is absolutely central to the work of these periodicals;2 a belief that the arts have a role to play in larger projects of social “uplift”; and a commitment to reaching socially and educationally diverse readerships. Such commitments bear significantly on how these magazines launched themselves into a rapidly expanding media marketplace and positioned themselves in relation to other periodicals. Rather than developing “vertical” micro-histories of these magazines, however, I want to use my discussion of them here as an occasion for raising two key methodological questions for modern periodical studies. Namely, how do we conceptualize a magazine’s contribution to a public sphere whose very nature and character was being transformed by the “revolution” of the printed text at the turn of the twentieth century (Carey 5)? And how do we conceptualize authorship in these deliberately and complexly performative authorial environments, where the play of signed, pseudonymous, semi-pseudonymous, and anonymous writings further complicates what Michael Warner terms the “prosthetic” personhood of a “disembodied public subject” (381)? Drawing on recent theoretical, bibliographic, and archival scholarship, and making reference to a course I teach on turn-of-thetwentieth-century British and American magazines,3 I begin to address in this essay some of the “complexities of periodical culture” that will need to be investigated still further as we proceed with the “reassessment of modernism, media technology, and print culture” that has been facilitated by the recent “cultural turn of the humanities” (Latham, “Magazine Modernism” 2).
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Towards a theory of the periodical as a publishing genre4 Recent work in textual editing theory by George Bornstein and others calls attention to the fact that “bibliographic” and “contextual codes” can change linguistic meaning even when the “linguistic code” of a text, the words on the page, remain the same. But if studies such as Material Modernism pioneered the work of attending to the materiality of literary modernism, their focus is only tangentially on periodicals as objects of study in their own right. So we still have to ask ourselves some very fundamental questions: do we view periodicals as “coherent mixed genres” in which diverse materials are juxtaposed and resolved into more complex wholes (Nelson 15)? Or do we recognize that some periodicals “deliberately resist such synthesis by courting debate and fomenting scandals predicated precisely on their incoherence” (Latham, Magazine Modernism 2)? Sean Latham and Robert Scholes have called our attention to “the hole in the archive” created when archivists and editors treat a magazine’s advertisements, covers, and paper wrappers as ephemera to be discarded, archiving only its “serious” contents (Latham and Scholes 520). Determining that a periodical’s textual archive is complete is a very real challenge in modern periodical studies. But as Ellen Gruber Garvey’s research on late-nineteenth-century advertising suggests, we also need to recognize that generic divides between a magazine’s advertising copy and its non-advertising content were often deliberately undermined during this period, enabling the “transmutation” of the “sponsored speech of ads” into “the apparently free – both unfettered and without cost – speech of conversation” (94). Thus we also have to ask: when is “news” indistinguishable from advertising and/or fiction in turn-of-the-century periodicals, and how do these permeable generic boundaries influence a reader’s experience? Students in my course on British and American magazines are astute readers of publishers’ advertisements in the Yellow Book and Blast, recognizing immediately how John Lane’s advertisements in the endpapers of the first issue of Blast link these two magazines – and contradict the bibliographic avant-gardism of Blast’s “content” pages. They are also quick to grasp how the Crisis used advertisements for its printer and for modern office machinery to establish credibility with up-market readerships and commercial enterprises. They are far less comfortable, however, with the bibliographic codes of the Clarion, where Robert Blatchford borrows freely from patent medicine advertisements in promoting the publication of “cheap and good books” like his serialized
Magazine Dialogism 33
novel, “Julie,” and where puffs and blind ads for Grasshopper Ointment, Mother Siegel’s Syrup, and Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People borrow equally freely from the New Journalism’s human interest news reporting techniques.5 Deliberate obfuscations of distinctions that they tend to assume are categorical rather than historical – for example, between fact and fiction, art and commerce, and between a magazine’s advertising and non-advertising materials – surprise and confuse them. They don’t expect such sophistication and complexity in their reading experience of historical materials. On the one hand, my experience teaching this course lends support to Suzanne Churchill’s argument elsewhere in this volume about how the teaching of magazine studies exposes students to the experimentation of “writers, artists, activists, entrepreneurs, and ad agents ... with forms – including forms of periodicals” – as well as “ideas” (311). On the other hand, it raises important methodological questions for scholarship in modern periodical studies. Is a taxonomy of “genres” borrowed from literary studies adequate for our purposes in making periodicals our primary object of study? Or do issues of audience and reception history inevitably frustrate any and all attempts to stabilize formal definitions of the periodical as a publishing genre, as Margaret Beetham has suggested? Does a taxonomy of genres also assume a kind of formal stability that many periodicals simply did not have during this particular period of tremendous expansion and transformation in print media? The Athenaeum’s visual “look” was relatively stable during this period, for example, in spite of the rapid turnover in editorships and its final editor’s attempt to modernize its literary offerings.6 By contrast, the layout and bibliographic “branding” of magazines like the Little Review, Crisis, and the New Age shifted radically in the 1910s. Still other methodological questions to consider: can a formal taxonomy of genres account for what Laurel Brake has characterized as the permeability of genres within print culture in noting how materials published originally in one media form get repackaged for circulation in other media (Print in Transition 3)? Are we better served by organic modelings of genres as evolutionary “trees” and of print media “ecosystems” that can evolve both radically and rapidly over time, as Franco Moretti argues in Graphs, Maps, Trees? By replacing “old, useless distinctions (high and low; canon and archive; this or that national literature)” with “temporal, spatial, and morphological distinctions” that “concretely change the way we work” (91, emphasis in original), Moretti “widen[s] the domain of the literary historian, and enrich[es] its internal problematic” (2). Or might theoretical models and metaphors of
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periodical “networks” (Hampton) and “communication circuits” (Darnton) that are themselves derived from modern media technologies serve us even better? Maria DiCenzo and Lucy Delap’s discussion elsewhere in this volume of R. A. Scott-James’ characterization of magazines as “wires” (73) building local, regional, national, and transnational circuits of information, opinion, and social identification is an example of the latter kind of modeling. Scholarship in modern periodical studies will need to grapple further with these kinds of questions about the methodologies and theoretical underpinnings of this research field as it continues to develop, taking full advantage of the wealth of research in Victorian periodical and print culture studies in doing so. Such meta-critical questions also surface in the classroom, however, as was the case when my students read the inaugural issue of the English Review alongside Mark Morrisson’s discussion of the issues Ford Madox Hueffer faced in re-imagining the function of a monthly “review” when he assumed its editorship in 1909. Impatient with both the narrow literariness of Edwardian literary magazines and the political partisanship of contemporary reviews, Hueffer aspired instead to the ideal disinterestedness and comprehensiveness he perceived in both the Mercure de France and the mid-Victorian Fortnightly Review. As Morrisson notes, “material markers of genre, such as price, page size, types of advertising, and frequency of publication, all contribute to a reader’s horizon of expectations for a magazine” (39). Such markers remained quite stable in the English Review during Hueffer’s editorship; its “look” and pricing did not shift or evolve appreciably during this period. Yet Hueffer was “unable to form a meaningful link in the public mind between the ‘purely’ literary” materials he frontloaded in each issue of the magazine and the “political and cultural article[s]” featured subsequently (51). That is to say, he was never able to convince the magazine’s Edwardian readers that the English Review achieved either the disinterestedness or the cultural comprehensiveness of the Mercure de France – perhaps because its material markers of genre, including the bibliographic coding of its page layout, still cordoned off the magazine’s literary content from its political content, conforming to rather than dismantling contemporary generic expectations for English literary magazines and intellectual reviews. The case of Hueffer’s tenure at the English Review, in other words, serves as a lesson in the tenacious and unpredictable ways in which such often opaque factors as historically specific bibliographic codes and generic expectations can limit editorial agency and determine reception. Early twentieth century periodical studies are just beginning to become sensitive to these issues.
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As Morrisson’s archival work on the Freewoman and the Egoist also suggests, a magazine can shift from one discursive arena to another as it morphs materially and thematically under different editorial staff. Transformations of a magazine’s bibliographic codes, generic identity, and discursive positionality in the public sphere can also occur, however, when the editorial staff of a magazine remains relatively stable over time. Such is the case with the New Age under Orage’s editorship. When Orage and Holbrook Jackson began editing the New Age in 1907, their goal was to engage a newly literate, Board-school-educated populace – “a generation rising that finds Tit-Bits useless and T.P.’s Weekly unsatisfactory” (Orage, “Unedited Opinions” 280) – in serious, wide-ranging discussions of politics, literature, and the arts. Eventually, the New Age shared many contributors with the little magazines whose history has been woven so centrally into the history of modernism – and it is in this light that Orage’s journal entered the landscape of modernist studies. Initially, however, it had far more in common both graphically and thematically with late-Victorian socialist weeklies like the Clarion, Justice, and the Labour Leader than with magazines like the Egoist.7 Robert Scholes has written recently about the New Age’s brilliant political cartoons and figurative drawings of “modern” life as examples of what he terms “Low Modernism.” Calling attention to a range and breadth of visual materials in the New Age that have never been accounted for in treatments of modernism that privilege abstraction and formal experimentation, Scholes emphasizes the importance of “hear[ing] the entire dialogue” of High and Low Modernism if “our goal is to understand Modernism and its relationship to modernity” (90). I take a cue from Scholes’ work with Latham on modern periodical studies rather than The Paradoxy of Modernism, however, in suggesting that analysis of the visual materials in the New Age needs to be taken still further: needs to encompass its advertising copy as well as its content pages of visual art; needs to address changes in both its advertising policies and presentation of visual art over time. Such analysis would reveal how the New Age backs away from its early engagement with the intense visuality and graphic “noisiness” of modern advertising culture over the course of Orage’s editorship. After 1914, the New Age performs the same kind of retro-Victorian, austere, visual “seriousness” that marks other key periodicals associated with the Anglo-American avant-garde’s “coming of age” as modernism in the early 1920s, publishing very little visual art and even fewer advertisements (none at all in its final years).8 Initially, however, that is, before the heyday of High and Low Modernist visuals (1912–1914) that Scholes analyzes so astutely, advertisements for
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printing services, lectures, fellowship meetings, books, pamphlets, and socialist collectibles (e.g., framed portraits of “Leaders of the Socialist Movement”) appear regularly in its pages, alongside ads for quite a range of commercial products: Hovis bread, Red White & Blue coffee, New Age cigarettes, and Cadbury’s Cocoa (“Made under ideal conditions of labour in an English Factory amidst pure and healthful surroundings where the well-being of the workers receives the constant care of the firm”).9 Ads are even deployed in the masthead of the magazine’s first issue; they are not corralled into the final few pages of an issue until 1909. In other words, in the early years of Orage’s editorship, the New Age’s graphics gave it the look and feel of a “modern” rather than a modernist magazine. By the time it began to feature cover art, art supplements, and Tom T’s [Jan de Junosza Rosciszewski] wonderful cartoons rather than ads for events and products, it was making categorical distinctions between art and commerce, “sponsored” and free speech (Garvey 94), where none had been made in its earliest issues. I take a cue here as well from Anne E. Carroll’s work on Crisis in noting the need for further scholarly attention to the “dynamic conjunctions of written and visual” materials in turn-of-the-twentieth-century periodicals, and for careful consideration of the ways we read such texts (89). Borrowing her terms of analysis from the visual arts, Carroll demonstrates how Crisis’s “coverage of its two most prominent topics, protest against racial injustice and affirmation of the achievement of African Americans,” is enacted through its strategies of collage, its deliberate design of individual pages as “composite texts that mix copy and headlines with photographs, drawings, maps, and graphs” (89) in order to create meanings that are not spelled out explicitly in any one of the component parts but instead are “suggested by their conjunction” (94). “[W]ith its multimedia format and its engagement with the ethics and politics of representation,” she argues, Crisis “hints that the complexity of the strategies of representation in such texts played an important role in the [United States’s] pursuit of civil rights for all its citizens in the early twentieth century” (109). I would frame Carroll’s point less provisionally while also broadening its scope of reference: with its mixed-media format and its engagement with the ethics and politics of representation, Crisis is a microcosm of the utopian possibilities as well as the deep cultural anxieties raised by the rapid expansion and transformations of print media during this period. It does not just “hint that the complexity of the strategies of representation in such texts” played an important role in the project of democracy. It raises all of those macro-level questions noted earlier about the role of print culture in the politics of the public sphere and the role of art in a “print-saturated ... society”
Magazine Dialogism 37
that made the periodical press “the most controversial medium” at the turn of the twentieth century (Collier 6). It is precisely because magazines were such a key focus and forum for the expression of anxieties about both the visual spectacles of mass society and the projects of radical democracy that they deserve our attention as objects of study in their own right. It is also why I focus next on conceptualizing their role in the dynamics of the public sphere.
Magazine dialogics and the public sphere Russ Castronovo has demonstrated how Crisis put aesthetics “on the color line” when it staged “monthly confrontations between aesthetics and black print culture” by juxtaposing columns on “Music and Art” with statistics and news reports about lynching (1443). Crisis, he argues, “mapped aesthetic theory onto a geography of racial difference,” thereby retheorizing art as “one historical form among many forms – legal, national, gendered – that constitute social possibilities and political horizons” (1448). The visual/textual collage effects are less shocking in periodicals such as the New Age and the Freewoman and New Freewoman than in Crisis; that is to say, none of these other magazines pushes back so constantly against the racialized pornography of atrocity in the mainstream press. Nonetheless, the challenges to traditional (Kantian) aesthetic theory, the rethinking of familiar binaries like aesthetics and politics, art and propaganda, Art and everyday life, are as radical in the “discursive activism” (Murray 201) of early twentieth-century feminists and socialists as they are in the AfricanAmerican periodical press of this period. The protocols of modern disciplinary organization invite us not only to think of literature and aesthetics as second-order phenomena but also to treat U.S. race matters, British socialism, and feminist activism as discrete arenas of activity. Moreover, as Janet Lyon has argued, traditional histories of modernism in the literary and visual arts refused entirely to “acknowledge the conspicuous continuities between artistic and political avant-gardes” when they institutionalized a version of modernism emphasizing “formal aspects of experimentation” (18, 17). This essay, however, (and this anthology) is an occasion for working against the grain of these kinds of methodological assumptions – about the location, identity, and nature of the avant-garde(s); about the distinctiveness/exceptionalism of American and British literary and political traditions; about the heuristic usefulness of distinctions between a “black press” and an “American” or a “British” periodical press. A comment that Aled Jones makes about Birmingham’s pictorial magazine, the Dart (1876–1911), is especially apt in this regard.
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Challenging the supposedly discrete nature of national markets, he notes how magazines can map geographical space in unexpected ways as they stage their interventions in the public sphere. We are very comfortable, he writes, “with the notion that the periodical press, particularly the newspaper press, as a product of industrial capitalism is, in its very periodicity, a means of imposing order on time. It might also be helpful,” he goes on to suggest, to think of periodicals as instruments for the ordering of geographical space, or as a form of territory mapping. The territories they survey, and report, and distribute copies to, and take advertisements from, can sometimes appear remarkably well-defined and yet startlingly strange, their boundaries conforming to no very obvious political or demographic boundaries. And the ways in which these borders change over time can be mapped in much the same way as political boundaries may after wars, say, or ... the way the geographical distribution of occupational or language groups may change from one census to the next. (180–181) “Vertical studies” of periodicals, like Carroll’s and Castronovo’s of Crisis, call our attention to what might be termed the internal dialogics of a magazine: the relationships among and between specific components of any given issue of the magazine, and the creation of meaning through these juxtapositions. Jones’ work on the Dart, however, invites us to focus on the external dialogics of magazines: their discursive exchanges with other print media; the mappings of geographical (and temporal) space that they perform as they claim the territories that they report on, distribute copies to, take advertisements from. There are any number of interesting examples of such “remarkably well-defined and yet startlingly strange” mappings of geographical and temporal space in British and American magazines at the turn of the twentieth century. I offer three here. “Current Cant” is one of two regularly featured columns in the New Age that consists entirely of quotations from other sources. As is so often the case in this column, the magazine’s threads of dialogue with other periodicals routinely defy hierarchies of status in the periodical press while also subverting both metropolitan and national frames of reference and value. Citing passages from the London Times alongside snippets from the Evening News, T.P.’s Journal of Great Deeds, the Daily Mirror, and the Toronto Christian Guardian, “Current Cant” for 5 November 1914, for example, also includes comments by a diverse
Magazine Dialogism 39
array of individual speakers, some of whom are identified by their public office and others by name only. Cited entirely without introduction or contextualization, the point of including all of these “tit-bits,” whether for praise or parody, is apparent only if readers are following the New Age’s running commentary on contemporary affairs, week after week, issue after issue. The point I want to emphasize: these tit-bits are not Reader’s Digest versions of current events, beamed by a superior editorial intellect at an audience that is assumed to need guidance in managing modernity’s information glut. Instead, “Current Cant” demands a reader’s sharply critical and active engagement in public conversations, as staged in the periodical press, about current affairs. These columns, in other words, are complexly dialogical speech acts; they sustain the educational ideal of the nineteenth-century press – though not by reproducing the editorial practices of early mass publications like TitBits and T.P.’s Weekly.10 In the inaugural issue of the New Freewoman on 15 June 1913, Reginald Wright Kauffman writes on “Social Atavism in California,” expressing concern for guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly. Because his views on this subject are entirely in keeping with the ideological commitments of both the Freewoman and the New Freewoman, this article might have functioned for its original readers as a reassuring reminder of continuities between the “old” and the “new” Freewoman. The fact that articles in the 2 November 1911 L.A. Times and the April 1912 Roman Catholic Nativity Mirror provide the occasion for his commentary, however, might give contemporary readers pause for at least two reasons: first, he is responding to news articles that are as much as 18 months old; and second, the L.A. Times’ and the Nativity Mirror’s regional and theological frames of reference lie quite far afield from the New Freewoman’s typical focus on London metropolitan politics. In both of these examples, the territories that these magazines map via their external dialogics, their discursive exchanges with other periodicals and print sources, are quite strikingly not what national paradigms of the periodical press might lead a reader to expect. Moreover, in the case of the New Freewoman a standardized notion of time and of a periodical’s commitment to reporting on its own historical moment are violated very deliberately.11 A third brief example follows. As noted above, the dynamic conjunctions of visual and textual materials in the graphic design of “Along the Color Line” were a signature feature of the Crisis. As it appeared in the inaugural issue of the magazine, however, the juxtapositions this column staged were entirely textual, positioning the magazine in dialogue
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with the mainstream white press, the legal discourses of individual states as well as the nation, and a diverse array of regional and local print media sources. By quoting documents as disparate in their arenas of influence as the Arkansas Constitution and the Chattanooga Times, and by featuring such materials along unsigned news bulletins in the inaugural column, Crisis offers a vision of “Our ‘Colored’ United States” that points up the limitations of familiar characterizations of North/ South regionalism and race politics – without ever quite putting its critique of the socio-political status quo entirely into words.12 I’ll have more to say about the Crisis’s deployment of unsigned copy below. The point to emphasize here, however, is that, as staged in magazines like the New Age, the New Freewoman, and Crisis, the public sphere is at one and the same time both more local or more regional and more ambitiously transatlantic, though less consistently centered on or dominated by metropolitan culture, than today’s academic mappings of the period recognize. In writing about Dial and the Little Review, Alan Golding uses the term dialogics to describe the relationship between “these two equally important, though very different magazines” as he outlines the need for a “historically based model for considering how the shaping of taste by modernist magazines is a collective project, not a matter of the atomized influence of single publications” (42, 43). His point about the shaping of taste as a collective project is well taken; however, to read widely in turn-of-the-twentieth-century English-language periodicals, to look beyond the modernist little magazines for evidence of both the shaping of taste and the professionalization of its study, is to recognize the need for a far more complex modeling of magazine dialogics: one that encompasses multiple constellations of periodicals rather than collaborative duos; and one that both accounts for changes in these dynamics over time, and registers telling silences as well as discursive exchanges. A modeling of such “periodical communities”13 can also be supplemented productively by revisionary public sphere theory – because the dialogics of magazines can refuse containment within specific periodical communities, can reach instead toward an ideally all-inclusive public. As Nancy Fraser writes in discussing efforts to revise, refine, and update Habermas’s theory of the eighteenth-century public sphere, “community suggests a bounded and fairly homogeneous group, and it often connotes consensus.” “Public,” by contrast, “emphasizes discursive interaction that is in principle unbounded and open-ended, and this in turn implies a plurality of perspectives” (141). Defining the public sphere as “the structured setting where cultural and ideological contest
Magazine Dialogism 41
or negotiation among a variety of publics takes place” (125), Fraser characterizes subaltern publics as “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (123). If they “function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment,” they also can “function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics” (124). And the “emancipatory potential” of a counter-public sphere lies in the dialectic between these two functions. Such a dialectic “enables subaltern counterpublics partially to offset, though not wholly to eradicate, the unjust participatory privileges enjoyed by members of dominant social groups in stratified societies” (124). Fraser is not interested in periodical studies per se. Nevertheless, her work is pertinent to the study of magazines like Crisis, the New Age, and the New Freewoman, which position themselves so very deliberately in relation to both “that indeterminate, empirically counterfactual body we call ‘the public at large’ ” (Fraser 124) and various counter-public spheres. Fraser’s modeling of intra- and inter-public relations can help us understand these magazines’ reluctance to identify exclusively with any given periodical community, their outreach, always, to an ideally all-inclusive public, and their faith in the principle of “unbounded and open-ended” discursive interaction in such a public sphere (Fraser 141). To make the same point more broadly while also introducing one further complication: revisionary public sphere theory not only encourages us to remember that the ideals of participatory democracy are crucially at stake in the “revolution” of the printed text at the turn of the twentieth century; it also can help us appreciate what is at stake in the interplay of anonymous, pseudonymous, and signed publications orchestrated in early twentieth-century magazines. Thanks to both theoretical and archival work in late-Victorian print culture and periodical studies, we know a great deal more now about the material conditions of literary production and periodical press writing at the turn of the twentieth century than we did even ten years ago. We know how and why anonymity was valued in Victorian periodical press writing and how the shift toward signed articles figured among the New Journalism’s innovations in cultural production. We understand better than ever both the commodification and the professionalization of literary authorship that was facilitated in the Victorian fin de siècle by new technologies of illustration, “modern” marketing strategies, and the establishment of associations like the Society of Authors. And we know how the Anglo-American avant-garde
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both capitalized on and responded to all such innovations by conceptualizing the “imprimatur” of the modernist author (Jaffe). What we do not yet have a good handle on, though, are the more anonymous, more collaborative, less coherent and more deliberately performative authorial environments of magazines like John O’London’s Weekly and the New Age – where Beatrice Hastings, for example, the magazine’s shadow co-editor, published extensively not only under her own signature but also both anonymously and under more than a dozen pseudonyms. Carefully respecting the distinctiveness of each persona, each “prosthetic person,” Hastings even on occasion pits these voices in debate with one another, and stages her critiques of emerging modernist aesthetics through the writings of “T.K.L.” and “Alice Morning.”14 If her use of so many pseudonyms is highly unusual, the phenomenon of anonymous, pseudonymous, and semipseudonymous publication is far more common in the early twentieth century than scholarship in modernist studies trains us to expect. As recent work by scholars such as Holly Laird, Sean Latham, Bette London, Jayne Marek, and Nicholas Ruddick demonstrates, any number of turn-of-the-twentieth-century writers multiplied their authorial identities in ways that defy a Foucauldian conceptualization of the author-function or a modernist notion of an authorial imprimatur. Grant Allen, for example, published all of his periodical press writings and non-fiction prose under his legal name, but published fiction as Grant Allen, “Cecil Power,” “Olive Pratt Rayner,” and “Martin Leach Warborough” (Ruddick 46–47). H.L. Mencken wrote a column by “Owen Hatteras” for the Smart Set. Ezra Pound published all of his poetry under his legal name, yet used two pseudonyms in writing music and art criticism for the New Age. Arnold Bennett was actually invited by journal editors to review his own fiction by writing as “Jacob Tonson,” a pseudonym he also used for the “Books and Persons” column of the New Age, though he subsequently re-published material from this column as a book under his own name (Latham, Am I a Snob 215). In the inaugural issue of the Little Review (March 1914) Margaret Anderson contributes anonymous reviews as well as articles signed as both “M.C.A” and as Margaret C. Anderson – but lists only the latter in the magazine’s table of contents. Marianne Moore contributed both signed reviews and anonymous “comments” during her editorship of Dial (Marek 228), a license to manipulate editorial masks that W.E.B. Dubois also took in contributing to and editing Crisis. Examples proliferate, demonstrating Robert Griffin’s point that “anonymity is not simply a residual characteristic of oral
Magazine Dialogism 43
or manuscript culture, but continues to be a dominant form, perhaps the norm, for print culture as well” (15).15 As research in modern periodical studies proceeds, we will need to attend carefully to the discursive and material conditions that made the rhetorical deployment of multiple “prosthetic” identities so appealing – so functionally necessary – for many writers, artists, and political activists negotiating an entrance into the literary marketplace and the public sphere during this period. Which brings me back, in closing, to Fraser’s cautionary words about the “unjust participatory privileges enjoyed by members of dominant social groups in stratified societies” (Fraser 124). When the public sphere functions like a cliquish, clubbish, socially homogenous space, rather than as an arena for unbounded and open-ended discursive interaction, then perhaps deliberate acts of discursive dis-corporation – authorial ventriloquism through anonymous and pseudonymous publication – are the means by which the ideals of disinterested, objective rational discourse are adapted to the hypermediated environment of a mass society. Consider again the first iteration of “Along the Color Line” in the Crisis: to have presented those unsigned editorial comments as the words and ideas of a single human being would not only have both personalized, and thereby limited, the source of the “Agitation” on behalf of the entire “Social Body” that the N.A.A.C.P. sought to enact through this magazine (“Editorial,” Crisis, November 1910, 11); it also would have exposed that author to certain personal risk. Think too of the complicated tangle of personal and professional relationships that Beatrice Hastings was negotiating in writing about feminism and modernist aesthetics for the New Age via a rich array of pseudonyms. In a post-bourgeois public sphere marked (still) by radical social injustices, the contributions of both magazines and specific individuals to the dialogics of the public sphere are enacted through an armature of authorial prosthetics with which we have not yet fully come to terms.
Notes 1. Roger Fidler coins the term “mediamorphosis” to describe the process of media transformation in his book of this same title. 2. Mark Hampton, for example, notes that Victorian newspapers could fulfill “two related and overlapping educational functions.” They could “ ‘influence,’ ‘inform,’ or ‘elevate’ readers, bringing them into possession of certain supposedly established truths, such as the scientific basis of political economy and the wonders of the British constitution.” And they could create “an arena for public discussion on the ‘questions of the day’ ” (9). This educational ideal,
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3.
4.
5.
6.
7. 8.
9.
10.
11.
Hampton argues, “held sway from the 1850 to the 1880s” but receded in prominence subsequently with the development of mass media (10). As Patrick Collier argues elsewhere in this volume, however, this educational ideal “may have been more pervasive in the twentieth century than Hampton allows” (100), though mass periodicals such as John O’London’s Weekly (and magazines such as the New Age, Crisis, and the Freewoman, I would add) deploy it “in somewhat different form” (100). The syllabus for this course can be found on the Modernist Journals Project’s website: 22 June 2007
. I borrow my title for this section from Margaret Beetham in order to underscore the indebtedness of research on modern periodicals to studies of Victorian print culture. “Puffing,” as Garvey notes, means “touting products or businesses in what appear[s] to be editorial matter in magazines and newspapers, and was a longstanding if sometimes controversial practice” in the nineteenth century (94). “Blind ads” were ads “disguised as fiction,” and occupied an especially “uneasy place” in the pages of late nineteenth-century magazines and newspapers (95). Publications started requiring that such ads be distinguished bibliographically from non-advertising content in the early 1900s (97). Marysa DeMoor, “The Athenaeum in the Eye of the Modernist Storm, 1901– 1921,” Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms Symposium, University of Delaware, 28 April 2007. For further discussion of these issues, see Ardis, “Democracy and Modernism.” Consider, for example, how the New Age in its final years and the Criterion from its inception reproduce the “look” of a grand Victorian monthly review with their stately columns of black-and-white print unbroken by advertisements; or how Dial borrows its visual design from modern museum display protocols rather than (as Blast did) from lowbrow advertising. See “All Need It – HOVIS BREAD” and “Delicious COFFEE RED WHITE & BLUE,” New Age 2 May 1908 (1); “New Age Cigarettes,” New Age 10 December 1908 (131); “PORTRAITS of LEADERS of the SOCIALIST MOVEMENT,” New Age 10 December 1908 (139); “THE SOCIALIST ANNUAL FOR 1909,” New Age 10 December 1908 (149); and “Cadbury’s Cocoa,” New Age 10 December 1908 (149). In suggesting how fruitful further analysis of the New Age’s advertising would be, I take a cue from Latham and Scholes’ recent work on advertising and modern periodical studies as well as Barbara Green’s current research on the brisk traffic in feminist collectibles during the British suffrage campaign. The thumbnail option of the Modernist Journal Project’s digital edition of the New Age facilitates this kind of analysis by providing a quick visual overview of each issue’s contents. Recall Orage’s statement of his editorial goals for the New Age, as cited earlier: it was designed to appeal to “a generation rising that finds Tit-Bits useless and T.P.’s Weekly unsatisfactory” (“Unedited Opinions” 280). See Jean Lutes’ essay on Portrait of a Lady and Maria DiCenzo and Lucy Delap’s argument about British readers’ belated championing of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s work for other interesting discussions in this volume of what Wai Chee Dimock terms “deep time” in turn-of- the-twentieth- century print culture.
Magazine Dialogism 45 12. My thinking about these issues is greatly influenced by Adam McKible’s work on the Messenger and the series of articles, “These ‘Colored’ United States,” that it featured in response to the Nation’s “Our United States” in the mid-1920s. See “Our (?) Country: Mapping ‘These “Colored” United States’ in The Messenger.” 13. I borrow the phrase “periodical communities” from Lucy Delap’s work on early twentieth century periodicals. Historians, Delap notes, “have found it helpful to read periodicals not as single entities but as participants in one or several ‘periodical communities’ ” (“Feminist and Anti-Feminist Encounters” 388). Within such communities, journals “identify each other as important players, promote debate and controversy between each other, exchange material, share contributors and generally inhabit the same intellectual milieu” (388). Such communities are “structured by fluid ideological affiliation, financial necessity, and close interdependence within personal networks” (“The Freewoman” 265). Delap’s extraordinarily careful archival scholarship is a model of the kind of attention to the “complexities of periodical culture” that is required by the “reassessment of modernism, media technology, and print culture” (Latham, “Magazine Modernism” 2), but I also want to suggest here that revisionary public sphere theory can help us address facets of these complexities that a modeling of periodical communities does not illuminate. 14. “Prosthetic person” is Michael Warner’s phrasing. His work on the rhetorics of dis-incorporation that structure discourse in the public sphere demonstrates how the classical free speech model of the eighteenth century is renegotiated and adapted to the conditions of a print-saturated mass society. For further discussion of Hastings’ use of pseudonyms, see Ardis, “Debating Feminism, Socialism, and Modernism”; Ardis, “The Dialogics of Modernism(s) in the New Age”; and Delap, “Feminist and Anti-Feminist Encounters.” 15. Griffin’s tentative claim that anonymity is “perhaps the norm” for print culture as well as oral and manuscript culture obviously challenges ideas of authorship that are deeply embedded in the disciplinary practices of English studies – and deserves to be tested through further historical research.
Works cited “All Need It – HOVIS BREAD” (Advt. for Hovis bread), New Age 2 May 1907: 1. “Along the Color Line”, Crisis November 1910: 3–7. Ardis, Ann. “Debating Feminism, Modernism, and Socialism: Beatrice Hastings’ Voices in The New Age.” Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. 160–185. ——. “Democracy and Modernism: The New Age Under A.R. Orage’s Editorship (1907–1922).” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Volume 1: Britain and Ireland 1880–1945. Ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker. (Forthcoming, Oxford University Press). ——. “The Dialogics of Modernism(s) in the New Age.” Modernism/Modernity 14 (2007): 407–434. Beetham, Margaret. “Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre.” Investigating Victorian Journalism. Ed. Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden. Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1990. 19–32.
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Bornstein, George. Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Brake, Laurel. Print in Transition, 1850–1910: Studies in Media and Book History. London: Palgrave, 2001. “Cadbury’s Cocoa” (Advt. for Cadbury’s cocoa), New Age 10 December 1908: 149. Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. Chicago: Academy Chicago, 2002. Carroll, Anne. “Protest and Affirmation: Composite Texts in the Crisis.” American Literature 76 (2004): 89–116. Castronovo, Russ. “Beauty along the Color Line: Lynching, Aesthetics, and the Crisis.” PMLA 121 (2006): 1443–1459. Collier, Patrick. Modernism on Fleet Street. Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. “Current Cant,” New Age 5 November 1914: 3. Darnton, Robert. “What Is the History of Books?” The Book History Reader. Ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. “The Death of an Idea,” New Age 10 July 1913: 276–288. Delap, Lucy. “Feminist and Anti-Feminist Encounters in Edwardian Britain,” Historical Research 78 (2005): 377–399. ——. “The Freewoman, Periodical Communities, and the Feminist Reading Public,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 61 (2000): 233–276. “Delicious COFFEE RED WHITE & BLUE” (Advt. Red White & Blue coffee), New Age 2 May 1908: 1. “Editorial,” Crisis November 1910: 10–12. Fidler, Roger. Mediamorphisis: Understanding New Media. London: Sage, 1999. Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Habermas and the Public Sphere. Ed. Craig Calhoun. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1997. 109–142. Garvey, Ellen Gruber. The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Golding, Alan. “The Dial, The Little Review, and the Dialogics of Modernism.” American Periodicals 15 (2005): 42–55. Griffin, Robert J., ed. The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Hampton, Mark. Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illiniois Press, 2004. Harding, Jason. The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Jaffe, Aaron. Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Jones, Aled. “The Dart and the Damning of the Sylvan Stream: Journalism and Political Culture in the Late-Victorian City.” Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors, Authors, Readers. Ed. Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell. Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 177–194. Kauffman, Reginald Wright. “Social Atavism in California.” New Freewoman 15 June 1913: 7–10.
Magazine Dialogism 47 King, Andrew and John Plunkett, eds. Victorian Print Media: A Reader. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Laird, Holly. “Michael Field as ‘the Author of Borgia.’ ” Michael Field and Their World. Ed. Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson. High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2007. 29–39. ——. Women Coauthors. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Latham, Sean. Am I A Snob? Modernism and the Novel. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. ——. “Magazine Modernism.” Unpublished manuscript. Latham, Sean and Robert Scholes. “The Rise of Periodical Studies.” PMLA 121 (2006): 517–531. London, Bette. Writing Double: Women’s Literary Partnerships. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Lyon, Janet. “Women Demonstrating Modernism.” Discourse 17(2) (Winter 1994–1995): 6–25. Marek, Jane. “Women Editors and Modernist Sensibilities.” Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. 225–260. McKible, Adam. “Our (?) Country: Mapping ‘These “Colored” United States’ in The Messenger.” The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays. Ed. Todd Vogel. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2001. 123–139. Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary Theory. London and New York: Verso, 2005. Morrisson, Mark. The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Murray, Simone. “ ‘Deeds and Words’: The Woman’s Press and the Politics of Print.” Women: A Cultural Review 11(3) (2000): 197–222. Nelson, Cary. Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left. New York: Routledge, 2001. “New Age Cigarettes” (Advt. New Age cigarettes), New Age 10 December 1908: 131. Orage, A.R. “Unedited Opinions. IV. Concerning THE NEW AGE.” New Age 28 January 1909: 280. “PORTRAITS of LEADERS of the SOCIALIST MOVEMENT” (Advt. for colourprint portraits of George Bernard Shaw and Robert Blatchford produced by the New Age Press), New Age 10 December 1908: 139. Ruddick, Nicholas, ed. The Woman Who Did. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004. Scholes, Robert. The Paradoxy of Modernism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006. “THE SOCIALIST ANNUAL FOR 1909” (Advt. Twentieth Century Press edition edited by Th. Rothstein), New Age 10 December 1908: 149. “To Our Readers.” New Age 25 April 1908: 503–504. Warner, Michael. “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject.” Habermas and the Public Sphere. Ed. Craig Calhoun. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1997. 377–401.
3 Transatlantic Print Culture: The Anglo-American Feminist Press and Emerging “Modernities” Lucy Delap and Maria DiCenzo
Journalism [daily, weekly, or monthly] not only groups society – in groups of individuals of which are so hard to trace – but also promotes social action by presenting the information or opinion which is the necessary basis of action. It serves to link together the members of each group, and enables them to cooperate. (208) Every journal is like a wire carrying a psychological current which winds its way intricately across and through the country [and between countries], and it is continually crossed and recrossed by thousands of other wires. (215) R.A. Scott-James, The Influence of the Press, 1913 R.A. Scott-James’s 1913 analysis of the influence of an ever-proliferating and segmented – but intricately interwoven – newspaper and periodical press offers a useful point of departure for understanding the highly self-conscious debates about print culture in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, as well as the complexities facing researchers today working to recover these periodicals and reconstruct the contexts from which they emerged. His broad aim is, according to the preface, “to examine the function that is fulfilled by the Press at all times, and particularly the part that it plays in modern life” (vii). His historical scope, the wide range of groupings (or “publics” as he terms them), and the many types of publications alert us to how stratified and specialized our own discipline-based categories and approaches to genre and periodization are. We start with this “wide angle shot” in order to highlight why modernism – rooted in a literary public sphere, and driven by an 48
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aesthetic imperative and logic – is too selective and distorting a framework through which to “map the next frontier in material historical research in publishing and new media forms between 1880 and 1940.”1 Indeed, the term “modernism” has not constituted part of the critical vocabulary informing our work on feminist periodicals. Nonetheless, this paper is engaged in a debate whose point of departure includes literary modernisms and the expansion of “new modernist studies.” As the primarily literary field of modernist studies expands into the wider arena of press and periodical history, we would like to intervene as feminist media and cultural historians (rather than as modernist critics) to raise some important methodological and disciplinary issues related to research in transatlantic print culture in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Feminism figures in our argument in two key ways. First, and most importantly, the case studies in the final section of the paper rely on examples of feminist print media to challenge existing periodization, categories, and assumptions about circulation in a transatlantic context. In this way, the example of early feminist periodicals helps to reveal the challenges of identifying and tracing emerging “modernities” in these decades and to consider what was at stake for different groups. Secondly, in relation to modernist studies, we would like to use the case of feminist modernist scholarship to reveal and anticipate the potential problems and pitfalls of modernism as a critical paradigm, as modernist studies expands further into the field of print culture. The aesthetic preoccupations of feminist modernist studies have provided a rich but ultimately limiting perspective on the politicization of gender in the years it tends to address. It is one thing to treat modernism as a point of reference in the literary public sphere, but to use it as a framework for the analysis of press and periodical history is more problematic. Rather than “re-invigorating and re-imagining the field of modernist studies through the study of the arts in their original social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts,” or exploring “modernism(s)’ emergence in a range of venues of publication,”2 we propose a different strategy – namely, to use a different kind of lens or frame, and a different emphasis, by distinguishing and disengaging the often implied concept of modernity from modernism. Rita Felski reminds us to avoid the “symptomatic confusion of a historical period (modernity) with an artistic movement (modernism)” (Felski 191). In doing so, we can also recover modernity in its positive sense of the social and political developments and changes in the modern era, so central to social movements like feminism at the time.
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The limits of the modernist lens The how/why of modernism, we would suggest, are not the best questions to ask (not the best lens through which to look) if what you are interested in are under-explored issues, genres, artifacts, new media forms, and patterns of circulation between British and American audiences. The example of feminist periodicals and communities and the movement of feminist ideas through print media is a case in point. As a larger project, feminism operated both at the practical levels of social reform and in the intellectual and cultural sphere, where the arts played an important, but often secondary, role. The preoccupation in modernist studies with the status of authors, literary production, cultural criticism, formal experimentation, and aesthetic value makes it a problematic point of departure for understanding developments in social and political spheres. No matter how far critics try to expand the “web” of connections and the boundaries of modernist concerns, as long as the starting point is the literary/cultural field, this will necessarily limit the scope of analysis.3 The problems with trying to understand women’s experience of modernity through the lens of modernism have been explored in critiques of new modernist studies. It is not surprising that much of the work in modernist studies in the last 10–15 years has tried to break down assumptions about the “great divide,” to demonstrate how diverse and engaged in wider cultures, how international, how multimedia modernism actually was. But even in addressing the ways in which traditional understandings of modernism either omitted, obscured, or marginalized important contributions and tendencies, these attempts to “rethink” and “rechart” modernism, according to Deborah Jacobs , “constitute less a recharting than an enlarging of the same old chart, less a rethinking than a revaluation of a formerly neglected or disparaged half of the same old modernist thought” (273–274). She argues that even feminist critics of modernism, in this way, only serve to “shore up the hegemony of a privileged aesthetic/ literary discourse that advances and preserves its own criteria for and definitions of ‘experimentalism’ and ‘technique’ ” and become “complicit in supporting an establishment that has never had women’s (or any other others’) interests at heart” (277). She warns specifically feminist critics of modernism not “to settle for the ‘thin’ definition of modernism derived only from [dominant narratives of modernism]” because it treats “only a privileged piece ... of this crucial earlytwentieth-century formation as if it were the whole social formation.
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To do so ... is to read modernism from within its own politics and prejudices” (288). The implications for understanding feminist history in the period are obvious since feminists articulated and circulated (in a wide range of publishing venues) diverse and competing theories and representations of what it did and could mean to be a modern woman. Jacobs’s warning pertains as powerfully to modernist studies more widely as the field embraces print culture more generally. While feminist modernist critics have worked from within the literary field to reassess and expand the canon in valuable ways, others working in politically based forms of writing see a continued problem with what Glenda Norquay and Sowon Park refer to as the “power of Modernist aesthetics as an interpretive paradigm” (302). In relation to suffrage fiction, they argue that feminist theory has set the terms of the debate where it is easy to condemn suffrage discourse as merely topical, dogmatic, or reductive. In a reconsideration of suffrage literature, one would have to begin by first acknowledging that it falls under this considerable shadow of Modernist aesthetics and to think of ways of illuminating the field in its own right, while at the same time linking it to the more established contexts for study of this period. (302) The dismissal or marginalization of certain genres, and a reconsideration that foregrounds their assumptions and “operative categories” (Jacobs 275) are equally relevant to political and activist-based periodicals. It is not accidental that figures like Rebecca West come to play such an important role in the work of critics who try to reconcile or bridge the divide between what Mark Morrisson terms “art” and “public discourse” (6). In the critical engagements of modernist studies, figures like West and Dora Marsden offer an exciting foray into the arena of feminist political activism without leaving the literary sphere too far behind. One could tell two different stories about West as the artist and literary critic who dabbled in feminist activism, or as the feminist activist who dabbled in the literary world. Both perspectives oversimplify the permeability and fluidity of the range of print media available to journalists/ writers at the time. In modernist narratives, these figures signal a world of organizations, but are invariably treated as “individuals” who made contributions in literary, journalistic, or editorial capacities. As with so many features of modern life, that world of organizations and social reform was treated with a degree of cynicism by modernists. But the anti-modern politics of the period which, as Tim Armstrong
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claims, represented “a politics which opposes itself to the new mass public sphere, and to democracy” (80) were not shared by all. What the emerging modernities meant for women who sought emancipation from the constraints of traditional social roles and from the obstacles preventing their participation in all aspects of public life was very different than what modernities meant for those preoccupied with the so-called decline of modern culture. The celebration of progress, the defiance, and the optimism that characterize so much feminist writing in the period are anathema to the anti-modernity of modernism. Cicely Hamilton, one of the more ironic, even cynical, feminist writers of the period, concludes an early chapter in her polemical book, Marriage as a Trade (1909): To no man, I think, can the world be quite as wonderful as it is to the woman now alive who has fought free. ... The world to her is the experimental stage. ... Authority to her is a broken reed. ... Some day, no doubt, the pendulum will adjust itself ... But in the meantime the new is – new; the independence that was to be as Dead Sea ashes in our mouth tastes very sweet indeed. (33–34) While progress was not always fast enough, this was not a period of decline for feminist activists and thinkers. They were engaged in a struggle they expected to win. And it is in this context that we might understand what Patrick Collier describes as Rebecca West’s optimism, her convictions about the possibilities of social and political progress, and the importance she placed on championing what was valuable in the present (172–183). She was after all a living/working example of the emancipated woman. This defiant optimism informs why feminists wrote and what they wrote. These are some of the reasons why it is crucial to look for and understand emerging modernities and the discourses of modernity in print media of the period from a broader and more flexible perspective and critical context.
Feminism, women’s movements, and media: periodization, categories, and circulation Feminism by its very nature crossed the boundaries of political, social, economic, and cultural spheres. In her essay “Feminism and Politics” for the Contemporary Review in 1911 Teresa Billington-Greig indicates the scope and implications of changes the women’s movement sought: “Feminism would re-make society, would set up new standards, would
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destroy old customs, would establish a new morality. It frankly sets out to do great deeds of destruction and reconstruction. It asks a new world” (227). But the demands for women’s rights, as well as the ways in which they demanded them, were sources of controversy both within and outside of women’s movements. The debates were varied and heated, and any attempt to reconstruct them must account for the articulation of a wide range of sometimes conflicting “feminisms” (expressed by groups, campaigns, and dissenting/free-lance feminists), as well as the opponents of feminism (e.g., Victorian anti-feminists and later anti-suffrage voices). Because these debates found their public expression and were circulated in the pages of newspapers and periodicals, the history of feminist media and attempts to trace public debates about feminism in the media must necessarily account for and have much to tell us about how and where the “currents” of thought about the role of women in public life formed and travelled. As a product of a longstanding commitment to periodical history, as well as the interdisciplinary nature of the field, Victorian Studies has made significant contributions to our understanding of modern formations in all areas of knowledge and public life, especially early feminist thought. Linked to these tendencies has been the impact of new historicism in literary studies, as well as the growing importance of cultural history as a field.4 Scholarship on the early decades of the twentieth century has much to gain from these approaches because they have tended to fall between the disciplinary cracks; Victorian scholars (even those gesturing to the “long nineteenth century”) often never venture past the turn of the century, and twentieth-century specialists rarely travel back beyond the fin de siècle. These gaps in periodization have had enormous implications for the study of feminist movements and media. Ann Ardis’s suggestion for “turn-of-the-twentieth-century studies” (3) or Jacobs’s plea to imagine “a larger discursive and highly politicized field of inquiry and contestation that might be called early-twentieth-century studies – a field wherein the ‘literary’ becomes only one of many newly specialized discourses struggling for legitimation” (288) represent useful directions in broadening the disciplinary perspectives necessary to capture the points of intersection between the social, political, and cultural developments in these years. Analyses of feminism in the daily and periodical press or of feminist print media require such a broad temporal framework. A longitudinal perspective allows us to identify continuities, cycles, and patterns. Easier said than done: there are obvious logistical problems to trying to do it
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“all,” but gesturing towards the larger picture forces us to situate specifics. Even if a particular study focuses on a “slice,” there is less chance of making serious errors/assumptions about the longer processes.5 This raises methodological issues (where/how do we locate and identify these patterns, convergences, etc.), reminding us what we owe to researchers who have done much of the labor-intensive empirical work to date. In these ways, feminist media history provides us with a wider lens, but it has by no means simplified our task, raising some productive tensions in the process of collaboration. These difficulties and tensions extend to the problem of establishing categories for analyzing print media. The feminist press does not adhere in obvious ways to conventional categories such as the distinction between a “mass” and a “popular” or the literary “avant-garde.” Publications lean in particular directions, but many often straddle a variety of categories (organizational journal/newsletter, weekly or monthly review, and manifesto), and specific contributions were published and circulated in different forms (articles in periodicals, reprinted as books and in other journals, or as pamphlets). Identifying categories is complicated further if we think about feminism as part of a movement, a set of ideas and public debates, that permeated contemporary life, so to look in any one place only tells part of the story. Mona Caird’s essay “Marriage” offers a useful example. This compelling feminist document was originally published in the Westminster Review (a quarterly review) in 1888, but taken up by the popular press and, as Susan Hamilton notes, “in a classic device of the new journalism, the Daily Telegraph asked it readers, ‘Is Marriage a Failure?’ Two months and twenty-seven thousand responses later, the Daily Telegraph was obliged to refuse any further correspondence on a topic that clearly caught the late-Victorian public interest” (272). The article later elicited a response from Eliza Lynn Linton that initiated the “Wild Women” exchange between the two writers in the Nineteenth Century (Hamilton 272). This example illustrates the very fluid movement, and public profile, of these contentious ideas among/between different kinds of publications. In this way, questions of categories and circulation intersect if we think about “circulation” not in the sense of material objects, but in terms of ideas and influences, particularly as we account for writers and ideas that permeate a wider range of periodicals and magazines. Crossing the Atlantic had an impact, as writers inhabiting the realm of “little magazines” in Britain contributed to or were written up in the American middlebrow press. This was not simply a transnational effect. Adrian Bingham’s analysis of feminist discourses in the British popular press
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challenges the often disdainful dismissals of these kinds of publications as sources of progressive ideas and debates (Bingham). These sources underscore the importance of accounting for opposing sides in these debates – feminism and anti-feminism – as well as conflicts within feminism and the women’s movement. Feminist media traversed genres, temporalities, and geographic spaces in part because of the elaborate networks and resources of women’s movements. As a result, the patterns of circulation overlapped with, but also diverged from, more familiar commercial and coterie channels. The often heterogeneous content of feminist print media – parliamentary coverage, general news events, reviews of books and cultural events, in addition to the elaboration of feminist or campaign-specific debates – meant they were read by a wide range of people, including opponents and critics. They interpreted news events for their readerships and engaged in debates with the wider press, but not always in predictable or chronological ways. For these reasons, questions of periodization, categories/genres, and circulation offer a constructive framework for considering transatlantic exchange.
Periodical culture and transatlantic crossings The recent growth in intellectual interest by media historians and others in transnational exchanges promises to have profound implications for how the history of feminism is narrated. Participation within the women’s movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was centrally a reading experience, and print culture proved to be an element that easily crossed national boundaries. Key periodicals and other texts were shared between national communities of the women’s movement. Friendship networks and lecture tours emerged around the circulation of texts; international congresses flourished amongst temperance, anti-slavery, peace, and women’s suffrage activists and produced corresponding innovations in print culture, spanning the “long nineteenth century,” the progressive or Edwardian years, as well as the years of “high modernist” experimentation and beyond. Transnational exchanges can transform and can influence who is given authority to speak, what meanings may be read into texts, and their intellectual context. For readings made at a historical distance, transnationality also disrupts and realigns the historical trajectories used to make sense of such texts. Print-cultural exchanges between Britain and the United States in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were particularly close. Exchanges between the two were well-resourced with communications
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and travel links, and periodicals such as the Review of Reviews reproduced articles from across the ocean for each national audience. Many periodicals had regular features such as a “London Letter” or ongoing transatlantic relationships. The London-based Votes for Women and the Boston Woman’s Journal sustained a mutually beneficial relationship of reprints, publishing letters from readers across the Atlantic, and offered as competition prizes subscriptions to the journals of their transatlantic counterparts. Of course the periodicals, in addition to books and pamphlets, also circulated between other nations, and friendship networks or speaking tours fleshed out the exchange of ideas and reading matter. But the joint Anglo-American marketing and distribution of journals and books, and the close integration of social and political movements between the two countries, ensured that British and American readers might be understood to be inhabiting not just overlapping “reading communities,” but a single reading community that transcended national boundaries. The advertising, letters pages, and content of journals such as the Freewoman and the Woman Rebel are cases in point. What made this shared print-cultural space so exceptionally vibrant were the claims that were made in both countries of being at the forefront or vanguard of “the modern.” While between some nations America was figured as “the new” and cosmopolitan, and European nations the “old world,” between Britain and America it was possible for Britain to claim to be at the vanguard, in politics, fashion, and literary innovation. Contrarily, the United States might be marked as politically corrupt and culturally provincial. There was, then, a relatively even-handed space for Anglo-American cultural exchange, marked not only by competition, but also by the speedy transmission of innovations in print culture between the two nations. Simply pointing out that media can cross national boundaries, however, tells us little about the influence of such crossings. As we show in the following sections, this requires attention to the possibility of un-envisaged readerships, the loss or gain of cultural salience or political prominence, and the permeability of different media, as periodical articles morphed into pamphlets or lectures, or entire journals became known through reviews and reputation in another country. The material reading context was affected by the crossing of borders, as what was read in private homes might through scarcity or lack of circulation be read as file copies in bookshops, or in reading circles. Alliances that worked in one country sometimes became acrimonious or impossible to sustain in another. Accounting for the transnational nature of print culture is a helpful means of changing the personnel, periodization,
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and operative categories of the story we might tell about a cultural or political milieu and its texts. Figures that appear marginal in one national context can act as central transmitters of ideas or practices between countries. Voices that were derided as extremist in one country were unexpectedly listened to with great attention in another. Figures that left few historical marks in their own country emerge as important interlocutors in another. The following three examples illustrate how an account of transnationality from a media history perspective can give a rich and distinctive historical narrative of feminist print culture. The focus is on three periodicals of the women’s movement, which all loosely termed themselves feminist, and which might be read through a lens of “modernisms,” but are more usefully understood as shaping an engagement with modernity, and as part of a larger narrative of feminist print culture.
The Freewoman The Freewoman started life as a “weekly feminist review” in 1911, and soon became a humanist and then an individualist review. It was restarted in 1913 as the New Freewoman and finally became The Egoist in 1914. The journal occupied an ambiguous space in relation to suffrage – the editor Dora Marsden rejected the vote as a dangerous diversion from the more important business of changing women’s sense of their own possibilities. In Britain, a highly acrimonious relationship developed between the suffrage papers and the Freewoman. One suffragist commented that the Freewoman “no more represent[s] the general opinion of suffragists than, say, the opinions of the Mormons represents the Christianity of the Church of England” (Furley Smith 5). Other suffragist readers spoke of their shame and disgust at the suffrage and sexual politics of the journal.6 Dora Marsden consciously constructed the Freewoman as a cosmopolitan “Anglo-American review.” She wrote I am hoping to be able to make the paper into an Anglo-American Review in a literary sense as well as a commercial. We in England know practically nothing about the new spirit of America. ... I think the value of the paper would be increased enormously if it could contain the dual point of view – the different aspects of the same problems debated on the same ground. (Marsden letter) She worked hard to cement a circle of readers, contributors, and supporters in the United States, and consciously marketed her paper as
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“NOT a suffrage paper” but an experimental “open review” (“New Freewoman” Advt.). However, the transatlantic shift had a curious effect. The American reception of the Freewoman was largely mediated by suffrage rather than by literary-modernist circles. The Freewoman was sponsored and a file copy kept at the literature department of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (“the National”). The threepenny price of the Freewoman had in Britain been consciously used to distinguish it from the penny suffrage papers. But at 10c in the United States, it occupied the same price niche as the American suffrage papers. What had been read as a subversive “little magazine,” dangerous to the cause of the women’s movement in Britain, became something American suffrage print culture and opinion could assimilate and circulate, through reprinting articles in the suffrage press and as pamphlets sponsored and circulated by the National. The transition from periodical to pamphlet is an indication of what Laurel Brake has identified as the permeability of genres within print culture (3). The possibility of shifting medium was made more likely by the crossing of national boundaries, and effected changes in how texts might be read. Editorials from the first two issues of the Freewoman, which had been published in England under the names of both Freewoman editors, were transformed in the United States into a single pamphlet solely attributed to Dora Marsden. This media shift contributed to Marsden’s celebrity status in the United States. Her portraits graced accounts written in other periodicals, under titles such as “A Feminist Disciple of Nietzsche,” and there was intense interest in her personal life story. Crossing national borders had thus transformed a text that seemed to speak for the Freewoman into a much more personal piece, removing the juxtaposed articles and adverts from the periodical and perhaps allowing for the circulation of Marsden’s views amongst suffragists who would otherwise be repelled by the full miscellany and range of opinion within the Freewoman. The Freewoman has long been positioned as a modernist little magazine, due to its combination of political and literary material, its sense of rupture with the past, and its later association with figures such as Pound and Joyce. Its readers were sometimes directly addressed as “modernists” though they were just as likely to be addressed as having an interest in middlebrow society journals or high fashion. In the main, modernism was not an identity that gained much currency amongst the readership, and indeed, there was a resistance to the literary and experimental material that became more of a staple in the New Freewoman. This was made clear by its American readers, who commented on the “hideous
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sense of intellectual insecurity” they felt when reading “a paper so post-everything as the New Freewoman” (Björkman letter, 1913). One American commented: “I could do with considerably less of ‘the white bodies of women.’ One is so everlastingly pursued by said white bodies through literature, and I did hope that the Freewoman would furnish us with a refuge where we could rest secure from them” (Björkman letter, 1913). It is clear that such readers largely abandoned the more literary New Freewoman and Egoist. By focusing on the American readership, the trajectory of how we understand the influence of the Freewoman need not point towards its own later incarnation as the “modernist” Egoist. We can instead substitute other journal titles on which the Freewoman had great influence – Margaret Sanger’s Woman Rebel, for example, or Judy, a New York magazine aimed at “the modern woman and the men who wished to understand her,” published from 1919. Perhaps following the Freewoman, this magazine declared itself to be “post-feminist,” and called on its contributors to “Be contemporary; be fragmentary; be indiscreet; be tender; be bitter; be unimportant; be morbid; be anything you like.”7 Yet lacking a relationship to canonical authors, such periodicals have been invisible under the lens of modernism. Placing the Freewoman in such a trajectory of feminist print culture can give us a much more acute and wide-ranging sense of its circles of influence.
The Woman Rebel The Woman Rebel, published briefly as a monthly in New York in 1914 by Margaret Sanger, focused chiefly on women’s reproductive freedom and stimulated controversy over freedom of speech issues. Repeatedly banned from the mail under the influence of Anthony Comstock, the United States postal inspector, it publicized and dramatized Sanger’s battle to achieve birth control, linking this to larger questions of worker control and women’s self-development. The influence of the Freewoman upon the Woman Rebel was profound. Sanger had recently returned from an extended stay in London, and published articles with titles such as “The Freewoman as Teacher.” British Freewoman writers contributed articles and letters to the Woman Rebel, and Sanger also published excerpts from their books. The two journals seemed to offer a similar politics of anarchist-influenced individualism and radical sexual politics, and to be based on a similar sense of a shared Anglo-American intellectual community. But the two journals nonetheless constructed very different kinds of transatlantic alliances and illustrate how crossing the Atlantic might
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change the political valency of periodical communities. Margaret Sanger took a critical stance towards the very feminists who sustained the Freewoman in the United States – the feminists, mostly members of the Greenwich Village discussion group Heterodoxy, who organised the first “feminist mass rally” at the New York Cooper Union in February 1914. Sanger derided these “new feminists” as middle-class and respectable, interested in suffrage rather than the issues Sanger felt were central to working-class women: birth control and conditions of work (Sanger “The New Feminists”). Where the Freewoman had hailed women such as Crystal Eastman, Henrietta Rodman, and Rose Young as unconventional radicals, the Woman Rebel preferred to laud the British suffragette leaders Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst as indomitable and unconquerable in spirit (Witcop 25, 31). The very suffrage leaders who through their conventionality, sentimentality, and suppression of dissent had led to the schisms and intense bitterness in Britain that motivated the founding of the Freewoman had become icons to one of the Freewoman’s nearest counterparts in the United States. Conversely, the American feminists Sanger deplored were welcomed and admired within the British Freewoman. In part, this represented a strategic attempt to shame readers in their own countries into mobilizing on feminist issues by offering a picture to their domestic readers of the nation “falling behind” comparable nations. The transnational re-alignment of journals such as the Freewoman and the Woman Rebel also represented an effect of distance, which may have created a sense of being able to pick and choose alliances without having to make any deeper commitment. Sanger offered a creative re-interpretation of what the Pankhursts stood for – an option that was not available to British feminists, who were closer to the controversies of the suffrage movement, and who signaled this to Sanger in no uncertain terms (Witcop). It is clear that the alliances created across transnational boundaries were sometimes unexpected, and created possibilities for coalitions to be formed across ideological divides that could not be traversed within a national context.
The Forerunner Charlotte Perkins Gilman was one of the speakers at the New York “feminist mass meeting” in 1914, about whom Sanger was so critical. Her correspondence reveals her deep transatlantic influence, which persisted for many decades after she ceased publication of her sole-authored journal, The Forerunner (published in the United States from 1909–1916).
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This periodical, a monthly mix of fiction, poems, and social commentary, spanned an ambiguous space between “socialist,” “feminist,” and “humanist” identities. Without an overt investment in modernism, Gilman became known as a leading proponent of “modern” ways to organize the home, calling for technology and collective living to transform the domestic subordination of women. Like more obviously “modernist” feminist figures, she called for women to recognize their own psychic subordination and their power to take rebellion into their own hands. The Forerunner drew on the print-cultural styles and scientific thought of the last decades of the nineteenth century, offering sentimental fiction and poetry alongside an optimistic, utopian, and racially exclusive approach to the power of individuals and collectivities to compel change. Though published through the years of suffrage and modernist innovation in print culture, the paper is better placed in a trajectory of an earlier mode of publishing within the women’s movement, harking back to British journals such as Shafts or American papers such as the Woman’s Journal or Revolution. What is interesting about the way Gilman’s periodical writing and books were taken up across the Atlantic is their disruption of periodization. British feminists persistently read Gilman as a leading radical, long after she had lost her early Edwardian ascendancy in the United States. Her Woman and Economics had been published in 1898 to enormous critical acclaim, but one American suffragist recalled that in 1912, “everybody who used to read Charlotte Perkins Gilman was now reading [Ellen Key]” (Dorr 245). Nonetheless, when transported across the Atlantic, Gilman continued to be read as the leading American feminist thinker. Ada Nield Chew, a working-class labor and suffrage activist based in the north of England, told of how through the Workers Education Association she had taught a large class of “Gilmanites” in Rochdale (a northern textile town) in 1911. Chew testified that reading Gilman had “opened a new world to me. Whereas I was bewildered and hopeless, though blindly in rebellion, now I see light” (Chew letter). The Forerunner had become a guiding text for her. This account of transnational influence shifts our attention from metropolitan elites and their coteries to the networks of provincial and rural study circles. But it also sets the scene for a surprising continuity of influence, both in Rochdale itself and more widely in provincial Britain. As late as 1923, a correspondent described using the Women’s Institutes’ “lecture circuit” in rural Suffolk to spread Gilman’s ideas (Thompson letter); in 1931, Gilman was still receiving mail from members of a Gilman study circle in Rochdale. The Forerunner, as read
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in 1930s Britain, linked back directly to the intellectual and print culture of the American 1890s, through the medium of a late Edwardian journal. The Gilman Circle studied interwar British feminists such as Vera Brittain, Margaret McMillan, and Dora Russell, but its members continually referred back to Gilman’s contribution as the means of making sense of these later voices within feminism. In crossing the Atlantic this periodical had given prominence to a figure who was no longer read in her own country as a contemporary commentator and linked her ideas to British feminists of younger generations. This odd recontextualization and resignification of Gilman owes something to the effect of transnational exchanges on the status and distribution of a periodical, which can transform it as a textual resource and establish a different kind of relationship to its readers. The periodical that has crossed national boundaries might be encountered by reputation or the occasional copy, rather than as an ongoing, timely series. American periodicals such as the Forerunner circulated as scarce and treasured items in Britain. Gilman’s British correspondents described their difficulties in accessing her work. One writing in the 1930s mentioned that she had a few copies of the Forerunner, but found that “Women who have taken the ‘Forerunner’ will not part with it” (Clegg letter). In order to find answers to current controversies, she and her peers turned back to old copies of the Forerunner, and were constantly surprised at how relevant the material was. The Forerunner in Britain had lost its role as a timely and ephemeral monthly, and had instead become a kind of canonical resource. In its scarcity it had almost the status of a sacred text for some of its readers, which allowed it to continue to be read long after it had ceased publication. Transnationally circulating periodicals might come to resemble other forms of print culture – back issues of the Forerunner were consulted as if they were an encyclopedia or bible, resembling a book rather than a periodical. In the case of the Freewoman, constraints on distribution, caused by small initial print runs and the lack of a distributor in the United States, and compounded later by paper shortages during the war, gave it a very patchy circulation. Many Americans who wrote to the Freewoman editor offering contributions or support commented that they had simply heard of the paper through commentary in books, the National’s pamphlets, or other periodicals that discussed it. This “imagined status” perhaps allowed it to be consumed by an American “middlebrow” public its editors had actively shunned in Britain. While the British marketing of the paper had stressed “It is les jeunes who make history and literature and science” in the “revues libres,” in the United States “Nietzschean feminism” was
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comfortably discussed in women’s magazines such as Good Housekeeping and The Delineator, or in mass-market periodicals such as Harper’s Weekly or Current Opinion.8 The Freewoman could stand for a wider range of positions for its American “readers,” who might have seen a single issue or even a single article reprinted in other sources. Accounts of the development and influence of periodicals must acknowledge this patchy circulation and the creative readings that might be inspired by the sometimes imagined nature of print material from other countries.
Conclusion These sources thus suggest that a change of perspective – from a literary focus on content to a media history focus on circulation, or a historical focus on transnational exchanges of ideas, can offer new “lenses” sensitive to features on the landscape. Reading feminist periodicals requires attention to the “crossing and recrossing” of popular and mass-market channels of media distribution with the political and the literary, and the morphing of genres as they cross national boundaries. It should also be clear that we advocate a rethinking of the cast of historical actors whose contributions have been read as “significant,” and that we propose the need for greater sensitivity to the unevenness of periodical publishing and reading when asking questions about the “when” of “modernity.” These are processes of sensitization and recontextualization to which the critical framework of “modernism” does not lend itself. All of the journals mentioned above engaged actively and overtly with the idea of “modernity,” and how women might be figured within it. This active engagement seems an appropriate starting point for any attempt to place such journals within a larger framework of historical change; “modernity” is a concept that carries less of an ideological charge than “modernism,” and does less violence (or runs less of a risk of anachronism) to any attempt to narrate the ways in which historical actors placed themselves as advocates or opponents of “the modern.” The journals dealt with here represent only a few examples of the wide range of suffrage and feminist publications produced and traveling between Britain and the United States in these years, and do not account for other transnational connections that were just as important. Taking transnationality seriously also complicates teaching and publishing, since the construction of subject groups within academies, or lists within publishing houses, is often unable to categorize or sponsor work that does not fall within traditional “national” mappings. And attention to the imperatives of cultural history – to
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reception, circulation, and reading practices – demands attention to the “non-canonical” – the enormous range of ephemera, of popular dailies, the illustrated press, pulps, and pamphlets. This entails a correlative move away from the standard landscape of “little magazines” and political quarterlies and monthlies which have populated the readings lists of many courses: or better, an attempt to see both realms as part of a dense web of “live wires” which interact and share audiences, networks of distribution, and publishing practices.
Notes 1. We are drawing here and below on language from the original call for papers and publicity material for the symposium at the University of Delaware, “Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms,” 27–28 April 2007. 2. Ibid. 3. The use of the term “web” here derives from Bonnie Kime Scott’s first volume of Refiguring Modernism. For instance, her chapter “Stretching the Scope of Suffrage” may expand our understanding of the contributions of figures such as West, Woolf, and Barnes, but it actually shrinks and distorts an understanding of the issues and publications of the suffrage movement, attributing to modernist women ideas that had been debated by Victorian feminists decades earlier. 4. For a useful definition of cultural history, see Ashplant and Smyth, 5–6. 5. We might consider here the important contribution made by revisionist work on feminism in the inter war period. Women’s periodicals provided a crucial part of that story. 6. See Delap for further discussion of The Freewoman. 7. This appeared as an editorial comment (no signature) in Judy September 1919: 20. 8. Daily Herald advertisement for The New Freewoman, 6 December 1913.
Works cited Ardis, Ann L. “Introduction.” Women’s Experience of Modernity, 1875–1945. Eds. Ann L. Ardis and Leslie W. Lewis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 1–10. Armstrong, Tim. Modernism: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Ashplant, T.G. and Gerry Smyth. Explorations in Cultural History. London: Pluto Press, 2001. Billington-Greig, Teresa. “Feminism and Politics.” The Non-Violent Militant: Selected Writings of Teresa Billington-Greig. Eds. Carol McPhee and Ann FitzGerald. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. 225–235. Bingham, Adrian. Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain. Oxford: Clarendon, 2004. Björkman, Frances Maule. Letter to Dora Marsden. 16 October 1913. Mary Ware Dennett Papers. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute.
The Anglo-American Feminist Press 65 Brake, Laurel. Print in Transition, 1850–1910: Studies in Media and Book History. London: Palgrave, 2001. Chew, Ada Nield. Letter to Charlotte Perkins Gilman. 10 December 1911. Charlotte Perk Gilman Papers. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute. Clegg, Susan. Letter to Charlotte Perkins Gilman. 22 December 1926. Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute. Collier, Patrick. Modernism on Fleet Street. Burlington and Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Delap, Lucy. The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Dorr, Rheta Childe. A Woman of Fifty. New York: Funk and Wagnalls Co., 1924. Felski, Rita.“Modernism/Modernity: Engendering Literary History.” Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism. Ed. Lisa Rado. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994. 191–208. Furley Smith, Catherine. Letter to the Editor. The Morning Post 26 July 1912: 5. Hamilton, Cicely. Marriage as a Trade. London: Chapman and Hall, 1909. Hamilton, Susan, ed. “Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors”: Victorian Writing by Women on Women. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004. Jacobs, Deborah. “Feminist Criticism/Cultural Studies/Modernist Texts: A Manifesto for the ‘90s.” Ed. Lisa Rado. Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994. 273–295. Marsden, Dora. Letter to Frances Maule Björkman. 11 January 1913. Mary Ware Dennett Papers. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute. “The New Freewoman.” [Advertisement]. Daily Herald [London] 6 December 1913: 6. Norquay, Glenda and Sowon S. Park. “Mediating Women’s Suffrage Literature.” Women’s Studies International Forum 29: 3 (May–June) 2006. 301–306. Sanger, Margaret. “The New Feminists.” Women Rebel March 1914: 1. ___. “The Militants in England.” Woman Rebel, June 1914: 25, 31 Scott, Bonnie Kime. Refiguring Modernism: Volume One, The Women of 1928. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Scott-James, R.A. The Influence of the Press 1913. London: S.W. Partidge, 1913. Thompson, Margaret E. Letter to Gilman. April 24 1923. Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute. Witcop, Rose. “Letter to Margaret Sanger.” The Woman Rebel [New York], July 1914: 39.
4 Feminist Things Barbara Green
You should be reading this with something in your hands besides a journal. And something, really, besides a pencil or pen. Something like an empty glass, a rubber band, a paper clip that you can rub between your fingers, that you can twist and bend back and forth. For the idea is to wonder whether – while concerning ourselves with one or another crisis of the subject – we haven’t also been in the midst of an effort to think about the object, if not indeed to liberate material objects. Bill Brown, “The Secret Life of Things” (1) Bill Brown’s suggestion to his reader that the journal Modernism/ Modernity might not be enough to set up the proper (tactile) relationship between reader and object raises the question: if not properly a thing itself, what relationship does a periodical hold to the things represented in its pages?1 It is first, perhaps, in their role as tour guides to a world of things, mediators that describe, promote, and sell, that early twentieth century periodicals open a window onto the theories of objects that organized relationships between their readers and the things surrounding them. The periodicals produced during the suffrage campaigns in Britain and America at the beginning of the last century provide fertile territory for considering modern objects for, as has been capably demonstrated, they were stitched firmly to a complex commercial, thing-filled, world.2 The editors of periodicals such as Votes for Women, Suffragette, Vote, Common Cause or the Freewoman in England employed various state of the art methods of advertising, marketing, and promotional spectacle to circulate feminist ideas in the public sphere, though their commitments to advertising culture varied, as did the level of concern and 66
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anxiety that accompanied an engagement with commercial culture. As quite a few scholars of suffrage culture have shown, British and American suffragists and suffragettes used mass advertising techniques – sandwich boards, sensational political events – to promote and sell their feminist papers. As they did so they also relied upon and helped to support the development of a niche market for feminist collectibles: badges, banners, tea-sets, card and board games, books, pamphlets, celebrity postcards, jewelry, and more. Given this abundance of suffrage objects, and the current visibility of these objects in museum special exhibits and glossy art books like Diane Atkinson’s Suffragettes in the Purple, White and Green, most scholars of suffrage culture would agree that feminist activists on both sides of the Atlantic exploited and helped to create the new forms of commercial (and visual) culture that dominated the first part of the twentieth century. More importantly, this engagement with the marketplace has been persuasively read as a central practice through which suffrage culture established a feminist public or counter-public sphere.3 Michelle Tusan has found in the diversity of suffrage publications, each presenting the aims and goals of a particular organization, the emergence of multiple locations for public debate and the coexistence of multiple counter-public spheres (108). Maria DiCenzo has shown that it was precisely through an engagement with advertising culture and commercial culture that suffragists and suffragettes created their counter-public spheres, a claim that runs against the grain of the notion that the rise of a (feminized) commercial market and the capitalization of the press indicated the demise of the public sphere (DiCenzo “Militant” 116). By harnessing the possibilities of the new advertising culture associated with New Journalism, developing commercial relationships with suffrage supporters in department stores and other commercial venues, transforming feminist collectives into consumer blocks, employing female “newsys” to sell periodicals in city streets, and other vibrant techniques of promotional spectacle, suffrage editors developed a feminist public sphere through their commercial activities.4 This focus on the transformation of the public sphere through suffrage’s commercial strategies has radically altered our understanding of the modern press and enriched our understanding of women’s contributions to the making of modern periodical culture. Suffrage periodical culture has been shown to be not only a central vehicle through which women entered into and engaged the wider public but also a mechanism for shaping and producing feminist identities (Tusan 141). In these pages I want to turn the question of feminist advertising culture around and direct our attention away from the public sphere and back to
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the so-called “private” arena, to the commercial activities of suffrage activists and the potential these activities may have had to reframe the rituals of daily life. There is some unavoidable complexity in invoking the terms “public” and “private” in this context, since I am drawing on both feminist descriptions of separate spheres and studies of print culture influenced directly by a Habermasian notion of the public sphere. In feminist studies, on the one hand, public and private generally map onto the physical spaces of home and a wider public arena; in a Habermasian context, on the other hand, commercial activities are excluded from the “public sphere” while rational and disinterested political debate comes to define it. To add to the confusion, it is now a commonplace in studies of modern shopping culture that the rise of the department store enabled the middle-class woman’s engagement with the “public” arena.5 And many readings of suffrage culture indicate that one of the lasting contributions of the suffrage debate was to subvert the distinction of public and private realms altogether. Yet, most work on suffrage culture has traced woman’s increasing engagement with a “wider” public world and thus suffrage’s engagement with the “feminine” worlds of home and department store has taken a back seat to studies of the suffragette in the street, the prison, the government meeting. The question remains how a feminist engagement with the marketplace transformed existing or developing practices of daily life. As feminist objects and feminist consumers emerged, so did new understandings of “feminine” rituals and activities. We would do well to consider the mechanisms that enabled feminist activists to reshape commercial desire and remake women’s relationships to particular objects in their efforts to advertise “the cause.” How did a broach or a teacup become more than a familiar object of daily use or adornment? Rather than concentrating upon a single object (though one could easily imagine doing so: a study of the imprisonment broach, for example, or the suffrage banner could be useful), I want to track how suffrage discourse suggested new relationships to often familiar or only slightly remade, rebranded, objects. I am especially interested in what attention to the “thinginess” of suffrage culture can tell us about the special role the feminist periodical played in creating a feminist approach to the everyday in modernity through the refashioning of domestic objects into feminist ones. This essay will focus on some of the strategies members of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) developed in the pages of Votes for Women – perhaps the most canny of the suffrage papers in its use of advertising and innovative promotional strategies – for rethinking a relationship to the object, and on Evelyn Sharp’s fictional and journalistic readings of the suffrage shop that sold feminist things.
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The suffrage shops that became part of the London landscape in the Edwardian period took on a crucial role in the reorganization of a feminist relationship to the object. John Mercer argues that while historians and others have been consistently attracted to the WSPU’s “public protest tactics,” few have studied the deliberate, “low-profile” and non-militant campaign strategies that were employed throughout the campaign: “ ‘at homes’ reminiscent of nineteenth century drawing room meetings,” the distribution of propaganda literature, the behind the scenes office work of its staff, and the development of the suffrage shop (2–4). Votes for Women shops were launched in 1908, with most major WSPU branches opening a shop, even if only temporarily, within their headquarters. In 1910 the WSPU’s Woman’s Press moved to a new location on Charing Cross Road and opened the flagship suffrage store with a Votes for Women clock outside and stocks of collectibles in the tricolors within. The suffrage shop is particularly interesting because of its use of place and space: neither wholly public nor private, the suffrage shop positioned itself within a “third space” which allowed for both an engagement with the public sphere and the maintenance of a degree of “respectability” and “protection”; in addition, the suffrage shop gave activists the opportunity to control their own space, to host meetings on their own property and thus leverage a certain amount of control over potentially hostile visitors (4, 5). Like Margaret Finnegan , who has also taken up the modern feminist engagement with commodity culture, Mercer worries about the contradictions enfolded into these marketing schemes. Was the suffrage shop a new venture or a retreat from the public sphere? A canny manipulation of modern commodity culture? A capitulation to dominant notions of domestic femininity (Mercer 4, Finnegan 112)? While suffragettes and suffragists courted the legitimacy that accompanied their successful entrance into the market, and embraced modern consumer values “including the celebration of material abundance and commoditycentered selfhood,” they also risked “reinforcing concepts of femininity and domesticity that had long been the basis of women’s political dependence and social subordination” (Finnegan 112–113). At best, suffrage’s engagement with the market has been read as canny strategy or as fully entwined in the creation of a counter-public sphere, at worst as a “dilution of the internal consistency of [suffrage’s] ideology and objectives” (Finnegan 118). Though these tensions cannot be wished away, approaching the problem from the angle of the everyday can be illuminating. A set of everyday operations – from shopping to dressing to housekeeping – received sustained critical attention in a wide variety of feminist journals in the early twentieth century. Within the pages of Votes for Women, for
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example, one finds not only advertisements for a wide range of commodities and “suffrage things” (tea and soaps branded with the WSPU’s logo), but also a column devoted to various aspects of daily life entitled “The World We Live In,” book reviews that frequently had a focus on feminist engagements with domestic issues and objects, and fashion advertorials (essays blending advertisement and editorial in which “the woman reader and woman consumer become one and the same”) (Beetham 81). Reading for conversations about the everyday reveals a large shared cultural project of developing new ways of reading modernity through a specifically feminist lens. A focus upon reviews, short fiction, and what journalist Evelyn Sharp called the “middles” of periodical culture – “lighter articles that temper the solidity of editorials” (Sharp 93) – highlights how the rituals, habits, and daily obligations of modern life were read in relation to the political issues that dominated suffrage papers at the beginning of the twentieth century: the vote, wages, employment opportunities, and the like. Attending to a discourse of feminist consumption is in part a matter of noticing how the “density of the subject passes into the object” (Baudrillard qtd. in Brown 1). As Bill Brown and others have argued, “thing theory” and material culture studies illuminate the practices through which we organize our relationships to objects and grant them a certain kind of value. Here, I’ll be drawing on three practices of relating to the object that have been developed in multi-disciplinary studies of the object and of modern commodity culture: first a strategic practice of “misuse,” then the organization of objects into overlapping or intersecting “domains,” and finally the “re-auratization” of the thing through its proximity to a “lifestyle.” The first of these practices, “misuse,” is elaborated in Brown’s reading of modernist anxieties concerning the disappearance of the thing in a burgeoning commodity culture. Modernity’s “circuits of exchange and consumption” can produce objects but never “things” themselves. A “thing” is remarkable in the degree to which it escapes the cycles of exchange and consumption that characterize the life of modern objects. Organized through a “fetishistic overvaluation or misappropriation,” a “thing” is understood best when “dislodg[ed]” from the “circuits through which it is what it typically is.” Thus a “thing” is distinguished from an object because it is best understood in terms of its “misuse value”; its hidden qualities become visible “when the object is experienced in whatever time it takes ... for an object to become another” (3). Brown is describing here, at least in part, a practice of experiencing the thing as such, a use of or approach to the object that renders it more than object, and engages the “excess of the object” (2). To
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use a knife as a screwdriver, for example, is to “dislocate[e]” it from “one routinized objectification” and to have a chance at “sens[ing] its presence” (3). In Virginia Woolf’s story “Solid Objects,” Brown locates a treatment of the “luminous transparency” and “auratic singularity” of the modern thing (1). The phrase the “auratic singularity” of the thing may be difficult to reconcile with the pragmatic bent of suffrage’s promotional strategies. Yet, it begins to make sense of the degree to which suffrage activists wrenched common objects from routine circuits of exchange and use and made them signify differently: a cup of tea as a sign of political commitment; a paste amethyst, emerald green, and imitation diamond necklace transformed into a symbol through its brilliant display of the WSPU’s colors; a periodical bound, marketed during the Christmas season and transformed into a feminist collectable. Through a kind of strategic “misuse,” the teacup is both itself and more than itself: an emblem of taste, certainly, but also a badge of honor, a reminder of commitment, a recruiting tool, a memento. The teacup is more than a teacup, in part, because of the various contexts in which it is located – the teacup is neatly set within an arena of abundance and plenitude that characterized modern shopping culture while it simultaneously holds a place within an arena of selfsacrifice and loyalty that organized much militant suffrage debate and experience. That is to say that the suffrage collectable is best understood in relation to the various “domains” in which it acquires meaning. According to Daniel Miller, the “object worlds” or “domains” of modernity are striking in their sheer abundance, variety, internal diversity, and specificity.6 While Miller is especially attentive to the “specific materiality” of each object, he also recognizes the interrelatedness of object worlds and the fact that objects gain meaning in relation to one another. It is often by working the borders between material domains in order to notice how “material worlds” interact or “become each other’s contexts” that we can discover “how things matter,” acquire meaning and sometimes act as embodiments of ourselves (3, 9).7 Through an attention to specificity, the materiality of specific domains, and a recognition of the diversity of material domains, Miller suggests that we can discover unstated criteria for how “human values ... exist ... through their objectification in cultural forms” (19). A look at the interrelatedness of material domains can help us ask new questions about the ways in which modern feminists combined progressive politics and traditional patterns of consumption to create a feminist consumer culture and feminist theories of everyday life. Suffrage objects and suffrage periodicals make a particular kind of
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cultural sense in relation to one another when read in relation to suffrage activities such as large-scale marches, street hawking, organized protests, certainly, but also strategic interventions in the feminine practices of everyday life, shopping, housekeeping, dressing, etc. Read in this way, feminist objects help compose what Jennifer Wicke has called in another context a modern “lifestyle” based on new relationships to the market and its commodities. Such a lifestyle provides meaning through consumption: “a re-auratization under the sign of personal history, fantasmatic agency, collective desire” (121). Though Wicke’s interest lies with the “coterie consumption” of the Bloomsbury group and the circulation of its aesthetic products (under the Omega Workshop brand in the early twentieth century and under the Laura Ashley brand in the later decades), her reading is suggestive for my purposes. Briefly, Wicke says that the modern market was transformed from the rational, easily categorized “grid of goods” of the nineteenth century and required the experimental techniques of Woolf’s modernism (and Keynes’ economic experimentalism) to give it expression. Consumption becomes a matter of lifestyle, “a dimension of modern art production and social tastes articulated by contemporaries like Henry James, and Oscar Wilde, among others,” and “coterie consumption” becomes a group activity meaning both the “consumption of art by a coterie” and the “marketing and consumption of their art (and thought and lifestyle) as produced by a celebrated coterie” (110). Substitute politics for art (or politics and art) in the above, and you have a fairly good description of how suffrage literature, periodicals, poster art, and commodities circulated in a feminist community, albeit one that was far more diverse and far-reaching than Bloomsbury’s “coterie” but that operated using similar strategies of celebrity. The meaning attached to feminist objects – “a re-auratization under the sign of personal history, fantasmatic agency, collective desire” – came from new venues for consumption like the suffrage shop, new meanings attached to objects which became public signs of commitment, and from personal sacrifice, most obvious when an imprisoned suffragette was given a broach in the shape of a prison grille to signify her suffering. Periodicals advertised and provided access to this lifestyle and created both virtual and actual communities of collective desire. But because suffrage journals were often interested in reorganizing and challenging their readers’ relationship to dominant codes of femininity, consumption, and to both the private and public spheres, they also stood in a unique relationship to the commercial culture they both featured and created. Suffrage papers strategically deployed discussions of dress,
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cookery, and shopping by suggesting that these womanly enterprises were compatible with feminist activism. For example, an item on “suffragettes at home” at work cooking and canning published in the Vote gave new readers a way of envisioning themselves as converts by aligning activism with traditional representations of womanhood. Similarly, a fashion feature in Votes for Women concerning dress often recommended popular fashions for suffrage rallies, full dress uniform of a white frock with regalia and colors (“Where Dresses” 588). By maintaining dominant representations of femininity, such efforts worked effectively to combat anti-feminist rhetoric about feminism as a failure of femininity (Tickner, 213–226). Other strategies worked to create a collision between old and new patterns of consumption, thus effectively creating a space for a “reauratization” of objects “under the sign of personal [and political] history” that now belonged to a new domain. Suffrage culture worked not just by encouraging specific kinds of consumption, but also by denying, and/or troubling consumption itself. For example, the WSPU’s “Self-Denial Week[s]” launched in 1908 and run annually, raised money for the campaign and simultaneously developed new vocabularies for understanding consumption. In 1908, the WSPU raised over £6,800 by shifting the meanings attached to objects and establishing new patterns of consumption. Individual collection cards indicate how women denied themselves things in order to save for the cause: “Denial of a summer outfit, Savings from housekeeping expenses,” “Water and dry toast for breakfast and tea all the week,” “By going without butter, meat, and flowers,” “Fasting,” “From dress allowance” (Pethick Lawrence “Report” 2–3). Such “sacrifice” was given both a political and spiritual significance through a comparison with the imprisonment of suffrage activists: “They [activists like leader Emmeline Pankhurst] had set the supreme standard of self-denial, and all question or hesitation was swept away” (2). Within this framework, an everyday object, in its absence, took on new meaning for the would-be consumer. Acts of non-consumption came to work as signs of political commitment and membership in a community and the anti-object came to have a certain kind of value. Certainly, it is true that self-denial was routed back into consumption as women were asked to market “Votes for Women” commodities (soaps bearing the Votes for Women stamp, for example) or other wares during the fundraising period, yet this period of denial and its rhetoric of sacrifice attached spiritual value to ordinary objects and marked the female consumer as hyper-rational, selective, abstemious.
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In addition, typically feminine practices of everyday life – shopping, cooking, and gardening – took on new political valence, as women reorganized their shopping and household patterns: a woman writes that she will do without butter, and that she will take collections; a boy is going to save up his pocket money; a family of five will adopt very simple meals through the week, and send to the funds the money they save; ... one woman writes that she is going to do without a servant for a week, doing the work herself, and sending the money which she saves in this way. (“Self-Denial Week” 378) WSPU treasurer Emmeline Pethick Lawrence emphasized the degree to which “self-denial” in this context meant labor: “Self-Denial Week” requires “sheer hard work by everyone,” is “difficult,” requires the energy of “devoted and resourceful members” (“Letter” 381). By calling attention to the ways in which women’s consumption is a kind of labor, Pethick Lawrence anticipated contemporary scholarly investigations of shopping that recast consumption both as female labor and as central to the making of the modern metropolis. By linking affect to acts of consumption and refusal, Pethick Lawrence imagined a context in which commodity exchange becomes saturated with sentiment: “one reason that money is so essential to our agitation is that money is the symbol of love, labour, devotion, sincerity, and self-denial.” “[W]e are a practical people,” Pethick Lawrence wrote, “and we want to turn all this sacrifice and suffering to the fullest possible account in winning the immediate enfranchisement of women” (“Letter” 381). It is in a “domain” (to borrow Miller’s term) in which shopping, labor, selfdenial, love, and devotion are strongly linked that one can imagine both the transformation of an ordinary object into a feminist thing and the saturation of everyday life with feminist politics. Yet, the tensions at the heart of the militants’ engagement with the marketing of suffrage collectibles did not go unnoticed by suffragettes themselves. The journalistic essays and stories by Evelyn Sharp about her work in a Votes for Women shop mark both a recognition that feminist shops targeted the rich fantasy life of consumer culture and a hope that the suffrage collectable was somehow more than a commodity. I suppose by the time one has finished one’s journey through life all the ambitions of childhood will have been realized, except, perhaps, the more exalted ones, such as discovering a desert island or snatching somebody from the angry flames. And another one went by the
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board the other day when the Kensington W.S.P.U. was suddenly inspired to open shop at 143 Church Street. Nobody said so in committee, but I do not believe a single member of that serious and grown-up group of Kensington Suffragettes was above feeling a secret thrill of glee at the thought of keeping shop at last – real shop, with a counter, and a bell, and a cash-box, and a staircase leading up to a sort of Never-Never Land, where tea is made every day at five o’clock, and up which you can shout “Shop!” whenever you want to appear particularly professional. It is like raising a humdrum existence to the level of dreams. (“Painting Kensington” 422) Sharp’s essay, “Painting Kensington Purple, White, and Green” published in Votes for Women in 1909, recognizes the “shop girl” as a new figure in the metropolitan cultural imagination and stitches that figure firmly to the rich fantasy life of childhood. Here, the suffrage shop blends the glittering dream world of modernity’s shopping culture (“everything, wherever you look, is glowing with purple, white and green”) with the reality of the business of suffrage (“Food for the mind is rather our aim, and the mind we try to catch is expected to feed just as hungrily on purple, white, and green ‘goods’ as on pamphlets and books”) (422). But the business of suffrage, suffrage as business, continually points to the ways in which the suffrage shop is more than, or not quite, a shop: the “coy” public must be persuaded by “enticing invitations in the window” that it is “safe to come inside”; the suffragettes are visited by a “real” “shop assistant” who in offering to dress their window before she goes to work in the morning highlights the suffragette’s appropriation of the shop girl’s role as childish playacting; indeed, suffragettes “never feel quite so much like real shopkeepers as when someone comes in and planks down a sovereign, with a cursory ‘Can you kindly oblige Mr. So-and-So with change, miss?’ ” It is the ambiguity of the suffrage shop in Sharp’s writings, its status as both a central participant in modern commodity culture and as something quite different, that allows for a new look at the feminist everyday. In this “Never Never Land” of the suffrage shop, the hope is that feminist things can be relied upon to be unambiguous. A “well known man of letters” buys a suffrage tie to wear to events when he is prohibited from speaking on militant tactics. “ ‘The tie will speak for itself,’ said the member of committee who happened to be playing at shop that day.” But this is a confidence that is short lived, as we will see. What makes the suffrage tie a feminist thing that can “speak for itself”? Is
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Sharp suggesting that suffrage shops bring a new kind of object before the public? Or is she outlining an approach to the object that makes it something new? Is the suffrage shop offering a strategic “misuse” of the object, to borrow Brown’s term? Or is it a set of overlapping “domains” or contexts that gives the thing its meaning and value?8 Efforts at selling suffrage wares are explored in Sharp’s writings as entirely new kinds of transactions entailing new relationships to objects – not really marketing at all. Her suffrage stories, written for the Manchester Guardian as well as Votes for Women and collected in the volume Rebel Women, register both the energy and discomfort that accompanied the involvement of feminist politics with the marketplace. In “Votes for Women – Forward!” Sharp concentrates upon the suffrage shop as a space for what Wicke would call “coterie consumption” and what Sharp calls “buying” as opposed to “shopping.” The distinction for Sharp is a fine but important one: Sharp’s narrator seems quite dismayed by the fact that her “amateur” suffrage shop is frequented by wandering “professional” consumers who know how to spend a half hour in a hat shop without buying anything. Yet, despite the amateur status of the suffragette shopkeepers, her suffrage shop seems to be doing exactly what it should – selling a lifestyle to its public. The shop is frequented by passers by who want to stop and chat, shoppers who think that all of the saleswomen are “Pankhursts,” the down and out who are told by the police that the suffragists, if anyone, can help, and by small schoolchildren who shout “Votes for Women!” into the mail slot before running away. The story culminates in a photography session that is intended to establish the suffrage shop’s professional status but instead works to reinforce the suffrage shop’s celebrity status. Never fully secure in the Never Never Land of the shop, Sharp’s narrator is caught in two worlds simultaneously, as are her customers. The narrator’s frustration with browsing shoppers, and the store’s ambivalent status between amateur and professional ultimately results in an uncertain meaning attached to the objects sold. Though one shop assistant announces that a suffrage tie in the colors will “speak for itself” (93) echoing the journalistic piece Sharp had published earlier in Votes for Women, the narrative here suggests that such confidence is ill-placed. Of a tobacco pouch given to a policeman who had once arrested the most militant of the store’s staff, the suffragette says “he might use it for the rest of his life without discovering what the sketch of Holloway Gaol was meant for” (96). The strategies of misuse, collection into a proper domain and “re-auratization” of the object through its proximity to a lifestyle are crucial if a new meaning for the object is to be secured. Removed from a system of activism, periodical culture, suffrage
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shops, and rhetoric of feminist consumption and sacrifice, the object fails to mean anything particular to its owner. Without its location in a number of intersecting domains, without being stitched to the lifestyle of suffrage, without a practice of “misuse” to give it meaning, the tie is just a tie, the tobacco pouch is just a tobacco pouch. The energy devoted to establishing new shopping practices for suffragettes in the pages of Votes for Women does more than sell goods; it gives things their status as something other than a commodity. In addition, it makes a feminine practice of everyday life visible and lends it a new meaning. Attention to the thinginess of suffrage culture may change the way we think about suffrage papers. Suffrage journals – along with manifestoes and leaflets – also functioned as objects in and of themselves. Sold with collectibles in suffrage bookshops, displayed on coffee tables in the home as signatures of political conversion, used as physical evidence in public trials, carried as badges or signs of affiliation on the street, the suffrage periodical was often the first object that a potential convert came in contact with as she became radicalized. Suffrage papers are treated with remarkable reverence and affection in suffrage writings: indeed, Mary Chapman has suggested that the suffrage paper is treated as more than a thing in suffrage culture, but nearly as a person.9 It may be that attending to the thinginess of suffrage culture can help us recognize how both affect and subjectivity came to be attached to the suffrage periodical in histories of the movement. To attend to the development of the feminist thing, and to the status of the feminist periodical as a thing, is to deploy the insights of scholars such as George Bornstein, who have drawn our attention to the materiality of the periodical and its existence as an object, in combination with material culture scholarship’s efforts to make sense of the ways in which “cultural values become objectified in specific material forms” (Brown 2).10 Taken together, periodical culture studies and material culture studies (or “thing theory”) can reveal the value of the periodical as an object itself, thus enriching discussion of the public sphere with an understanding of the affect, sentiment, and desires that bond subjects to objects and allow for the production of new subjectivities through innovative acts of consumption.
Notes 1. This piece is greatly indebted to the work of Mary Chapman, Maria DiCenzo and Mark Morrisson. 2. For work on suffrage’s relation to commodities and promotional culture see Atkinson, Chapman, DiCenzo “Gutter” and “Militant,” Finnegan, Mercer, Morrisson, Tickner, and Tusan.
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3. For suffrage print culture read in relation to Habermas’ notion of the public sphere, see DiCenzo “Militant,” Morrisson, Murray, Tusan. 4. For the newsy, see DiCenzo “Gutter Politics.” 5. For this point, see Friedberg, Nava and Rappaport. 6. In his introduction to Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, Daniel Miller uses the terms “domain” and “object world” interchangeably to indicate the arena in which an object operates and gains meaning. The diversity and particularity of domains in modernity are striking: “within an hour of waking we move from the paraphernalia of interior furnishing through the decisions to be communicated over choices of apparel through the moral anxieties over the ingestion of food stuffs out in the variety of transport systems held within vast urban architectural and infrastructural forms” (6). These “object worlds” sometimes overlap with academic arenas of inquiry – food studies, building studies – or with academic disciplines – architecture and the like. 7. In one of Miller’s examples, a successful study of gardens places them not in relation to a predictable history of landscape, but in the relation to the cultural meaning of the lounge and of kitchens – interior spaces that organize our relationships to leisure. 8. I’m grateful to Brad Evans for discussions regarding networks for reception. 9. Electronic mail conversation. 10. In an essay devoted to outlining the new critical possibilities that emerge with the digitalized text, Latham notes briefly that the particular characteristics of periodicals in print become visible in the digital age when we have the opportunity to compare print to an alternative (415).
Works cited Atkinson, Diane. Suffragettes in the Purple, White and Green. London: Museum of London, 1992. Beetham, Margaret. A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Bornstein, George. Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Brown, Bill. “The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism).” Modernism/Modernity 6(2) (1999): 1–28. Chapman, Mary. Making Noise/Making News: Suffrage Advocacy and Modernist Print Culture. Unpublished Paper. Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms. 27–28 April 2007. University of Delaware. DiCenzo, Maria. “Gutter Politics: Women Newsies and the Suffrage Press,” Women’s History Review 12(1) (2003): 15–33. ——. “Militant Distribution: Votes for Women and the Public Sphere.” Media History 6(2) (2000): 115–128. Finnegan, Margaret. Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
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Latham, Sean. “New Age Scholarship: The Work of Criticism in the Age of Digital Reproduction.” New Literary History 35(3) (2004): 411–426. Mercer, John. “Commercial Places, Public Spaces: Suffragette Shops and the Public Sphere.” University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History 7 (2004): 1–10. Miller, Daniel, ed. Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Morrisson, Mark. The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1906–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Murray, Simone. “Deeds and Words: The Woman’s Press and the Politics of Print.” Women: A Cultural Review 11(3) (2000): 197–222. Nava, Mica. “Modernity’s Disavowal: Women, the City, and the Department Store.” Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity. Eds. Mica Nava and Alan O’Shea. New York: Routledge, 1996. 38–76. Pethick Lawrence, Emmeline. “A Letter To Women. Self-Denial Week.” Votes for Women. 26 February 1909: 381. ——. The National Social and Political Union Report of Self-Denial Week. 1908. WSPU pamphlet. Women’s Library. Rappaport, Erika. Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. “Self-Denial Week,” Votes for Women. 26 February 1909: 378. Sharp, Evelyn. “Painting Kensington Purple, White and Green.” Votes for Women. 12 March 1909: 422. ——. Unfinished Adventure: Selected Reminiscences from an Englishwoman’s Life. London: John Lane, 1933. ——. “Votes for Women – Forward!” Rebel Women. New York: John Lane, 1910. 92–100. Tickner, Lisa. The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907–1914. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Tusan, Michelle Elizabeth. Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005. “Where Dresses in the Colours Can Be Bought.” Votes for Women. 23 April 1909: 588. Wicke, Jennifer. “Coterie Consumption: Bloomsbury, Keynes, and Modernism as Marketing.” Marketing Modernism: Self-Promotion, Canonization, and Rereading. Eds. Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. 109–132.
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Part II The Cultural Work of Print Media: Markets, Institutions, and Audiences
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5 Philanthropy and Transatlantic Print Culture Francesca Sawaya
This chapter argues for foregrounding as an object of scholarly attention the ways in which modern print culture was funded. I suggest that scrutiny of the economics of production enables us to historicize and analyze with greater clarity the social and political significance of different forms of print culture, particularly within a transnational or transatlantic framework.1 To insist on the role that funding plays in shaping print culture is not to presume a homologous relation between economics and cultural production, but it is to assert the importance of mapping out the constraints and possibilities with which all forms of cultural and political expression struggled in a globalizing modern economy. I return here to an object of study that many of the scholars in this collection reject – namely elite literary modernism and its figurations. I do so, however, with an eye to the ways in which elite modernism’s funding dilemmas and its figurations are not unique, but instead are linked to those in mainstream or popular journalism. More specifically, this essay speculates on the relation between fin de siècle American philanthropy – specifically its patronage of both elite and mainstream intellectual and cultural production in the United States and Britain – and American imperialism.
Rethinking the “new patronage” Standard economic histories of literary modernism argue that by the middle of the nineteenth century an elite and closed literary culture had been transformed by the rise of a literary market. This transformation had an important effect upon the status of the author and the texts s/he produced. The author of independent means and the impoverished author dependent on wealthy patrons gave way, literary historians have 83
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claimed, to the author who sold his or her writing to various audiences. High modernism is frequently read as either a critique or product of this dominance of a market economy, or as both those things at once. More recently, however, scholars have begun to problematize this simple notion of market dominance in modernism. Lawrence Rainey and Paul Delany have separately analyzed the significant role that patronage played in high modernism in the teens and twenties. While Rainey and Delany’s accounts differ significantly, they agree that this “new patronage” is temporally limited and class-specific.2 I argue, by contrast, that this “new patronage” needs to be situated within the development of a larger phenomenon – namely modern philanthropy. This broader context of modern philanthropy can enable us to link the patronage high modernist figures like Pound, Eliot, and Joyce experienced to patronage in mainstream and alternative publications, and to a variety of social and cultural endeavors more generally. Of course, patronage and philanthropy are not the same historical phenomenon, though the terms are often used synonymously. Patronage in the arts is usually associated with a court-based social order, or as a classic text puts it, with “a highly aristocratic form of society, for obviously inequalities of wealth and position only can bring about an exercise of individual largess or protection” (Holzknecht 1). By contrast, while traditional or religious meanings of philanthropy focus on any expression of a love of mankind, modern philanthropy is associated with a bourgeois or capitalist social order. Modern philanthropy emerges in the seventeenth century and seeks “to apply reason to the solution of social ills and needs” through “abstract and institutional” forms (Gross 31). In the nineteenth century, a particularly powerful version of “abstract and institutional” philanthropy emerges, what has been called “scientific philanthropy.” Scientific philanthropy “seeks causes and cures” for the ills caused by the industrial revolution (Sealander 220–222), and its central characteristic is the systematizing and organizing of giving, especially though not solely, through non-profit foundations.3 While philanthropy is demonstrably a transatlantic phenomenon (Adam), it is also true that large-scale, institutional philanthropy has generally been seen as more central to U.S. civil society than to that of other western nations and is therefore seen as registering a range of distinctions – governmental, economic, and ideological – purported to make the United States unique. Neither determined by the market nor by the state, yet operating in complex relation to both, philanthropy is often contestedly denominated the “third sector” of modern societies. The difficulty in understanding the so-called “third sector,” along with
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the quite powerful role it has played in both the domestic and foreign policy of the modern United States, has made it a source of great anxiety on both the right and left, from the early twentieth century to the present (Hammack 80–83). Given these definitions of patronage as linked to pre-modern or aristocratic economies and societies, and philanthropy to modern or bourgeois ones, it is important to keep patronage and philanthropy to some degree analytically separate. At the same time, however, there are good reasons to see them as linked or related phenomena that share certain characteristics.4 Most important for this essay, late Victorian intellectuals perceived of modern philanthropy as linked to aristocratic patronage. In other words, they framed their understanding of the emergence of the so-called “third sector” by imagining it through older forms of cultural sponsorship. They described this continuity by imagining capitalist and democratic societies as continuous with, or as departing from, feudalism and aristocracy. Such imaginings could be deployed in a variety of ways.5 A particularly illuminating transatlantic dialogue about American philanthropy, patronage, or more generally, what we could call American gift-giving, took place in the late 1880s between Andrew Carnegie and Matthew Arnold. Their dialogue centers on the differences and similarities between, on the one hand, feudalism and aristocracy, and on the other hand, capitalism and democracy. At the same time, this discussion registers the conflicts over the rise of a new American empire. Carnegie and Arnold’s dialogue specifically highlights what Fredric Jameson identifies as the late Victorian ideologeme of ressentiment. Jameson argues that European intellectuals at the turn of the century saw clearly the bankruptcy of Victorian philanthropic solutions to industrial capitalism and class conflict. Critical of these solutions, yet anxious about any change in the status quo, Jameson says, many bourgeois thinkers reduced class conflict to psychology and read the fight for social and economic justice as expressive only of the working class’s ressentiment or envy of the upper classes (190–199). Jameson reads ressentiment symptomatically, as itself an expression of bourgeois ressentiment, “little more,” he writes, “than an expression of annoyance at seemingly gratuitous lower-class agitation at the apparently quite unnecessary rocking of the social boat” (202). Carnegie and Arnold’s debate reveals two directions in which Jameson’s bold but highly abbreviated reading of ressentiment can be expanded. First, it shows that ressentiment does not always entail a rejection of philanthropy, as Jameson claims; rather, this ideologeme
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frequently reflects the growing social and cultural significance of, and tensions surrounding, philanthropy at the end of the century. Second, this debate demonstrates that ressentiment can be discussed in terms of other kinds of social conflicts besides class conflict, including the fin de siècle struggle between England and America over imperial power. In short, Carnegie and Arnold’s transatlantic dialogue over American philanthropy focuses on comparisons of feudal and capitalist societies and the envy that these two different economic systems promote or suppress. This dialogue therefore allows us to rethink the role philanthropy played economically and imaginatively at this time. While Matthew Arnold is all too familiar in the history of modernism, often serving as a metonym for the bad faith of elite modernism (its claims to market transcendence and critical disinterestedness, and its real investment in the status quo), I hope by the end of this paper, that Andrew Carnegie can also be seen metonymically, as providing a new context for understanding the claims of elite modernism as well as those of mainstream journalism.
American generosity In the May 1890 North American Review, an essay entitled “The Hatred of England,” by Goldwin Smith made its appearance. The topics of Anglophobia and Anglophilia were much discussed in the U.S. press in the 1880s and 1890s (Banta chapter 3). For Smith, American “Anglophobia” stems from a variety of sources, but a crucial one is American ressentiment. America “jealousy” of England is the result of England’s intellectual “achievements” (556) and its prowess as an empire in “war and conquest” (557).6 In a forum in the next issue of the North American Review entitled “Do Americans Hate England?” Andrew Carnegie responds aggressively to the charge of American jealousy. He writes: When Mr. Smith wrote that jealousy waits upon success, I thought that he was about to speak of the success of the Republic making England jealous; but he means that the success of England accounts for the jealousy of the American. Jealousy is not a fault of the American. It would be better, perhaps, if he had a trace of it in his composition ... . [A] country that has in one century become the greatest manufacturing, commercial, and mining nation, and the wealthiest nation in the world, cannot well be jealous of the success of any other. Jealousy of England! [T]he dear little thing! This is a new idea, and we must thank Mr. Smith for the suggestion. It gives us a laugh. (754)
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Carnegie reverses the charge of American envy by implying that the charge itself stems from English envy of American success. English jealousy he implies would be natural, since America has become the “greatest ... and wealthiest nation in the world.” By contrast, and without much explanation, Carnegie claims the American is so generous it is almost preternatural. “It would be better, perhaps, if he had a trace of [jealousy],” he says, perhaps implying the need for America to protect its self-interest or imperial interests more aggressively. Carnegie is a useful starting point for any discussion of American philanthropy because he reveals the contradictions and tensions of this phenomenon. As an acknowledged innovator of what historians call “scientific philanthropy,” Carnegie’s most famous work is the “The Gospel of Wealth,” which caused “such an uproar” when it was published in the North American Review in the United States in 1889 that it was “immediately reprinted” in the Pall Mall Gazette in England (Nasaw, Gospel ix). Before Carnegie died, he had given away the majority of his vast fortune to a variety of non-profit philanthropic foundations in the United States and Britain that carry his name to this day. Carnegie is thus cited today by U.S. billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett as one of their models (New York Times C4). Of course, and herein lies part of the complexity of American philanthropy, Carnegie is also important as one of the most infamous “robber barons” of the time. His name is associated with some of the worst labor practices of the Gilded Age, culminating in the deadly suppression of the Homestead strike in 1892. He is also associated with the tragedy and cover up of the Johnstown Flood, with price fixing, stock manipulation, and bribery of elected officials. Likewise, Carnegie’s life story and intellectual and philanthropic engagements are a useful starting point for discussions of transatlantic exchange in which capital and ideas are inextricably linked. Immigrating to the United States in 1848 in quest of economic opportunity, Carnegie was returning regularly to Europe by the late 1860s. His returns were motivated by the then fairly typical quest of American industrialists for European capital to finance the expanding American economy, as well as by the arriviste’s quest for cultural capital, and the immigrant’s nostalgia for home (Nasaw, Carnegie chapters 5–7). By the 1870s, Carnegie had also begun his career as a transatlantic philanthropist. His transatlantic endeavors came to include not only the funding of parks, libraries, art galleries, museums, concert halls, university scholarships and buildings; not only the hosting of the U.S. speaking tours of Matthew Arnold and Herbert Spencer; not only the bankrolling of the
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Republican party in the United States and the Liberal party in Britain; but also all kinds of peace, arbitration, and anti-imperialist activities.7 Carnegie’s friend and beneficiary William Gladstone, in his 1890 review of “The Gospel of Wealth,” thus described Carnegie as a man “of considerable celebrity ... one of those rare individuals whose lives and whose sympathies are so distributed, rather than divided, between [America and Britain] ... that they themselves have become part of the living nexus between them” (677 his emphasis). Throughout his life, Carnegie’s role as “living nexus” between the United States and Britain was enforced by his engagement with print media. Carnegie was a prolific writer of books, essays, and pamphlets, so much so that his most recent biographer theorizes that Carnegie’s ambition to be a “man of letters” drove him more than his ambition as a businessman (Nasaw, Carnegie xii). In the 1880s, Carnegie was particularly evident in the world of print culture because in 1881 he purchased a string of newspapers and magazines in England in the hopes of promoting his liberal and anti-monarchical views. He eventually owned or had a controlling interest in nearly 20 newspapers and weeklies throughout England. Editorials in these papers were often written by the same hand or preached the same message (Wall 433). Carnegie’s sponsorship of these newspapers and weeklies created great anxiety on both sides of the Atlantic. He was described as engaged in a conspiracy against the British empire as well as a more general plot to control the press. At the same time, for some journalists, like W.T. Stead, Carnegie’s sponsorship signaled the possibility that genuinely alternative views could be presented to a broad public.8 These various responses to Carnegie’s sponsorship feed into a larger debate that galvanized both mainstream and more alternative journalism at the turn of the century – a debate about the independence of the press – whether sponsored by political parties, advertisers, or in this case, millionaires.9 While I cannot develop this point at length here, a number of scholars have shown how a powerful, if contradictory, notion of “objectivity” developed in mainstream journalism as a response to what was seen as the economic and ideological dependence of mainstream journalism on its various sponsors. In any case, Carnegie sold his newspapers off when his syndicate began losing money in 1886, after Gladstone’s defeat. Nonetheless, Carnegie remained a “celebrity” on both sides of the Atlantic, not only because of his wealth and transatlantic philanthropy, but also because, as he says to Stead in one letter, he continued “advertising our views in the ordinary periodicals” and in books on both sides of the Atlantic (Wall 442). In
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short, Carnegie’s life story and engagements embody well the complex exchange of both capital and ideas in a globalizing economy. To return, however, to the forum in the North American Review, the book that perhaps best qualified Carnegie to respond to a debate about United States ressentiment is his best selling book Triumphant Democracy (1886). Published the same year Carnegie’s newspaper syndicate failed, and the same year that nationwide strikes convulsed the United States, culminating in the Haymarket massacre, Triumphant Democracy was apparently a publishing sensation in both the United States and Britain.10 The preface to Triumphant Democracy states Carnegie’s aim clearly. Carnegie describes the book as stemming from his desire to unite the people of England and America: “Born a subject of the Monarchy, adopted a citizen of the Republic, how could it be otherwise than that I should love both lands and long to do whatever in me lay to bring their people to a like affection of each other!” (v). Nonetheless, the way in which he sought to foster such peace depended on frequent and repeated assertion of American superiority and the necessary domination of the world by America as a result of its democratic institutions. His opening paragraph provides both the gist of his polemic and a handy outline of the book: The old nations of the earth creep on at a snail’s pace; the Republic thunders past with the rush of the express. The United States, the growth of a single century, has already reached the foremost rank among nations, and is destined soon to out-distance all others in the race. In population, in wealth, in annual savings, and in public credit; in freedom from debt, in agriculture, and in manufactures, America already leads the civilized world. (1) Each chapter then provides a statistical analysis of American superiority to Britain in the above-named fields and hence American leadership of what Carnegie calls “the civilized world.” Carnegie’s basic argument is a racialized one inspired by the man he called “master,” namely Herbert Spencer. Carnegie argues that political democracy creates homogeneity and unity. Homogeneity to Carnegie, in turn, creates economic prosperity. What has fostered U.S. superiority, Carnegie argues, is the fact that four-fifths of the U.S. population is British, but freed from what Carnegie calls “the feudal systems of Europe” (20), these Anglo Saxons were able to pursue free trade actively and aggressively. Democratic political institutions, Carnegie asserts, protected the United States from its two greatest “sources of danger” (17): slavery and “foreign” (as opposed to British) immigration. “The generosity,
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shall I not say the incredible generosity, with which the Republic has dealt with these people met its reward” (18), he writes. By turning African slaves and foreign “subjects” into “citizens” (17–19), says Carnegie, “the threatened danger is averted – the homogeneity of the people [is] secured” (19). In other words, democratic generosity creates U.S. prosperity and stability by turning everyone, British and nonBritish immigrants and former African slaves, into Anglo-Americans and thus “citizens.” American democratic generosity, in fact, is a leitmotif of the book as a whole. Democracy, he asserts more directly than in his North American Review essay, encourages “generous instincts”: “The American never cherishes resentment, but is willing always not only to forgive but to forget” (30). Carnegie concludes Triumphant Democracy by noting, first, that even conservative Englishmen can see that “the most democratic and ultra-republican community upon earth is much to be envied by the unfortunate supporters of an antiquated monarchical system” (488), and second, that as English political institutions come more and more to resemble American ones the two nations will “be brought more closely into unison” (508). One chapter that does not easily fit into the narration of triumphant democratic American hegemony, however, is entitled “Art and Music.” Carnegie begins consistently enough by taking on “the exploded idea that only monarchs and aristocracy ... could or would patronize the beautiful” (321). Part of his argument focuses on the ways in which genius has nothing to do with hereditary privilege (316–321), but even more, his argument focuses on the fact that “the best patrons of art are the Americans ... [while] the monarchy ... is not conspicuous for its treatment of art or artists” (321). By American patronage, he means two things. First, he means “popular support” for the arts because “Nothing flourishes in our day but through the support of the people” (322). However, Carnegie dispatches popular support as patronage in one brief paragraph. What he really means by American patronage is elite American support for the arts. He writes, Throughout the world, whenever art treasures come under the hammer, the American will be found in competition with nobles, and even with crowned heads, and he is no mean competitor, for he carries a pocket full of dollars, and is not afraid to spend them where he is sure of getting his money’s worth. (325) The American art “connoisseur,” writes Carnegie, “is recognized now in the European markets as one of the shrewdest, as well as one of the
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most liberal buyers,” and the “constant flow of works of art to the United States” (325) has exerted “a most beneficial influence in creating a taste for art” (326). “Republicanism,” he concludes, “does not withhold from life the sweetness and light which mainly make it worth living” (339–340). I will return in a minute to Arnold, whose phrase “sweetness and light” Carnegie borrows frequently in his writings. For now, it is worth summing up the key themes of Triumphant Democracy. First, democracy is a form of politics that both enables the growth of capitalism and prosperity, and thus creates a society characterized by its generosity, liberality, and gift-giving capacities. Second, American generosity, in turn, creates unity and homogeneity, which leads naturally to British ressentiment. As Carnegie says, “the most democratic and ultra-republican community upon earth is much to be envied by the unfortunate supporters of an antiquated monarchical system” (488). But furthermore, British and European society is characterized by a kind of stinginess. As Carnegie says, immigrants are “won to [America’s] ... side by being offered for their subjectship the boon of citizenship” (18 his emphasis). If an open-handed democratic generosity wins out over aristocratic stinginess in terms of material growth and political and social order, it wins out also in terms of cultural production. Carnegie insists on American cultural superiority by highlighting Americans’ “liberality.” Americans’ ability to sponsor art, however, he oddly enough models on aristocratic funding of the arts, namely patronage. The “best patrons of art,” he writes, “are American.”
Rethinking American generosity The impact Carnegie had on Arnold’s thinking would, at first, seem to confirm the worst that has been said about Arnold and elite modernism’s bad faith. Carnegie and Arnold had become friends in 1883, the same year that Carnegie hosted Arnold in his U.S. speaking tour. Arnold’s later essays on America, “A Word More About America” (1885) and “Civilization in the U.S.” (1888), reflect his engagement not only with Carnegie’s ideas about America, but also with Triumphant Democracy, which he cites explicitly. Arnold accepts unproblematically his host’s opinions on the superiority of American political institutions to British ones in their ability to create homogeneity, unity, and social stability – a fairly astonishing set of concessions given the social conflict that characterized the United States in the 1880s. Arnold goes even further than Carnegie dared to in defending the honor and virtue of American
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politicians (Civilization 118–120) so that in Triumphant Democracy Carnegie, somewhat comically, cites Arnold on American political virtue (480). Equally important, Arnold seems to affirm his host’s argument about democratic American generosity and the aristocratic stinginess that leads to an envious society. If Carnegie says democracy fosters generosity and a lack of resentment, Arnold likewise argues that an aristocracy consolidated in a “feudal age” makes property so fixed that envy and class hatred necessarily develop. In a democracy, Arnold argues, property switches hands frequently so that “The envy [with which the property] holder is regarded diminishes.” “[I]t is indubitable that [in America] rich men are regarded ... with less envy and hatred than rich men are in Europe,” writes Arnold, and thus in America, “society is safer” (123). Nonetheless, if Arnold’s arguments here about the American economic and political scene of the 1880s embodies a willed, even sponsored, naiveté, Arnold holds out firmly on the issue of “sweetness and light” through a stubborn refusal to discuss economics as the only factor in cultural production, as Carnegie did. Instead Arnold argues that there is no “distinction and beauty” (172) to be found anywhere in the United States, and thus whatever the superiority of democratic institutions, there is “no country calling itself civilized where one would not rather live than in America, except Russia” (152). If Americans are generous, they are also pathologically self-deceived. Americans “have agreed, as a people,” he writes, “to deceive themselves, to persuade themselves that they have what they have not, to cover the defects in their civilization by boasting ... by proclaiming themselves at the top of their voices to be ‘the greatest nation upon earth’ ” (182–183). Taking on Triumphant Democracy directly, he describes Carnegie as “a kind friend of mine, one of the most hospitable and generous of men” and his book as, “a most splendid picture of American progress” (185). However, Arnold then suggests that his host’s paean is marred by typical American “self-glorification and selfdeception” (186). In short, Arnold typifies Carnegie as American in his generosity and in his boasting and self- delusion. “[I]t is to be hoped,” concludes Arnold, “our democracy may not be like theirs ... we are failures after all, if we cannot eschew vain boasting and vain imaginations” (191). If, writes Arnold, the English are mistaken in believing that America “envie[s] us our great aristocracy” (147), and if ressentiment instead characterizes British society, American boasting, and by implication its generosity, are apparently motivated by a desire to hide failure, to hide from the world the fact there is nothing to envy.
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Arnold’s refusal to engage a purely economic reading of culture, and his profound cultural elitism, represent here not just a resistance to democratization, as is characteristically argued, but also a resistance to an American empire which justifies its claim to dominance through an appeal to its triumphant democratic generosity. In this sense, we can see Arnold reading American “generosity” as interchangeably the financial and ideological arm of American imperialism. From another angle too, Arnold is enacting his resistance to the narrative of American generosity by trying to break the unstated bond of gratitude and obligation that sponsorship usually entails. He names his host, and he breaks, albeit somewhat incoherently (as Chris Baldick would say), with him. This essay’s analysis of a transatlantic debate over American philanthropy has been by necessity exploratory, rather than conclusive. My overarching point that our analyses of transatlantic print culture must be attentive to the economics of production as well as to ideology is, of course, not new. However, I hope I have pushed that argument in new directions. First, of course, I have sought to highlight the relation between modern philanthropy and print culture in order to help us rethink that abstract formulation, the so-called “free,” or alternatively democratizing market. Indeed, Carnegie’s sponsorship of newspapers and magazines represents a different form of sponsorship than that of political parties, of advertisers, or even of a like-minded community. This difference is not one I want to deny; nonetheless, Carnegie provides us with the opportunity to rethink how the market for print culture is often a “sponsored” phenomenon. One implication of this is that while we cannot simply jettison the binaries of elite/popular, literary/non-literary print culture which have galvanized the important work of historical reconstruction to which this collection contributes, we nonetheless need to be sure that those binaries do not preclude our exploration of dilemmas that cross those binaries. The notions of disinterestedness and objectivity are not the same, but they are comparably problematic, influential, and I would argue, critical. This comparability suggests that in sometimes contradictory, yet powerful ways, elite and mainstream intellectuals of print culture sought not just to wrest a domain of freedom from the necessity of the market, but equally and complexly, to wrest a domain of freedom from the necessity of the gift. Second, I have sought to highlight the relation between modern philanthropy and print culture in order to think more concretely about the history of globalization. Carnegie’s engagement in, and sponsorship
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of, print culture in the United States and Britain – of elite figures like Matthew Arnold, and mainstream journalism alike – may well have involved a philanthropic “love [of] both lands and long[ing] to do whatever in me lay to bring their people to a like affection of each other!” (Triumphant Democracy v), but it clearly also involved the extension of what Carnegie saw as an (Americanized) “empire of business.”11 I have only begun to gesture at the multiple paradoxes of what we could call Carnegie’s empire of philanthropy, and the interesting, often important, resistance it generated; nonetheless, I would suggest we have much to learn from the past in our own era of billionaire philanthropists and media moguls – whose empires famously stretch not only across nations but across elite/mainstream or popular binaries upon which we still so doggedly often rely.
Notes For support while researching this essay, I would like to thank the ACLS and the University of Oklahoma. I would also like to thank Ann Ardis, Pat Collier, and Josh Piker for their comments and suggestions. 1. My essay relies on the term “transatlantic” in order to maintain consistency with the other contributors to this volume and because I focus specifically on U.S./British relations. My notion of that term, however, is indebted to Paul Giles’s (2002) methodological suggestions on transnational cultural study, and more particularly on Benjamin Lee and Edward Li Puma’s (2002) historical analysis of globalization. 2. For Rainey, this patronage, despite its pre-modern features, finally reveals the close links between a putatively critical elite and a hegemonic mass culture: namely that both forms of culture aggressively marketed themselves, the only difference being how and to whom they marketed themselves. Rainey’s brilliant argument breaks down the binary of elite/ mass culture in useful ways, but interestingly fits both elite and mass culture into the traditional narrative of the dominance of the market in modern culture. By contrast with Rainey, Delany sees the pre-modern features of patronage as creating, albeit momentarily, a kind of relative autonomy from the market for elite modernism that resulted in genuine moments of critical independence. While I do not agree with Delany’s notion of relative autonomy, like him, I am interested in the kinds of critical vocabularies – no matter how limited – that developed as a result of how writing was funded. 3. I rely on Gross and Sealander’s definitions of modern philanthropy in order to explain the focus of my essay, not in order to claim that large-scale institutions either actually express a disinterested “love of mankind” or to claim that such institutions are more important than grassroots, democratic, or
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5.
6.
7. 8.
9. 10.
11.
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radical philanthropy. I am grateful to Barbara Green for helping me to clarify this point. For an excellent contemporary summary of the debates over the term philanthropy, see Adam, 1–12. Most obviously, patronage and philanthropy are linked because the economic systems out of which they emerge depend, if in different ways, on social inequality. Likewise, the self-perception of governing elites, if different in these social systems, can also been linked through the notion of noblesse oblige (Adam, 2004; Ostrower, 1995). For example, the term “robber baron,” which was much deployed at the fin de siecle and is quite important to this essay, was apparently first used in the 1870s; it typically criticizes monopoly capitalism by positing it as continuous with feudalism. Likewise, fiction as disparate as that of Henry James and Mark Twain rely on various configurations of the capitalism/democracy, feudalism/aristocracy relation in their work. While ressentiment is usually translated into English as envy, and while “jealousy” and “envy” have different definitions, Peter Stearns (1989) points out that by the twentieth century the former term is typically used to describe either psychological state (12). This definitional blurring is one I rely on throughout this essay. I cannot deal at length here with the complex relation between Carnegie’s imperialist and anti-imperialist impulses and activities. For details of the history of Carnegie’s syndicate and press responses to it, I have relied on Wall (429–443), but also Nasaw (Carnegie 235–236). For Stead’s response, see Wall (441–442). See, for example, Chalaby (1998), Miraldi (1990), Schiller (1981), Schudson (1978), and Sawaya (Chapter 4). I qualify Carnegie’s success here because while the publication numbers that Carnegie’s biographers cite are impressive, it is also true that Carnegie instructed his secretary to “deluge” Great Britain with free and cheap copies of the book (Nasaw, Carnegie 276). Additionally, Carnegie was throughout his life the patron of his own publications, providing them gratis to political parties and the public in the hopes of shifting public opinion on key economic and political issues (222–223). This was the name of a 1902 book by Carnegie.
Works cited Adam, Thomas, ed. Philanthropy, Patronage, and Civil Society: Experiences from Germany, Great Britain, and North America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Arnold, Matthew. Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America. Boston: DeWolfe, Fiske, 1888. Baldick, Chris. The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Banta, Martha. Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct, 1841– 1936. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
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Carnegie, Andrew. “Do Americans Hate England?” North American Review CL: CCCCIII ( June 1890), 752–760. ——. Triumphant Democracy. New York: J.J. Little, 1886. Chalaby, Jean. The Invention of Journalism. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. Delany, Paul. “Who Paid for Modernism?” The New Economic Criticism. Eds. Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee. New York: Routledge, 1999: 335–348. Giles, Paul. Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Gladstone, W.E. “Mr. Carnegie’s ‘Gospel of Wealth’: A Review and Recommendation,” Nineteenth Century 28: 165 (November 1890) 677–693. Gross, Robert A. “Giving in America: From Charity to Philanthropy” in Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History. Eds. Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. Mc Garvie. New York: Cambridge Univesity Press, 2003: 29–48. Hammack, David C. “Patronage and the Great Insitutions of the Cities of the United States: Questions and Evidence, 1800–2000,” Philanthropy, Patronage, and Civil Society. Ed. Thomas Adam. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004: 79–100. Holzknecht, Karl Julius. Literary Patronage in the Middle Ages. 1923; New York: Octagon Press, 1966. James, Henry. The American Scene. New York: 1907; Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946. ——. The Golden Bowl. New York: 1904; Penguin, 1985. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. Lee, Benjamin and Edward Li Puma. “Cultures of Circulation.” Public Culture 14: 1 (Winter 2002), 191–213. McNeil Jr., Donald and Rick Lyman. New York Times, “Buffett’s Billions Will Aid Fight Against Disease,” Tuesday June 27, 2006: A1, C4. Miraldi, Robert. Muckraking and Objectivity. New York: Greenwood, 1990. Nasaw, David. Andrew Carnegie. New York: Penguin, 2006. ——. ed. The “Gospel of Wealth” Essays and Other Writings of Andrew Carnegie. New York: Penguin, 2006. Ostrower, Francie. Why the Wealthy Give: The Culture of Elite Philanthropy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Rainey, Lawrence. “The Cultural Economy of Modernism.” The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Ed. Michael Levenson. 1999; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003: 33–69. Sawaya, Francesca. Modern Women, Modern Work: Domesticity, Professionalism, and American Writing, 1890–1950. Philadelphia: University of Penn Press, 2003. Schiller, Dan. Objectivity and the News. Philadelphia: University of Penn Press, 1981. Schudson, Michael. Discovering the News. New York: Basic Books, 1978. Sealander, Judith. “Curing Evils at Their Source: The Arrival of Scientific Giving.” Charity. Eds. Friedman and Mc Garvie. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003: 217–239.
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Smith, Goldwin. “The Hatred of England,” North American Review CL: CCCCII (May 1890), 547–562. Stearns, Peter. Jealousy: The Evolution of an Emotion in American History. New York: New York University Press, 1989. Wall, Joseph Frazier. Andrew Carnegie. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
6 John O’London’s Weekly and the Modern Author Patrick Collier
We ought not to be interested in what authors are paid for their books, because that is to mix commerce with literature; but nevertheless we are. James Milne [“Elijah True”], John O’London’s Weekly, 8 April 1922 In opening a gossip item in John O’London’s Weekly with this disclaimer against mixing commerce with literature, James Milne invokes one of the shaping oppositions of early-twentieth-century discussions of the arts – a pervasive “ideological contradiction between art and money” (Wexler xii). This contradiction poses the “Romantic ideal of writer as genius” unoccupied with market concerns against “a newer definition of the author as professional” who earns a living through drive, training, and self-discipline (Wexler xii). The distinction cut to the essence of John O’London’s, powerfully shaping its constructions of itself and the readers to whom it was appealing. Whether read as half-hearted or blithely comic, Milne’s nod to a norm of separating art from commerce, and sustaining (or feigning) disinterest in commercial aspects of publishing, is quickly dismissed as one we cannot uphold, its plural pronoun asserting a shared orientation for reader and writer. Milne’s demurral sets up the juicy fact that “Mr. Thornton Butterworth ... has paid £3,000 in advance royalties for the British book-rights for the exCrown Prince of Germany’s reminiscences” (“Book World” 27). As if to emphasize the faintness of Milne’s hesitation, his column stands next to one of the paper’s frequent correspondence school advertisements, its headline boldly promising to explain “How to Become a Successful Writer” (“Power” 27). The demurral, its half-heartedness, and its location amidst advertisements promising success to hard-working, aspiring 98
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writers all speak to the contradictory and unstable cultural positioning of John O’London’s, whose pages display commitments to multiple, incompatible models of authorship. Launched in 1919, at a time when various insurgent modernisms were further complicating the unsettled constellation of meanings and identities connected with authorship, John O’London’s provided a field of contest for conflicting models of reading and writing.1 As a densely printed commercial weekly that included signed articles, anonymous and pseudonymous standing features, letters and questions from readers, and copious advertisements, John O’London’s displayed an irreducible polyvocality that did not allow any of these models to emerge as a norm. Rather, its pages provided an arena for the reiteration, variation, and reformulation of the terms of contest between models of authorship, marked by editorial efforts to contain the gleefully commercial images of writing in advertisements within a range of more respectable norms. As Wexler argues, despite the apparent neatness of the art/commerce division, images of authorship did not cleanly divide between the romantic, “starving artist” and the professional writer. Each had its “cautionary counterpart”: the flip-side of the professional was the “hack who wrote only for money”; that of the Romantic was the self-involved “amateur who wrote for no one” (xii). Superimposed on these in John O’London’s was the model of the author-as-celebrity, one that made authorship appear a desirable lifestyle and which could variably stress writing’s commercial nature or elevate the author above it – a range embodied in the newspaper’s treatment of two of its favorite authors in the 1920s, H.G. Wells and Thomas Hardy. John O’London’s efforts at containing commercialism had to be constantly reiterated and were undermined not only by advertisements but also by the tutorial stance the paper adopted towards its readers. That is to say, despite its commercial orientation, John O’London’s fashioned itself as a force for cultural education. Correspondingly, it imagined its reader as an autodidact interested in print culture not merely as a consumer but as an aspiring writer.2 John O’London’s thus invested in a self-help ethic that pulled it towards affiliation with the grandiose claims of correspondence schools; at the same time, it tried to contain this drift by associating itself with an “authentic” culture located inexactly between a more elevated professionalism and a Romantic ideal of self-expression. Edited by Wilfred Whitten, who wrote as “John O’London” and “Jackdaw,” John O’London’s was modeled closely on T.P.’s Weekly, where Whitten had served as assistant editor (Wild 51).3 Its price of two pence, its relatively high ratio of advertising to copy, and its paper quality all
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signal its middling position in the hierarchy of prestige among literary publications.4 It offered more and longer reviews and much more content on the arts than the daily newspapers, but enjoyed neither the retro-nineteenth-century authority of such sixpenny literary publications as the Times Literary Supplement or the Athenaeum nor the insurgent cachet of the little weeklies. John O’London’s, as Jonathan Wild points out, was aimed at the literate but not university-educated “new reading public,” which had undergone its most recent expansion as soldiers and civilians turned to reading for solace and relief from boredom during World War I (50). Though Whitten would later claim that John O’London’s “aspired simply to be a good companion to lovers of literature: it came to share, not to instruct,” early sub-editor Sidney Dark may have described the paper more accurately: “We realized there was a large public interested in books, that has little knowledge but is anxious for advice and criticism, but that has no appetite for high-brow criticism” (Wild 60 n.5, Dark “Not So Bad” 136).5 To use Mark Hampton’s terms, John O’London’s appropriated a vestigial, nineteenth-century “educational ideal” under which newspapers sought to prepare readers for increased participation in civil society (9–11). Indeed, though Hampton acknowledges that the educational model retained its currency into the twentieth century, particularly for intellectual commentators, its adoption by mass periodicals such as John O’London’s suggests that this notion, albeit in somewhat different form, may have been more pervasive in the twentieth century than Hampton allows. John O’London’s adapted this tutorial role to the arts, offering itself as a means to cultural literacy. This orientation shows up in myriad ways: in the weekly “Questions and Answers” feature, editors respond to readers’ requests for recommendations of books on various topics; in the very first issue, the newspaper published an unsigned “Guide for Newspaper Readers,” offering concise definitions of terms in the news, including “syndicalism” and “bourgeois” (“What’s That?” 26); it regularly published articles explaining concepts from science. The simplicity of these printtutorials suggests that the weekly saw its readership as eager for information but not educated beyond Board school. A 1922 article on Homer’s depiction of wifehood, for instance, assumes the reader does not know the basic story of The Odyssey (Dark, “Homer’s” 8). The frequency of advertisements for correspondence courses in accounting, business, and shorthand suggest that John O’London’s advertisers saw it as a way of reaching the Board school- educated clerks whom Jonathan Rose identifies as committed to auto-didacticism (407).6 To such readers it recommended books to read, provided fiction ranging from potboilers
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to modern classics, and offered shortcuts to becoming “well-read.” Such shortcuts included long reviews heavy on summary, gossip columns offering news of new titles, and “Tit-Bits” – style items such as the intermittent “Nibbles From ... ” column, which presented paragraph-long excerpts from recent periodicals or non-fiction books (“Nibbles” 114). In addition to mentoring readers in these ways, John O’London’s presented images of an attractive lifestyle in which reading and writing were central – images conveyed in gossip items, feature stories on authors, and advertisements for pens, reading-lamps, and bookcases. Gossip columns such as “What I Hear” and “The Book World” reported on authors returning from exotic vacations or setting up homes in desirable locations. Here authors emerge as people with interesting lives: Alec Waugh, we learn, has decided that he will henceforth divide his time between England, the United States, and Tahiti; John Masefield is acting in a village production of Lear (Blake, “What I Hear” 98, 126). John O’London’s never explicitly states that these lifestyles are within the reach of its readers: trafficking in literary celebrity requires that the celebrities be treated at least ostensibly as unusual, and therefore newsworthy.7 But these items also shared space with editorial content and advertising – and, as with many periodicals in this period, the line between the two could be unclear – endlessly reiterating that excellent money could be made from writing and that the print market was an arena of rapid upward mobility. Nowhere is this more evident than in the advertisements for correspondence colleges, which, if they cannot be identified with the newspaper’s editorial persona, through their sheer number and the relentless iteration of their message could not help but color the experience of reading John O’London’s.8 The London School of Journalism placed long, text-heavy advertisements virtually every week. Almost as ubiquitous were competitors such as the Premier School of Journalism, whose 9 April 1927 advertisement declared, “Nearly everyone can write well enough to get into print” and contained a testimonial declaring that the school’s main tutor, “Mr. Gordon Muggy, ... saved me from a stool in the bank” (Denham 967). These advertisements that are often dominated by long, signed, headlined testimonials, typically look more or less indistinct from editorial copy, with only a clip-out coupon at the bottom signaling their status as a paid ad. Their pitch typically runs: the demand for copy is so great that a little training and some easily conveyed “inside knowledge” can enable anyone with sufficient pluck to thrive as a writer; people without training, however, are doomed to multiple rejections. Perhaps most striking to contemporary eyes is the
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conflation in these advertisements of art and commerce and – an important subset of that binary – literature and journalism.9 They call their target readers “literary aspirants” and offer instruction on, for instance, “Journalism/Short Story Writing/English Composition/Advanced Literary Training/Verse Writing” (“Field” 80). These ads for “literary” training shared space with other narratives of self-help and upward mobility: ads for secretarial and civil-service test preparation courses; the Encyclopedia Britannica, which posits knowledge as a key to success in difficult economic times; and Corona typewriters, which borrowed directly from the correspondence school ads in declaring, “The field of the Free Lance is limitless, remuneration is excellent” (“Own” 950). This “You can do it” ethos informs editorial content as well, though more equivocally, and competes with more exalted understandings of authorship. The paper offers conflicting takes, for instance, on whether journalism and literature are symbiotic or distinct, even hostile, pursuits. An unsigned 1927 article, “Up from Grub Street,” posits newspaper work as an apprenticeship for novel writing and calls it “a stepping stone to fame and fortune” (181). In the same issue, Whitten labors to separate literary work from commerce and, in the process, distinguishes it from journalism, as well. Reviewing Lewis Hinds’s memoir Why Write?, Whitten reproduces Hind’s comical, statistical breakdown of his reasons for writing: “50 percent Ambition ... 25 percent Vanity ... 20 percent earning a living, 5 percent something to say” (“Passing” 186). Whitten rejects this understanding of authorship, though its emphasis on “ambition” and “earning a living” accords exactly with the message conveyed in the weekly’s advertising columns and more subtly elsewhere in the paper. Whitten questions whether the earning of a livelihood is ever a real spring of action in a born writer. It is the consequence of his work, but surely not in essence its motive, still less its inspiration. Even if he has no other way of earning a living he does not set this before himself as the principal object. If he did he would almost certainly faint and fail for of all the tasks a man can undertake, to write for bread and butter is nearest to dead-lift and disheartenment. (“Passing” 186) The repetitive insistence on distinguishing writing from its commercial “consequence” marks this passage as a case of protesting too much. Earning cash, lest we miss the point, should not be a writer’s “spring of action,” “motive,” “inspiration,” or “principal object.” Further word choices are telling: the phrase “born writer” invokes a distinction
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between “born” and “made” writers, calling up a value system that associates the best writers with innate talent and implicitly de-values the hard-working self-improver – that is, the implied reader of John O’London’s. Whitten invokes this hierarchy explicitly, late in the column, when he suggests that most contemporary writers are not “authors pure and simple ... they are first and foremost journalists, purveyors to given markets”; but even these, he insists, do not pursue remuneration as an “originating motive” (“Passing” 186). Whitten reaches here for what Wexler calls the Flaubertian model of the professional writer, for whom “to be concerned with payment was beneath his dignity, though as a professional he was entitled to receive a fee” (xiii). At the same time the fine distinction between “motive” and “inspiration” invokes the Romantic model of authorship as irresistible self-expression. Whitten’s re-inscription of more exalted models ends with the claim that living by one’s pen is extraordinarily difficult – “the nearest to dead-lift and disheartenment,” – a claim essentially opposite to what the paper’s advertising columns are saying week after week. The awkward forcefulness of Whitten’s rejection of a commercial understanding of writing is remarkable, but the gesture itself is not. The paper’s narratives of writing as a field for upward mobility and authorship as a desirable lifestyle compete with descriptions of writing deeply invested in an expressive model. John O’London’s could even mentor writers and downplay commercial motivations simultaneously, as in “The Making of a Novelist,” a 1927 series “designed to help those beginners in fiction who so frequently apply to [John O’London’s] for advice and help” (Raymond 309). Though the newspaper often provided commercial advice to writers, its editors introduced this series by noting that its author, Ernest Raymond, “is naturally not concerned with the business side of novel-writing” (309). Its first installment reinscribes the distinction between journalism and literature, urging aspirants to read Thomas Browne and Sir Izaak Walton, prose stylists who wrote “before the arrival of the universal daily newspaper” (309). After quoting them, Raymond advises: “He who cannot hear in such passages an idiom different from that of his leading articles, let him not begin to write his novels till he can” (emphasis added). With that last phrase, Raymond carefully sustains the paper’s self-help ethic by implying that the difference between journalistic and literary language can be learned. But he does so by recourse to the distinction between literary writing and journalism, a distinction that would have proven problematic for the autodidacts among his readers. This tension foregrounds the uneasy co-existence of two competing, ambient
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discourses in John O’London’s, the persistent nineteenth-century educational ideal in journalism that seeks to mentor everyone into the world of letters and the rising professionalism, invested in establishing standards and, implicitly, in limiting membership, that was increasingly informing cultural discussions of the arts at this time.10 One week later, Raymond explicitly adjudicates between competing models of authorship, describing what he calls “two schools of thought”: the one which maintains that the artist creates solely to satisfy himself and technique is just some inevitable form into which he feels his creation must flow, and the other, which emphatically declares that the artist must have some public, good or bad, in his mind, and that technique is a business of making his work intelligible, easy, and delightful for this public. (354) Amid Raymond’s studied avoidance of commercial aspects of fiction, the word “business” registers the close tie in discussions like this between rhetoric (a concern with impact on the audience) and commercialism – the twin enemies of the expressivist model as it was informing aesthetic debates at this time. And while he plays at being balanced, Raymond declares the expressivist model to be “very near the truth. Great art is akin to a cry ... the expressed reaction of a sensitive soul to the spectacle of life before him” (354). His column then satirizes devices for capturing audiences, such as cliff-hanging suspense, before offering his way of “harmonising” these imperatives: “there must be that inner compulsion driving us to cry out our reaction to the great pageant of life before us; and there must be a reader in our mind ... whose many tastes and hungers we are always striving to satisfy” (355). Raymond’s ideal reader – unsurprising within his article, but uneasy in the context of John O’London’s, which provides (and advertises) training on pleasing editors and audiences – is the writer himself. “He is a reader whom we have carefully trained for this work, sending him among the greatest writers that every facet of his mind may be polished, and his demands may become more exacting and his criticism more trustworthy. ... That reader is Ourself” (355). Just as Raymond’s balancing of his two models is not really balanced, his resolution is a false resolution: by positing the author’s implied reader as the author himself, he essentially denies the claims of the audience while positing a composite of the romantic and the professionalized author, one whose work is the “cry ... of a sensitive soul” but
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who is also “carefully trained ... polished ... exacting.” This formulation ignores various overlapping, implied readers of John O’London’s, among them the aspiring writer courted by the correspondence schools (and promised a quick entry to the marketplace) and Sidney Dark’s reader, “interested in books,” but with “little knowledge ... [and] no interest in highbrow criticism” (Not So Bad 136). Raymond’s series thus displays the contradictions characteristic of John O’London’s constructions of authorship. Ostensibly aimed at “beginners in fiction” (the same audience as the correspondence school advertisements), it studiously ignores the commercial aspects of writing with which this audience would surely be concerned, working instead to shore up the prestige of the author by synthesizing the romantic and professional models. Entries like Raymond’s series and Whitten’s review of Hinds show that the weekly’s embrace of the tradesman-like, self-help model of authorship evoked a counter-strain of anxiety about the quality of writing and the social status of the author, contributing to a polyvocality on this topic that in turn registered the unsettled nature of authorship in these years. We can further trace these competing, complexly entangled models of authorship in the paper’s treatment of Wells and Hardy. In the weekly’s first ten years, Wells was featured as the paper’s avatar of the writer as tradesman, Hardy as its embodiment of literary greatness. Both were also celebrities, and juxtaposing them shows how differently literary celebrity could signify in individual cases. Wells’s ubiquity made him a polarizing figure; his prolific output, his copious newspaper writing, his lower-middle-class origins, and the didacticism of his fictions combined to make him a man of the people to some, to others the epitome of a degraded print culture. Hardy’s fame and success seemed to have only increased his critical reputation. In the paper’s early years, Wells was ubiquitous in its pages, from brief puffs in the gossip columns to long articles by and about him to his testimonials for Corona typewriters and other products in the advertising columns.11 Wells wrote a long featured article in the first number of John O’London’s, a polemic about the teaching of history. Subsequently it was not unusual for his name to be sprinkled throughout an individual issue. On 15 April 1922, for instance, one could read about Wells in a long review of Sidney Dark’s study The Outline of Mr. Wells, learn of the high U.S. sales of The Outline of History in George Blake’s “What I Hear” column (38), and see Louis McQuillard cite him as a touchstone in a review of a novel by E.V. Odle.12 Venerable journalist H.M. Tomlinson, reviewing Dark’s monograph, praised Wells’s “intelligence and energy”
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and described him as “not an artist who is aloof from us,” a man “of the crowd, not an artist – in the exclusive sense of that word – but one of the multitude” (48). All this implicitly positions Wells as a role model for the weekly’s imagined readership of hard-working literary strivers. As someone who is decidedly not God-like, “not an artist – in the exclusive sense,” he is figured differently from Raymond’s novelist, who as the best judge of his own work approaches Joycean levels of detachment and self-sufficiency. In the advertising pages, Wells is equated with the self-help ethic. The weekly London School of Journalism advertisement for 22 April 1922, asserts: “Some of our greatest journalists began their careers as FreeLance Writers ... . I have a fancy that H.G. Wells, W.W. Jacobs, and Rudyard Kipling all began in the same way – ‘free-lancing’ in their spare time” (Anton 77). The advertisement plays out the recurrent narrative of upward mobility while positing Wells, et al., as role models, even if the assertion’s force is blunted by the ham-handed admission that these career histories are the ad writer’s “fancy.” A Corona typewriter advertisement of 8 April 1922 singles out Wells and is remarkable for its condensation of the traits of John O’London’s’ implied-reader-as-writer (See Figure 6.1). The smartly designed ad, covering the two right columns of the weekly’s three-column page, features an illustration of a typewriter with a copy of The Outline of History standing behind it. Above, in smallish print, appears a 50-word testimonial from Wells, expressing his “complete satisfaction” with his Corona, “exactly the typewriter for an author like myself” (“Corona” 10). The typewriter is “so light and small that it can be taken anywhere,” “portable, hardy, willing, and easy.” Beneath this tableau of illustration and testimonial appears the headline, “Corona helped H.G. Wells to write this book,” over the advertisement’s main copy. The Corona, it asserts, “helps men and women to success” by allowing them to compose quickly and legibly “anywhere and at any time”; it is the “perfect instrument for literary composition.” The call to identification with Wells is explicit: “With Corona’s help, H.G. Wells wrote the story of the human race ... You too can hasten your success with the help of this ‘Personal Writing Machine.’ ” All the elements of this weekly’s version of writing-as-trade are here: the narrative of self-improvement (helping “men and women to success”), the labeling of all free-lance writing as “literary work,” the sense of writing as a vigorous and exciting career, embedded here in the repeated assumption that writers must be ready to move – and to write on the move – at all times. Indeed, “literary composition” seems to be all about
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Figure 6.1
A Corona typewriter advertisement from 1922.
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speed and motion: four times the ad refers to the typewriter’s portability, which allows writers to record their thoughts “swiftly and legibly.” Wells’s own adjectives, “portable, hardy, willing, and easy” pick up the note of vigor while chiming with the paper’s larger “you can do it” ethos – its reiterated assumption that literary labor is open to anyone with sufficient gumption. We seem a long way here from the romantic image of the passionate artist tossing on his or her bed. More broadly, the image of Wells that emerges here aligns him with definitive characteristics of modernity: speed, mechanical reproduction, the modern literary marketplace itself. While Wells’s image was always positively valued in John O’London’s, not everyone viewed these signs of modernity favorably, and they could be used against Wells: his prolific output, implying speedy writing, might suggest slapdash intellection; his embrace of technology and his status as “one of the multitude” could place him among modern forces of cultural decline. Winston Churchill, vexed with Wells’s positive assessments of the Soviet state after a 1922 visit, wrote that “When one has written a history of the world from nebula to the Third International and of the human race from protoplasm to Lord Birkenhead in a twelve month ... there ought to be no difficulty in becoming an expert on the internal conditions of Russia after a visit of fourteen days” (qtd. in Mackenzie 327). Much later, T.S. Eliot posited an intellectually serious “minority journalism,” suggesting Wells as its antithesis. Eliot envisioned commuters reading Wells in “the first class as well as the third class compartment,” entranced with his writing because “he does not reason, or draw upon any kind of wisdom inaccessible to the common man” (237). Now, John O’London’s was a thoroughgoing artifact of modernity – a product of modern print and distribution technology and a player in the saturated, hyper-mediated literary marketplace. Nonetheless, Raymond’s tutorial for aspiring novelists, with its quasi-modernist emphasis on canonical learning and the integrity of the artist, illustrates that the paper hosted the kinds of nostalgic, elitist (i.e., antimodern) critiques to which Wells was vulnerable. Thus, along with its paeans to the Wellsian ethic of self-help, the paper displays an attraction to the contrasting image of the artist “in the exclusive sense” (Tomlinson 48). Its editors found a uniquely suitable instance in Thomas Hardy, whose status as a surviving Victorian who had rebelled against Victorian mores linked him positively with modernity without associating him with its commercial and technological excesses. Twice in the mid-to-late twenties John O’London’s ran extended Hardy serials,
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reprinting Tess of the D’Urbervilles from October 1925 to July 1926 and a series of selected poems in 1927. For Tess the paper paid the breathtaking sum of £1,000, underscoring an eagerness to invest in Hardy’s cultural capital (Hardy Letters 355). In the twenties Hardy may have shared with Conrad alone the distinction of having both cachet among intellectual readers and the kind of popular currency enacted by frequent mentions in the daily papers.13 Millgate notes the worldwide publicity for Hardy’s eightieth birthday in 1920, calling Hardy “the universally acknowledged grand old man of English letters” (490). Yet, despite the accolades, and in contrast to Wells, Hardy was not sanguine about modernity, nor would he have fancied himself “of the multitude,” despite his empathy for the suffering poor. Hardy saw the emergence of the new reading public and the expansion of print culture, of which Wells seemed the apotheosis, as drags on the culture: in a 1912 prize speech he named as “enemies to literature” the expansion of literacy, “slipshod writing,” and “hurried descriptive writing in the newspapers” (qtd. in Johnston 5). The paper’s embrace of Hardy can thus be read as an effort to protect it from association with degraded, modern print culture by linking it with a respected writer as an indicator of cultural value. To quote Marc DaRosa’s work on Henry James and fin de siècle authorship, such a move transforms “the cultural value contained in [the] name into a transactable, exchangeable source of social effects” (843); in other words, the association with Hardy seeks to accumulate prestige for the journal, balancing its more blatantly commercial models of authorship, and parrying the ambient distrust and devaluation of mass periodicals in 1920s Britain. That Hardy’s name served as highly valued currency for John O’London’s is evident in its handling of the Tess debut on 24 October 1925. The paper dedicated most of the cover to a teaser for the serial; in the space normally saved for the leading article appeared a facsimile, autograph “Message to our Readers” from Hardy himself. Topped with the salutation “Gentle Reader,” Hardy’s message emphasizes the novel’s continued relevance: Tess’s events are “as likely to have happened last week as fifty years back” (Hardy 125). An editor’s note underscores the facsimile’s claim to authorial sanction and presence, remarking not only on the serial, but also on the facsimile, which it describes as “a significant communication; for the searching story of Tess is likely to stir up as much controversy to-day as it did on its first appearance thirty years ago” (125). Both notes underscore Tess’s age and its contemporary relevance, thus rendering the novel safely modern for John O’London’s purposes: its staying power separates it from the
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ephemera and degrading commercialism of modern print culture, while its contemporary significance distinguishes it from pure nostalgia. Hardy’s note further serves as a sort of fetish, asserting authorial presence and fictively linking the weekly, its readers, and the author. The serial’s packaging seeks to authenticate the paper’s connection with Hardy and to posit the serialization as, to quote the headline above the first weekly instalment, “A Literary Event.” The facsimile autograph, as Salmon shows, had been part of the semiotics of literary celebrity since the 1880s; and it had a paradoxical effect, its mechanical reproducibility not deflating but rather increasing the “value” of the authorial signature (170). If Wells’s Corona testimonial marked an effort to use his name to sell typewriters through a rhetoric of identification with readers, Hardy’s “Message to our Readers” was perhaps less a gambit to sell copies of John O’London’s than an effort to polish its brand, to take it upscale, through a rhetoric of authenticity. Hardy and Wells’s contrasting significance as heavily-circulated authorial names in this weekly thus speaks to the unstable nature of literary celebrity in the late 1910s and early 1920s, as well as to the betwixt-and-between nature of the newspaper itself, which was neither a ha’penny rag nor the austere sort of journal that would have defined itself by rejecting literary celebrity and other trappings of arts coverage in the mass press. Its self-definition was, as I have been suggesting, contradictory, and there is reason to believe that its mixed messages were received as such. Having received a copy of John O’London’s from Macmillan’s during negotiations over Tess, Hardy observed that it “seems of a very good class”; Maurice Macmillan, in contrast, predicted that Tess’s fame would increase from its association with “this rather popular paper” (Hardy Letters, 356 and 363n). Amidst this many-voiced effort at self-definition, “H.G. Wells” and “Thomas Hardy” were not simply two of the countless, seemingly interchangeable names from the literary gossip columns. Nor were they what Aaron Jaffe calls modernist “imprimaturs,” names such as “T.S. Eliot” and “James Joyce,” which circulate as a unique form of elite currency precisely because they have been purged of their associations with journalism and celebrity and are thereby lifted into a separate economy of literary value (63–70). Yet Wells and Hardy performed starkly contrasting functions in John O’London’s, with Hardy functioning as a key signifier of durable literary greatness, signaling the desire for cultural legitimacy that Wells and the inclusive ethic of self-help could not offer. Through it all the weekly’s gossip columns and advertisements continued to mix art and commerce with unselfconscious enthusiasm, although, tellingly, the
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£1,000 payout behind the Tess serial was never mentioned in its pages. The Tess serial was about accumulating a different kind of capital – one predicated on occluding the links between art and commerce, between “A Literary Event,” and the exchange of cash behind it – links that were otherwise the stock-in-trade of John O’London’s Weekly.
Notes 1. The only critic to give sustained attention to John O’London’s Weekly is Jonathan Wild, who offers a useful overview of the weekly and argues convincingly that it provides a view to “largely overlooked aspect[s] of the history of reading” (50). As Wild notes, Q. D. Leavis was among the only previous scholars to touch even briefly on John O’London’s, and she dismissed it as a collection of advertisements, gossip, and lowbrow fiction. Wild goes on to argue that in its interactivity and its successful identification with its audience, John O’London’s served as a sort of “interactive distance learning center” (56). As will be clear from my argument, I share Wild’s sense of the importance of the weekly’s tutorial relationship with its readers. I am interested in teasing out the contradictions and points of tension inherent in that positioning. Wild pays only passing attention to the advertisements, which are central to my argument. 2. See Wild, 55–56, on “how to” articles about writing as a “mainstay of John O’London’s Weekly material.” 3. T.P.’s ceased publication in 1916, re-emerging to compete with John O’London’s in 1923 as T.P. and Cassell’s Weekly. 4. Through most of the twenties and thirties, the paper was 32 pages long, with an average ratio of advertising to copy of about 35/65 percent, including several full page advertisements and two to four full pages of mixed display and classified advertisements in the back. Wild aptly describes its paper quality as slightly better than the newsprint used for daily newspapers but not as nice as the “finer quality material used for more prestigious periodicals” (54). 5. Wild aptly describes the newspaper’s orientation as one that would “neither patronise its readers by adopting a schoolmasterly tone, nor assume that the process of instruction was entirely unnecessary” (51). 6. Rose also describes T.P.’s Weekly, John O’London’s predecessor and prototype, as a “penny literary review for self-improvers,” and reproduces a contemporary report that, in Edwardian times, “practically every bank clerk” read (407). 7. On literary celebrity in the late nineteenth-century, see Salmon, who notes that the genre of the interview of the “author at home” depends paradoxically on a sense of the author as special, as accessible, and as mechanically reproducible, all at once (166, 169–170). 8. Richard Hoggart, discussing working-class self-improvers, notes a “continuous line” between the desire exploited by such advertisements – “elementary promptings to learn ‘dynamic speech and writing’ ” – and the ambition to join the “minor intelligentsia” one might associate with John O’London’s editorial content (252). Hoggart was among the first scholars to subject such ads to critical inquiry.
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9. As I argue in Modernism on Fleet Street, building on work on the history of English journalism by Laurel Brake and others, the distinction between journalism and literature was largely a late-nineteenth-century creation, forged in response to a perceived crisis in British journalism. The distinction was then read back onto the history of journalism by twentieth-century commentators, including modernist writers invested in distinguishing literary from journalistic language. See especially Chapters 1 and 2; also Brake, Subjugated Knowledges, “Introduction.” 10. In addition to Wexler, see Gail McDonald, Learning to Be Modern (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), Lois Cucullu, Expert Modernists, Matricide, and Modern Culture (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave, 2004) and Thomas Strychacz’s Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 11. I discuss the Corona ad below; see also ads for “Neo-ceology ... a simple, drugless home treatment” on 2 April 1927 (954) and “The Linguaphone Method” of learning languages by gramophone on 20 February 1926 (782). 12. Dark’s essay is cited below. McQuillard’s review appeared under the title “Lure of the East,” John O’London’s Weekly 7.158 (15 April 1922): 58. 13. See Wexler on the unexpected best-seller status of Conrad’s Chance in 1913 (xvi, 44–47); Johnston on Hardy’s popularity from 1910 (70).
Works cited Dark, Sidney. Not So Bad A Life. London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1941. DaRosa, Marc. “Henry James, Anonymity, and the Press: Journalistic Modernity and the Decline of the Author.” Modern Fiction Studies 43(4) (1997): 826–859. Eliot, T.S. “Journalists of Yesterday and To-day.” New English Weekly 16 (8 February 1940): 237–238. Hampton, Mark. Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy. Fair Lawn, New Jersey. Essential Books: 1957. Jaffe, Aaron. Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Johnston, Dillon. The Poetic Economies of England and Ireland, 1912–2000. Houndsmills and New York: Palgrave, 2001. Mackenzie, Norman and Jean. H.G. Wells: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973. Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Salmon, Richard. “Signs of Intimacy: The Literary Celebrity in the ‘Age of Interviewing.’ ” Victorian Literature and Culture 25(1) (1997): 159–177. Wexler, Joyce Piell. Who Paid for Modernism? Fayatteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997. Wild, Jonathan. “ ‘Insects in Letters’: John O’London’s Weekly and the New Reading Public.” Literature and History 15(2) (Autumn 2006): 50–62.
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John O’London’s Weekly Anton, Edward. “Freedom of the Press” (Advt. London School of Journalism). 7.159 (22 April 1922): 77. Blake, George. (“Audax”). “What I Hear.” 7.158 (15 April 1922): 38; 7.160 (29 April 1922): 98; 16.415 (2 April 1927): 926. “Corona Helped H.G. Wells Write This Book” (Advt. Corona Typewriters). 7.158 (8 April 1922): 10. Dark, Sidney (“S.D.”). “Homer’s Model Wives.” 7. 157 (8 April 1922): 2. Denham, T.S. “My Literary Career” (Advt. Premier School of Journalism). 16.416 (9 April 1927): 967. “The Field for New Writers” (Advt. London Correspondence College). 7.159 (22 April 1922): 80. Hardy, Thomas. “A Message to Our Readers.” 14.342 (24 October 1925): 125. Milne, James. (“Elijah True”). “The Book World.” 7. 153 (8 April 1922): 27. “Nibbles from Anatole France.” 7. 160 (29 April 1922): 114. “Own a Corona” (Advt. Corona Typewriters). 16.415 (2 April 1927): 950. “Power of the Pen.” (Advt. London Correspondence College). 7. 153 (8 April 1922): 27. Tomlinson, H.M. “Mr. Polly and the World State.” 7. 158 (15 April 1922): 48. “Up from Grub Street.” 17. 421 (21 May 1927): 181. “What I Hear.” 7.159 (22 April 1922): 70. “What’s That? A Guide for Newspaper Readers.” 1.1 (12 April 1919): 26. Whitten, Wilfred. (“John O’London”). “Letters to Gog and Magog: Have We a Great Essayist?” 16.417 (16 April 1927): 29. ——. (“Jackdaw”). “Passing Remarks.” 17.421 (21 May 1927): 186.
7 “Women are News”: British Women’s Magazines 1919–1939 Fiona Hackney
When women want a National crusade for equal rights and equal pay, they use the news columns. A well-known woman attacks men, and casts grave doubts on the real ability of the Parliamentary male to govern. There is a hurricane of diverse opinions, and the Press is kept busy day and night distributing news about women’s challenge to men’s authority. Just the publicity women want to draw attention to their grievances! Home Chat, 19 April 1924 We are trying to blend our old world with our new. Trying to be citizens and women at the same time. Wage-earners and sweethearts. Less aggressively feminist than independently feminine. It is a difficult balance to strike. Lane 7 The achievements of female suffrage on equal terms with men, women’s entry into parliament, local government and at all levels of the work force, including professions, such as law and medicine, meant that when the first issue of Woman was published in June 1937 women’s public presence as citizens was already evident. The novelty of female entry into what, until the first decades of the twentieth century, had been predominantly a masculine public realm did not pass unnoticed in the commercial press, and from the early 1920s women’s achievements in sports, the arts, and government, as well as the latest innovations in female dress, were regularly splashed across the media, including newspapers and magazines. Successful modern women were a favorite subject of popular editorial photo-features in women’s magazines. Aviatrix Dorothy Spicer, Pageant 114
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Master Gwen Lally, fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, and the novelist G.B. Stern were typical of those featured in “Names that are News” in the monthly Modern Woman (9), while the “Sports-girls line-up” in Woman included swimmer Joyce “Mermaid” Cooper, aviation’s Jean Batten and tennis player Alice Marble, daringly wearing shorts (23). Modernity, as Robert Graves and Alan Hodge observed in their perceptive history of the inter-war years, “had become synonymous with lively progress” (113); women were emblematic of both.1 Women, moreover, as Adrian Bingham has pointed out, became “a talking point” (“Stop” 29). “The hurricane of diverse opinion,” as the penny weekly Home Chat put it, about whether or not women should “vote, smoke, bet, sit in parliament or attend boxing matches kept the press busy day and night” distributing news about “women’s challenge to men’s authority,” signaling a modernity that was, at once, controversial and progressive (“Women are News” 119–120). This increased media presence meant, meanwhile, that the boundary between “public” and “private” was fundamentally redrawn as, in addition to images of women, their voices – not least those of the growing number of female journalists writing for newspapers and magazines – became central to public debate and opinion-forming. By 1924 “women” were, in the words of Home Chat, “most definitely ‘News’.” Scholars who have studied the treatment of women in the press, however, have assumed that magazines promoted an “uncomplicated domesticity” in which women of all classes could find fulfillment in the performance of wifely and maternal roles (Bingham, “Stop” 19). The idea was established in 1970 by Cynthia White’s memorable phrase “the return to dear housewifeliness” (100) in her influential history of women’s magazines, and developed by Deirdre Beddoe (1989) in Back to Home and Duty, a social history of women’s lives in the inter-war years. Beddoe, in particular, sees a return to order and “traditional” gender boundaries after the blurring experienced during the war. Both accuse the mainstream press of endorsing the image of the housewife and mother to the exclusion of any other, nullifying the opportunities that opened up for women as a result of the war and the women’s rights movement. It is a view that has been reproduced more recently by Michelle Tusan in her book on the suffrage press (33–34). In recent years, however, others have suggested different readings of the feminine and domestic interests and values that characterize women’ magazines. Those working on the impact of modernity on women’s lives, in particular, have turned away from “high culture” and the public sphere, which principally describes the experiences and
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responses of men, to examine “middlebrow” fiction, shopping, fashion, or film, finding alternative modernities that privilege women’s experiences and contribute to the shaping of feminine subjectivities. In the 1920s and 1930s, “the parlor and the suburb,” as the literary historian Judy Giles points out, became “the paradigmatic spaces of modernity” for millions of British women (“Narratives” 23). The figure of the housewife was equally emblematic of modern life in the period as the female politician, the film star, or the sportswoman; she was certainly more ubiquitous.2 This essay argues that the multiplicity of varied, and sometimes contradictory, versions of modern womanhood that appeared in magazines – the secretary, career woman, and sports star, among others, as well as modernized versions of the domestic worker and wife – signal the plurality of possibilities open to women after the upheavals of the First World War. Among other forces, the rising number of women who worked (at least for a time before marriage), the growing consumer culture, the equalization of suffrage, and the new ideas about marriage that emerged from sexology and psychological theories about sex offered new opportunities, but also new challenges.3 A careful reading of magazines shows how they responded to these changes, offering different ways in which their readers could engage with, or negotiate, as the journalist Margaret Lane put it in her introductory editorial for Woman, the “old world” with the “new”: to be “citizens and women,” “wage-earners and sweethearts,” enjoying the “pleasures” and attending to the “responsibilities” of modern life (7). Despite Woman’s domestic emphasis (its subtitle was the “National Home Magazine”), Lane, interestingly, identifies those leading “two parallel lives” as both workers and wives as “more in the spirit” of the period than those who relinquished work for marriage. I propose that a purely domestic “dear housewifeliness” did not dominate discourses of feminine modernity in women’s magazines, which are better characterized by what Lane described as the “independently feminine.” Expressing an attitude that was aspirational but also involved compromise, it suggests how women, for instance, could strive for independence without rejecting the responsibilities of motherhood, or be open to change whilst aware of the difficulties it brought. Feminine modernity, as it was materialized in the messages (the words and images) in magazines, was a discourse attuned to the nuances and complexities of women’s lives: their hopes and aspirations, struggles and dreams. Evident elsewhere in commercial and mass culture, feminine modernity, I argue, took a distinct form in women’s magazines due to the ways in
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which these periodicals were modernized.4 In a phase of rapid technical, visual, and editorial innovation – as publishers were influenced by high-selling American periodicals such as the Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping magazine – the women’s press also became a predominantly female domain because publishers and the directors of advertising agencies believed that women were best suited to understand (and sell to) their own sex. A new breed of female journalist, women such as Mary Grieve, who worked on Mother and Woman in the period, or Leonora Eyles, the campaigning author and “agony aunt” (both strong Socialists) – seized this opportunity, viewing magazines as a chance to change and improve their readers’ lives.5
“What the big world thinks”: service magazines Among the leading producers of journalistic discourse about women were the so-called “service magazines,” which dominated women’s periodicals in these years and evolved from middle-class domestic consumer monthlies in the 1920s to the “new weekly” in the 1930s that targeted wider readerships. The American publisher Hearst’s Good Housekeeping magazine was perhaps the pre-eminent service magazine, a publication that, in White’s words, offered readers “an intimate personal service” in the form of domestic tips and consumer advice with a secondary emphasis on entertainment (96). The British version appeared in 1922, precipitating a flurry of activity as rival houses came up with their own versions. Prominent amongst these was Newnes and Pearson’s Modern Woman. Subtitled “the journal with the new spirit of the age,” it was launched in 1925 to appeal to the new interest in all things modern, and particularly, the latest developments in the home. The Amalgamated Press, building on the substantial audience that Woman’s Weekly had achieved since its launch in 1911, brought out three monthly sister papers: Woman and Home (1926), My Home (1928) and Wife and Home (1929). Priced at one shilling, Good Housekeeping was aimed at middleclass households with annual incomes of at least £1,000; with a cover price of six pence, its imitators targeted those living on £500 or less, and by the 1930s family budgets in Modern Woman were closer to £300 (Braithwaite, “Women’s Magazines” 42; “Family Budget” 42). The larger proportion of serial fiction in Wife and Home suggests a predominantly working-class readership (Melman 114–117). Good Housekeeping quickly became a byword for professionalism, quality and reliability with its comprehensive household service offering: product demonstrations, advice from recognized experts, up-to-date
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information on goods and services and, later, a consumer testing service. This was enhanced by a reputation for superior fiction and topical feature articles written by, among others, Virginia Woolf, Leonora Eyles, Rose Macaulay, Rebecca West, and Violet Bonham Carter; subjects ranged from Woolf’s modernist meditation on shopping in Oxford Street – the magazine termed it a “word picture” – to provocative pieces about whether women should work, marry, marry and work, or marry and draw a wage from one’s husband (Braithwaite et al., 138; Nava 46). Although the emphasis was domestic, this did not preclude participation in the world outside the home; Good Housekeeping presented itself as a “forum for rational debate” as Giles observes (“The Parlor” 123). Modern Woman likewise envisioned a public agenda for its readers. Promising in an early editorial to keep them informed about “what the Big World thinks,” the “men and women who do things,” literature, art and the “newest discoveries in domestic science,” the magazine’s vision of modern womanhood was by no means restricted to domestic pursuits (Introducing “Modern Woman” 47). The publication presented itself as a bridge that connected political, cultural and domestic life, offering its readers an independent, active and informed version of modern womanhood with which to engage and identify. The recipe for the future mass-market magazine, however, was established by three weekly titles that appeared in the 1930s, whose domestic emphasis was equally strong. With their high-quality illustrations, many of which were color, competitive price, and friendly, reassuring editorial voice, Woman’s Own (1932), Woman’s Illustrated (1936), and Woman (1937) made domestic life seem glamorous and extended the “service” ethos of “entertainment and enlightenment” to working-class women and the expanding, newly constituted lower-middle class (Ferguson 18). The challenge facing editors was how to achieve this shift at a time when sharp differences existed between middle, lower-middle, and working-class incomes, modes of employment and education.6 Woman, the brainchild of Odhams Press proprietor Julius Elias, was particularly successful and influential. Whereas Good Housekeeping sold around 150,000 copies per annum, Woman had circulations of three quarters of a million in 1939 and topped the one million mark by the end of 1940 (White 97; Grieve 89). Following the American model, Elias determined to revitalize the British periodical market by introducing new print technology, enabling the rapid production of large runs of fully illustrated color-gravure magazines that retailed at the same price as current black and white letterpress weeklies (Minney 271; Reed 178–181). American magazines had demonstrated the appeal of
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intelligent and topical features, and Woman combined visual innovation with controversial editorials such as “Women Must Work,” an article written by Labour M.P. Ellen Wilkinson, which foregrounded her arguments in support of women’s employment, the subject of her latest political campaign. Pre-war favorites such as Home Chat (1895) and Woman’s Weekly (1911), meanwhile, remained popular with their winning combination of fiction, dress and knitting patterns adapting to the new formats.7
Variant femininities and visual fantasy Lane, in her 1937 Woman editorial, foregrounded the contradictions of femininity: women’s struggle to be “wage-earners and sweethearts,” “citizens and women” (7). Her observation that citizenship and womanhood were in tension suggests that even those trying to re-imagine women’s social and political participation continued to position them outside the public realm. Neither the problem nor the willingness to represent it, however, was new. Variant models of femininity and accompanying debates about women’s behavior appeared in magazines throughout the 1920s and ’30s, and were central to the discourse of feminine modernity there. This discourse included writing on whether women should work or stay at home, marry or remain independent, enjoy sex or view it as a necessary, if unpalatable, part of married life, or practice birth control as a means of limiting family size, this last being perhaps the most radical change in domestic life of the period (Gittins: 181–187). While writing itself was of course the central medium of these discussions, much of the meaning of magazines was, and remains, embodied in the genre itself and the particular experiences of looking, reading, dreaming, doing, making, and consuming involved. Magazine reading increasingly meant “looking,” in these years, and a form of looking that was closely aligned with viewing film. Audiences, trained by weekly trips to the movies, were well versed in the nuances of visual communication and became sophisticated consumers of visual “things.” The historian Charles Eckert has written about the “emotional fantasy generating” qualities of popular media in the 1930s, referring to Hollywood movies as “living display windows” for the products they contained (120). Fantasy was, and remains, the psychic motor driving commerce, and Eckert’s metaphor has clear resonances for magazines. This is especially true of the new weekly Woman, whose large color format and finely honed commercialism meant that the transformative
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fantasies bound up with magazine reading were widely experienced through visual means, for the first time. Readers, however, did not absorb the messages promoted by magazines in a straightforward way. The reading/looking process offers many opportunities for re-thinking or re-contextualizing what Stuart Hall terms, the “preferred meanings” of the text (134). And opportunities for re-interpretation increased dramatically in this period as readers were required to negotiate the competing claims of advertising and editorial, “escapist” fiction and “factual” features, moving between text and image, illustration and black and white photography and, by the 1930s, the spectacle of color. Feminine modernity was as much about the distinct ways in which publications structured women’s fantasies as about the diverse models of modern womanhood they endorsed. The “montage-style” organizational structure and variant models of femininity that appeared within, as well as between, magazines offered fluid imaginary spaces in which women could question, negotiate, and inhabit different identities, exploring the possibilities of what being both modern and a woman might mean. Whereas much has been made of the domestic agenda of women’s magazines, the working woman – whether career professional (favorite of the monthlies) or “bachelor girl” (who worked, usually in an office, until marriage) – was a continual presence in their pages, particularly at times of acute economic upheaval. Immediately after the cessation of war Woman’s Weekly demonstrated an awareness of, and sensitivity to, women’s need for employment. At a time when, as historian Meta Zimmeck points out, public opinion quickly switched from approval of “our girls” who had helped to win the war to disapproval of “painted hussies” who kept “warriors and breadwinners” out of work (902), the Weekly varied its format of fiction, sewing patterns, and dress gossip to incorporate a regular employment column, “Chats on Careers.”8 Including such novel jobs as photography, commercial traveling, and working in a Turkish bath, the “Chats” suggest an exciting post-war period when women’s employment was re-imagined, rather than being tied to domestic work. Packed with information about the training required to be, for instance, a telephonist, hairdresser or shop-girl, the column was aimed at those starting out in life and at what the magazine termed “that terrible mishap the untrained woman” – that is, the woman who had to support herself (and often dependents) without the benefit of established qualifications and skills (“Chats” 316). The radical nature of the Weekly’s take on the
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subject, moreover, is suggested by a series of features discussing the rights and wrongs of that most controversial figure, the “working wife” (“Married Woman in Business” 37; “Should a Woman” 263; “Woman’s Work After” 277).9 Debates about work were not the only ways in which women’s lives were re-imagined in magazines; images of female bodies transformed by fashion, dance, energetic sports, or other physical activities quickly became an important theme. Nothing could be further from a safe, sedentary, domestic ideal than an illustration showing a young woman – a “motor-driver in mufti” – accosting a “ruffian” in a feature on self-defense (“What Would You Do” 238), or the sexually provocative stockinged legs of actress and dancer Miss Elsie Craven demonstrating the “jazz roll,” both of which appeared in Woman’s Weekly in 1919 (“How to do” 281). Active, youthful modern women dominated Home Chat in 1924. Characteristic was the dramatic photograph on the cover of a May issue showing the English tennis player Evelyn Colyer, part of the duo the “bob-haired babes,” dressed in a short frock and headband and leaping into the air to smash a volley. It was one of many images of young women smoking, dancing, driving, working, playing sports, and generally enjoying the new and varied opportunities of modern life that targeted the magazine’s audience of working girls and young married women. As women’s changed appearance became a visual syntax for modernity, editors took a more experimental attitude to the relationship between image and text. One strategy in the penny weeklies was to illustrate a commentary on modern manners with an image that undercut the more conventional editorial message. “Girls Who Just Miss Marriage!” (Laredo 287) “Teach Your Maid,” and “That Job You Don’t Like,” three articles published in the late 1920s and early ‘30s, for instance, depict women who are in some way daring, disruptive, or challenging to established feminine norms. Whereas each feature criticizes the girl’s upstart behavior (respectively applying lipstick in public, being disrespectful to social superiors, and “forever grumbling and grousing about her rotten job”), the images cut in a different direction: the sexually assertive lipstick wearer, the surly maid, and the gossiping employee signal alternative modes of behavior that counter the qualities of dissimulation, patience, endurance, and deferred gratification recommended in the texts. The power of these images to offer alternative cultural identities depends on the rapidly increasing influence of “the visual” in commercial media, including advertising and the cinema. The sexual allure of the Lipstick Girl, for instance, her
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glamour heightened by the flat decorative black and white illustrative style, references the unconventional femininities performed by movie stars such as Louise Brooks or Greta Garbo (Figure 7.1).10 While these subtly subversive moments were intermittent in magazines like Home Chat, the middle-class monthly Modern Woman
Figure 7.1
“Girls Who Just Miss Marriage: the Lipstick Girl!”
Source: Home Chat 10 May 1924.
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presented some of the most clearly progressive models of modern womanhood available in commercial women’s magazines. Leonora Eyles (96 and 76) deliberately used her column in the 1920s to increase what she termed “sex knowledge” and, at a time when The Daily Express operated a policy banning discussion of the subject, bravely promoted scientific methods, recommending Stopes’s publications and the Society for Constructive Birth Control (96, 76). In the mid-1930s, the publication daringly ran a series of articles titled “Marriage Failures” (23) in which a “London doctor” with an extensive practice in “nervous breakdowns” examined sexual problems in marriage, including male and female “sex roles,” in what the magazine described as a, “strikingly frank and helpful manner.” The series claimed to respond to “hundreds of letters from unhappily-married men and women” and, at a time when the attitudes of general practitioners could be colored by religious affiliations and relied largely on received opinion, “Marriage Failures” went some way to addressing the very real need for information that the thousands of letters sent to Stopes, for instance, identified (McKibbin 304–305). Good Housekeeping, Giles argues, “works to sustain a distinction” between the world of “rational advice, debate and information” that characterizes its editorial features and the “spectacle and display” inscribed in its advertising (123). This separation is less definite in Modern Woman, where the choice of lay-out design, language, and imagery frequently encouraged visual and conceptual integration, strengthening the rational appeal of advertising and enhancing the desirability of the cultural identities editorial material offered. The modern housewife or domestic manager was a particularly enduring ideal. Promoted by advertisers particularly to sell the new laborsaving goods, its libratory connotations worked on a number of levels. As Roland Marchand points out, advertisers sought to link products with the “social and political freedoms of the new woman”; they were quick to adopt the language of feminism, equating progress, equality, and social liberation with freedom from the drudgery of housework (186). The “Defiant” kitchen table, advertised in Modern Woman in 1925, is a good example. The brand name evokes something of the spirit and determination of the suffrage movement, circulating ideas about women’s independence and transferring them to everyday goods. Meanwhile such images as a housewife wearing a laboratory-style overall, or the image of a mother on the magazine’s cover dressed in beret and overcoat, and resembling an aviatrix rather
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than the timeless matriarchal ideal, re-imagine housewifery and motherhood as an exciting, enjoyable, and thoroughly modern job (Dressing to Your Salary 36–37; Modern Woman front cover, March 1930). In reality, the introduction of the so-called “labor-saving” appliances did not reduce time spent on housework by full-time housewives, which research shows remained remarkably constant from the 1920s to the late 1960s, as women struggled to maintain the higher standards of cleanliness resulting from the new housework regimes (Vanek 116–120).11 As rhetoric and a fantasy, however, the modern housewife and mother made visible aspirations for freedom, independence, and success that had undeniable appeal. The emotional, fantasy-generating qualities of magazines, however, were materialized most effectively in the new color weekly Woman, where advertising and editorial became ever more integrated and the reader was invited to participate in the imaginary world of the magazine through increasingly sophisticated visual means. This is demonstrated most dramatically on the magazine’s front cover that each week shows a girl who, whether at the beach, shopping, playing sports, dancing, embracing a baby, driving or simply gazing into a mirror, spectacularly embodies the pleasures of being a woman or, more specifically, a Woman reader. Covers, occasionally showing the whole figure, often consist of a woman’s face and shoulders contained within a graphic frame, reproducing the look of the screen close-up. As a head, hand or elbow stray across the borders of the image, however, unlike screen goddesses, the cover girls fracture their frame, breaking the gap between representation and reader and encouraging the latter to enter the imaginary space of the magazine. A technique that enhanced identification, bridging the gap between reader and publication, the fractured frame also connected an internal world of private feminine experience and emotions, which the magazine represented, with the external world. While articles about travel, jobs, and the workplace, for instance, exposed readers to the life beyond the home, Woman simultaneously put versions of private life and modern feminine subjectivities on public display. An image that would have been considered shocking ten years earlier, for instance, appears on the cover of a March issue in 1939 (Figure 7.2). Caught, head tilted and hair in rollers, the woman is shown engaged in the very intimate act of applying lipstick. It demonstrates how the most private aspects of women’s lives entered the public realm at this time, albeit in the service of
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Figure 7.2
Front Cover Woman.
Source: Woman 25 March 1939.
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consumption; the lipstick advertises a free gift (pictured life-size to the left of the page), a crucial component of the cut-throat world of magazine publishing at the end of the decade. That Vote of Ann’s Ann is a personality; Ann is a woman of note Ann was a flapper the other day But that’s not the sort of thing you’d say To one who possesses a vote! She can make a cross as big as a man’s; It’s a wonderful thing, is this vote of Ann’s. “C.E.B.” Home Chat 11 April 1929. 354 In 1936, Elizabeth Peacocke, editor of the Women’s Department at the Daily Telegraph, remarked that her male colleagues’ anxieties about “the little understood, silent, rather worrying and mysterious woman’s point of view on politics” (2) accelerated the employment of female journalists, who, due to their sex alone, it was felt, knew and could influence women voters. Equality of franchise was accomplished in 1928, when the age at which women could vote was lowered from 30 to 21. A landmark achievement, the bill added over five million females to the electoral register and placed women at the center of political life. It followed years of often bitter and acrimonious debate about women’s citizenship and the nature of their participation in public life, the ramifications of which, as Peacocke attests, were still fresh in the minds of the male establishment in the mid-1930s. This section will explore how fantasy combined with political activity to create a “politically savvy woman,” one of the multiple identities offered by magazines at this time. Women’s magazines posited this formidable and respectable new contributor to the democracy while the Daily Mail was dismissively terming the expanded franchise the “Flapper Vote Folly,” and the daily press by and large was dubbing female voters “irresponsible.” The Mail, for instance, made alarmist claims about newly enfranchised women “bringing down the British Empire” (qtd. in Bingham 23). Editors seized the opportunity to explore female citizenship, not so much in terms of how women would vote, something that preoccupied the Rothermere press, rather in relation to deeper questions about the issues that would concern them, and the wider possibilities for a changed political culture that the new electorate brought about. Above all, while magazine representations of the woman voter varied,
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from the “housewife as bastion of Empire” to the independently minded young woman challenging “wrongs and injustice,” editors agreed on one thing: that the vote was a powerful weapon, which radically altered women’s status, inside and outside the home. No longer a figure of derision, “Ann,” as Home Chat dubbed the new voter in a poem published on the eve of the 1929 election, was now a “personality” and a “person of note,” someone whose views and opinions had to be taken seriously and who’s vote was, if not more, as important as a man’s. Widely known as the “Flapper Election,” the General Election of May, 1929, generated a flurry of articles as women’s magazines attempted to anticipate, analyze, influence, or educate the female electorate. Home Chat ran several, ranging from “The Wheels Go Round,” a straightforwardly informative feature instructing readers about the operational arrangement of parliament, to “The Ballot-Box and Babies!” which carried a more complicated and partisan message. Aligning women’s responsibilities as citizens with their role as mothers or, “potential mothers of the future,” the latter urged women to “come out and mind the baby,” extending their maternal duties to the public realm (93). In place of “destroyers of Empire,” women were recast as its savior, as the editor proudly declared: “Every British housewife will refuse to support with her vote any policies or any prospects that would alienate our kith and kin across the seas, or that might lead to the breaking-up of this great Imperial fabric” (“Ballot-Box” 190). Equalization put questions about “women’s issues” of food, prices, housing and welfare, and marriage reform on the agenda as matters of pressing public debate. With its pro-imperial stance, “Ballot-Box and Babies,” however, was a thinly disguised promotion for the Conservative Party, which enthused about the current (Conservative) government’s plans for slum clearance and improved record on reducing infant mortality. The article shows that women’s magazines did demonstrate political affiliations, and that the “women’s agenda” could be co-opted for party political gain. The centrality of “women’s issues” to the female vote informs a very different argument in “How The Women’s Votes Will Change Politics,” a Modern Woman article by Elsie E. Bowerman, published earlier that year. Bowerman, a barrister involved with the suffrage movement and The Women’s Guild of Empire, presents an optimistic view of the new voters’ capabilities and judgment. She predicts, moreover, that women’s “maternal instinct, expressed in terms of politics” will displace the opportunism of party politics and move towards a time when, “none are for the party and all are for the state” (22). Disparaging both the politicians, with their visions of “endless crocodiles of flappers queuing up to support their
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opponent,” and press (rightwing and left) representations of women as “impressionistic young things,” Bowerman draws on an alternative female stereotype, that of the woman who is “uncertain, coy and hard to please,” to argue that the best way to appeal to the sex is not to their emotions but to their “common sense.” Aware of their domestic and national responsibilities and being “first and foremost practical,” women, she assures her readers, will vote “for measures, not for men.” In the immediate run up to the election, Home Chat published “Miss 21 and Her Vote!” a series that, far from deriding the new voters, gave their point of view. The newly enfranchised women that the magazine consulted, however, were no ordinary readers, but the daughters of leading politicians: Lady Eleanor Smith, daughter of Conservative minister Lord Birkenhead; Megan Lloyd George, the daughter of the Liberal leader Lloyd George; and the Labor leader Ramsay MacDonald’s daughter, Ishbel MacDonald. While differences of class and political ideology lurk below the surface, a sense of women’s shared interests, values, and priorities unite all three. First off was Megan Lloyd George who, in a rousing critique of the “Flapper Vote Folly” slogan, applauded young women’s level-headedness, experience and independence of mind, encouraging them to equip themselves with the facts, vote according to their own dictate, and prove those who thought it “folly to give girls like you and me a vote” wrong. Standing as the prospective Liberal Candidate for Angelsea, Lloyd George underscored women’s status as responsible and capable citizens, declaring: “I have faith in the young voters of my own sex. Girls of to-day are so different from girls twenty or thirty years ago. They know the world, and mix in it as much as their brothers do. They have become essentially practical” (421). Lady Eleanor Smith, meanwhile, despite a somewhat paternalistic observation that the vote will enable her “class” to help “the country and its masses become less mean than they are now,” voiced a shared sense of identity with all her “sisters of the vote” (353). It is Ishbel MacDonald, however, who articulated the parallels between political culture and the home most powerfully, despite her view that “different social systems” over-rode gender allegiance. The home is a central motif in MacDonald’s article, and an analogy between the state and homes run by “good” housewives is reinforced by a strikingly domestic description of MacDonald, as an enthusiastic “helper” in welfare work who “ran her father’s house” (499). This domestication of a woman who, elsewhere in the article, stridently declared that the vote
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is “a powerful weapon” to help fight injustice and wrongs, may have been a strategy to reassure readers about Labour’s domestic policy, embedding it within a rationale of efficient household management and domestic reform. “My vote will not be used for pulling down only,” MacDonald concludes, ending on a patriotic note: “but for building up a more healthy and happy State, in which the home will be put first in importance, because a country of unhealthy, overcrowded homes cannot be a great country.” Writing about the feminist journal Votes for Women, which ceased publication in 1918, Maria DiCenzo (117) demonstrates how women used it to gain access to a public sphere from which they were formally excluded, maintaining a “political stance while negotiating a market system.” While I make no claims that commercial magazines maintained a coherent position on women’s rights or represented a counterpublic sphere, they weren’t the retrograde organs of conservatism that others have assumed them to be. Influenced by American publications, and with a new breed of woman journalist involved, they served, rather, as an important mediator for large numbers of women, commenting on the possibilities and challenges of modern life, and interpreting these from a feminine angle. Articles about whether women should work, pay their own way, raise families alone, or become equal partners in a “Fifty, Fifty” marriage (which, in writer Ursula Bloom’s view, meant the husband shared domestic responsibilities so that his wife could also work) suggest that editors were conscious of their role as mediators of social change (Bloom 505). Images of glamorous and sexually assertive “lipstick girls,” gossiping office workers, surly maids, successful sportswomen, or debates about women who were politically active and astute, meanwhile, question social norms. The majority of women became intimately involved in the processes of modern life, in the home, in the workplace, and in parliament (as voters) during this period, and this opened up new possibilities about who they were and what their lives might be. Editors, who grasped the radical implications of this, offered readers new cultural identities through which to re-imagine womanhood as satisfying, powerful, and effective through, often, subtle and sophisticated means. This cultural work is perhaps best summed up by the image that accompanies “That Vote of Ann’s,” the humorous Home Chat poem quoted at the start of this section. Pictured with legs astride, cropped hair, cigarette, monocle, and suit, Ann conforms to the “manly” stereotype, which was often employed in critique of the modern woman (Figure 7.3).
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Figure 7.3
“That Vote of Ann’s.”
Source: Home Chat 11 April 1929.
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The joke, however, as the verse makes clear, was not on Ann, whose ambiguity (sexual and otherwise) suggests her power (“she can make a cross as big as a man’s”), but on the men, in this case parliamentary candidates, who were, for the first time, forced to “woo her.”
Notes 1. Graves and Hodge use the word “modernism,” referring not to the literary movement that informs this collection but rather to the shift in consciousness and qualities of social experience that occurred response to processes of modernization. See Nava & Alan O’Shea for a thought-provoking discussion of modernity in the English context. 2. I develop my thoughts on the discourse of housewifery in the 1930s in Despard. 3. For sexology see Kent, and employment see Holloway. 4. Bigham explores similar debates in relation to newspapers. 5. See Grieve’s autobiography for details of her life and my entry on Eyles in Hammill et al. 6. McKibbin gives detailed analysis of the definitions of and differences between the classes in the period. 7. Both were among the most popular weeklies in 1932 with readerships of 601,000 and nearly 1.1 million, respectively (McKibbin 508). 8. The column ran from March to December 1919. 9. The issue was seized upon by those who wanted to restore the pre-war status quo (Holloway 156). 10. Petro explores this in her discussion of the relationship between women’s magazines and filmic imagery in Weimar Germany. 11. For a useful summary of these debates, see Wajcman.
Works cited “The Ballot-Box and Babies!” Home Chat 13 April 1929: 93. Beddoe, Deidre. Back to Home and Duty: Women Between the Wars 1918–1939. London & San Francisco: Pandora, 1989. Bingham, Adrian. “ ‘Stop the Flapper Vote Folly,’ Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail, and the Equalization of the Franchise 1925–28.” Twentieth Century British History 13 (1) (2002): 17–37. Bloom, Ursula. “Fifty-Fifty Marriages.” Home Notes 26 November 1932: 505. Bowerman, Elsie E. “How The Women’s Votes Will Change Politics.” Modern Woman February 1929: 22. Braithwaite, Brian et al., Ragtime to Wartime: The Best of Good Housekeeping 1922–1939. London: Ebury Press, 1986. ——. Women’s Magazines: The First 300 Years. London: Peter Owen, 1995. C.E.B. “That Vote of Ann’s.” Home Chat 11 May 1929. 354. “Chats on Careers.”Woman’s Weekly 18 October 1919. 316. DiCenzo, Maria. “ ‘Militant Distribution’: Votes for Women and the Public Sphere.” Media History 6(2) (2000): 115–128.
132 Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940 “Dressing to Your Salary.” Modern Woman January 1930. 36–37. Eckert, Charles. “The Carol Lombard in Macy’s Window.” Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body. Eds. Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog. London & New York: Routledge, 1990. 100–121. Eyles, Leonora. “From One Woman to Another,” Modern Woman August 1929 & December 1927. 96, 76. Ferguson, Marjorie. Forever Feminine: Women’s Magazines and the Cult of Femininity. London: Heinemann, 1983. “Family Budget.” Modern Woman October 1939, London: George Newnes. 42. Giles, Judy. “Narratives of Gender, Class and Modernity in Women’s Memories of the Mid-Twentieth Century in Britain.” Signs: The Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(1) (2002): 21–41. ——. The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity. Oxford & New York: Berg, 2004. Gittins, Diana. Fair Sex: Family Size and Structure 1900–1939. London, Melbourne, Sydney: Hutchinson, 1982. Graves, Robert and Alan Hodge. The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain 1918–39. London: Harmondsworth Penguin, 1971 [1940]. Grieve, Mary. Millions Made My Story. London: Victor Gollancz, 1964. ——. “Leonora Eyles 1889–1960.” Encyclopedia of British Women’s Writing, 1900– 1950. Eds. Faye Hammill, Esme Miskimmin and Ashlie Sponenberg. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave, 2006. 85. Hackney, Fiona. “Pleasures and Responsibilities: The Discourse of Modern Housewifery in British Women’s Magazines in the 1930s.” A Woman’s Place: Women, Domesticity and Private Life. Ed. Annabelle Despard and Kristiansand. Norway: Agder College, 1998. 200–217. Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79. Eds. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis. London & New York: Routledge, 1980. 128–138. Hammill, Faye, Esme Miskimmin and Ashlie Sponenberg, eds. Encyclopedia of British Women’s Writing, 1900–1950. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2006. 85. Holloway, Gerry. Women and Work in Britain Since 1840. London & New York: Routledge, 2005. “How to Do the Jazz Roll.”Woman’s Weekly 12 April 1919. 281. “Introducing ‘Modern Woman’: The Journal with the New Spirit.” Modern Woman July 1925. Kent, Susan Kingsley. Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Inter-War Britain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Lane, Margaret. “Woman: Where She Stands Today, What She Has Paid, Was It Worth It?” Woman 5 June 1927. 7. Laredo, Lola De. “Girls Who Just Miss Marriage!: The ‘Lip-Stick’ Girl.” Home Chat 10 May 1924. 287. Lloyd George, Megan. “Miss 21 and Her Vote!” Home Chat 18 April 1929. 421. MacDonald, Ishbel. “Miss 21 and Her Vote!” Home Chat 25 May 1929. 499. Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. “Marriage Failures.” Modern Woman July 1935. 23. “Married Woman in Business.” Woman’s Weekly 18 January 1919. 37.
British Women’s Magazines 1919–1939 133 McKibbin, Ross. Classes and Cultures, England 1918–1951. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Melman, Billie. Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs. London: Macmillan Press, 1998. Minney, Rubeigh J. Viscount Southwood. London: Odhams Press, 1954. Modern Woman. March 1930, front cover. “Names That Are News.” Modern Woman August 1935. 9. Nava, Mica. “Modernity Tamed? Women Shoppers and the Rationalization of Consumption in the Inter-War Period.” All the World and Her Husband: Women in Twentieth-Century Consumer Culture. Eds. Maggie Andrews and Mary M. Talbot. London & NY: Cassell, 2000. 46–64. Nava, Mica and Alan O’Shea., eds. Modern Times, Reflections on a Century of English Modernity. London & New York: Routledge, 1996. Peacocke, Elizabeth. Writing for Women. London: A & C Black, 1936. Petro, Patrice. Joyless Streets, Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Reed, David. The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States 1880–1960. London: The British Library, 1997. “Should a Woman Keep Her Job After Marriage?” Woman’s Weekly 27 September 1919. 263. Smith, Lady Eleanor. “Miss 21 and Her Vote!” Home Chat 11 May 1929. 353. “Sports-Girl Line-Up.” Woman 26 June 1937. 23. “Teach Your Maid.” Home Chat 11 August 1934. 271. “That Job You Don’t Like.” Woman’s Weekly 15 March 1929. 372. Tusan, Michelle E. Women Making News: Gender & Journalism in Modern Britain. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Vanek, Joan. “Time Spent on Housework.” Scientific American 231 (1974). 116–120. Wajcman, Judy. “Domestic Technology: Labour-Saving or Enslaving?” The Politics of Domestic Consumption: Critical Readings. Eds. Stevi Jackson and Shaun Moores. London & New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995. 217–230. “What Would You Do If You Were Suddenly Attacked?” Woman’s Weekly 29 March 1919. 238. White, Cynthia. Women’s Magazines, 1693–1968. London: Michael Joseph, 1970. Wilkinson, Ellen. “Women Must Work.” Woman 12 June 1937. 11–12. “The Wheels Go Round.” Home Chat 4 May 1929. 301, 304. “Woman’s Work After Marriage.” Woman’s Weekly 4 October 1919. 277. “Women are News.” Home Chat 19 April 1924: 119–120. Zimmeck, Meta. “Strategies and Stratagems for the Employment of Women in the British Civil Service, 1919–1939.” The Historical Journal 27(4) (1984). 901–924.
8 Christopher Morley’s Kitty Foyle: (Em)Bedded in Print Margaret D. Stetz
“I am a woman with all the latest improvements. The creature the world wants. Nothing can now be done without me” (emphasis in original) (Grand 278). So declares the female Muse-figure in a short story by Sarah Grand, who was perhaps the bestselling “New Woman” writer of the fin-de-siècle and a key figure in the Anglo-American “traffic” in ideas about modern womanhood and modernity. In “The Undefinable: A Fantasia,” first published in a British magazine, Cosmopolitan, in 1894, this very up-to-date Muse arrives unbidden at the London studio of a male society painter. Stirred by the challenge that her appearance poses, he confesses in response, “I was consumed with the rage to paint her – or, rather, to paint that in her which I suddenly saw and could reproduce upon canvas, but could not otherwise express” (Grand 286). Her intrusion frees him not only from the stifling rules of social behavior he has absorbed from his upper-class patrons, but from his entrapment within the aesthetics of conventional forms of representation. Although Muses are usually associated with the Classical past, this one, as the painter recognizes, is instead the emblem of modernity: “a free woman, a new creature, a source of inspiration the like of which no man hitherto has even imagined in art or literature.” She both allows and encourages him to access the restless, mobile spirit of the current age, from which he has been remote – an age that defines itself through contradictions and antitheses, as does the Muse, with “her coming and her going, her insolence and her ideality, her gravity and her levity.” Without the impress upon the artist’s work of these exhilarating dualities, and thus without her, “nothing uncommonly great can be done” (Grand 287). Forty-five years later, when the American novelist Christopher Morley (1890–1957) created a fictional female character who, in her body, voice, ideology, and conduct, represented for him all that was modern, he was 134
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indeed following the lead of British “New Women” such as Sarah Grand. Where he differed from these predecessors, however, was in his referents for this figure. The eponymous heroine and first-person narrator of Morley’s 1939 Kitty Foyle was not merely the embodiment of the present age in general, whether in art or in life; she was also the embodiment in particular of contemporary print culture. Her personal history was more than individual, for it intersected with the rise of the American periodical press in the early decades of the twentieth century and its ties, through the publishing company owned by Cyrus Curtis, to Philadelphia. The story of Kitty Foyle, like the story of the American mass-market magazine, proved to be one of heterogeneous materials and conjunctions that united literary aspirations and business interests, regionalist perspectives as well as national and transnational outreach, gestures toward aesthetic uplift and expressions of rank sensationalism, cultivation of the comic and reliance upon the sentimental, and both elitist fantasies and populist affirmations. For the public that made Christopher Morley’s novel a bestseller just before the start of the Second World War, the interest of Kitty Foyle was as a sensational tale – that is, as an exposé of the doings of the urban “White Collar Girl” (Morley 261), also called interchangeably here the “White Collar Woman.”1 The novel’s chief draw was the first-person narrator’s star-crossed and social-class-crossing love affair, which concludes with a back-alley abortion. In 1939, it was still a daring choice indeed for a heroine to allow herself to be seduced by a member of Philadelphia’s upper crust, whom there is little reason to think she will marry. To read the novel now, however, is to see another narrative come into view, one where the interest lies not in the bedding of its protagonist, but in how she is embedded and contextualized. This other narrative focuses on the evolution of the publishing industry of the 1920s and ’30s, as well as on Christopher Morley’s own relationship to it. Within this parallel plot, the trajectory is not entirely toward loss, but also toward profit, whether in literary, cultural, or financial terms; the emphasis is not on unbridgeable divides and vanquished hopes, but on fruitful exchanges among disparate forces, as well as on appropriation and reinvention. Seen in this light, Kitty Foyle ceases to be a curiosity – a forgotten romance novel of the pre- and – post-Depression era, notable only as the basis for a 1940 Hollywood tear-jerker that won Ginger Rogers an Oscar. It reveals itself instead as a vital historical document, as a fictionalized record of the creation and circulation of print at a formative moment and of how that moment looked to an insider.
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If the story that Morley’s Kitty Foyle tells is, in effect, a narrative that tracks simultaneously the progress of “White Collar Girls” (Morley 146), the fortunes of the American periodical market, and the direction of its author’s own literary career, its construction of modernity is equally multifarious. For Sarah Grand and other contemporaries writing in England in the 1890s, the “modern” was a matter largely of binaries, beginning with the binaries of gender that divided the “Old Men” from the “New Women.”2 In Morley’s fiction of the 1930s, however, the modern defines itself not so much through dualism as through triangulation. The tensions, conflicts, allegiances, and alliances that drive the narrative forward in Kitty Foyle occur within and among an array of triads: England, France, and the United States; Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York; small town, city, and suburb; school, office, and department store; Irish Americans, WASPs, and African Americans; Protestants, atheists, and Jews; trains, automobiles, and ships; highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow values; books, newspapers, and magazines. Gender itself moves here beyond traditional oppositions. With an identity determined first by the uniform of the workplace rather than by sex, Morley’s “White Collar Woman” is, if not quite in an intermediate gender category, then at the least in the position of navigating between the conventional polarities associated with masculinity and femininity. By freely and unrepentantly terminating her pregnancy, Kitty Foyle proves herself no longer bound by the so-called biological imperative of motherhood that had always characterized the essence of the feminine, even in the most radical turn-of-the-century “New Woman” writing. (Whatever the “Woman Who Did” of the 1890s may have done, she certainly didn’t do that.) We may take with some skepticism Christopher Morley’s own description, supplied to the editors of the 1942 volume Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature, of his novel as a work of dispassionate scientific observation about femininity – “an unexpected revelation ... of the mind and heart and biology of a young woman of the 1930’s” – for the remark appears in what Morley, tongue in cheek, labels his “Obituary (premature, I hope)” and is thus part of an exercise in self-mockery (qtd. in Kunitz and Haycraft 986–987). Despite Kitty’s assertion to the audience that the condition of “never forgetting she’s a woman” is the feminine “universal” (Morley 278), Morley often appears to forget his narrator’s gendered identity. There is little in this novel that marks Kitty as the universal feminine and far more that confirms her as a character testing and trying on new versions of and new fashions in gender.
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Of course, the invention of a female persona that exists outside the ordinary confines, whether social or biological, of femininity made easier Morley’s project of inhabiting her and of speaking convincingly in and through her narrative voice. But how should we view his desire in the first place to use this particular “White Collar Girl” – Scot-IrishAmerican and lower-middle-class – as his vehicle?3 Here, we may recall Andreas Huyssen’s oft-cited analysis, in After the Great Divide (1986), of Flaubert’s statement that “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Huyssen deconstructs that claim, emphasizing the distance that the masculine writer places between himself and “woman (Madame Bovary) [who] is positioned as reader of inferior literature – subjective, emotional and passive – while man (Flaubert) emerges as writer of genuine, authentic literature – objective, ironic, and in control of his aesthetic means.” Flaubert becomes emblematic for Huyssen of male modernists in general, as a man who “genders mass culture and the masses as feminine” yet retains exclusively for himself the sphere of high culture, “the privileged realm of male activities” (Huyssen 46–47). But Christopher Morley is both like and unlike the masculine subjects of Huyssen’s scrutiny. He does indeed use Kitty Foyle as the representative of mass culture and, especially, of the world of mass-circulation magazines. She is more than merely an avid consumer of the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, which she flags as among the formative influences of her youth, “the papers most often seen in our house” (Morley 54). She becomes, in effect, the Philadelphia-born personification of the enterprising spirit of Cyrus Curtis’s Philadelphiabased publishing empire, which was responsible for both those periodicals.4 As she proves through her successful career in the advertising and sales of a cosmetics line created by her French émigré employer, her deepest instincts are for marketing, and her delight in devising new ways of selling once again places her beyond conventional gender bounds: “I guess I’m not the natural female, because when I see a shop window I don’t think what I can buy out of it, but what can I put into it for someone else to buy” (Morley 314). Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is only a parasitical consumer. Kitty Foyle is also an enthusiastic producer: an artist in the sphere of business, along with the teller and retailer of her own story. Morley’s narrative neither patronizes her nor scorns her verbal and visual inventiveness in the service of capitalism. Far from signifying the inferiority of the mass market, Kitty Foyle is its alluring and winning face – an incarnate argument for appreciating common speech, common sentiments, and common tastes as vital and as admirable, indeed as the true expressions of the modern.
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Morley’s novel celebrates its protagonist’s seemingly limitless capacity to absorb, access, and appropriate disparate cultural influences and experiences, as well as to transform these into commodities that can appeal to all social classes: That was the year I got the idea for the swish beauty kit shaped like a little hatbox, the kind the dress models always carry. I used to see them trotting into the photograph studio at Tuscan Court carrying their dunnage in hatboxes. ... They were all over Park Avenue next season. (Morley 313) At the same time, Morley’s narrative, written wholly in her voice, champions both the comic energy and the aesthetic charm that characterizes her language, with its colloquialisms, clichés, grammatical lapses, self-conscious vulgarities, echoes of the foreign and of the racialized dialects that surround her, and sudden flights into approximations of poetical lyricism. Like an issue of one of the magazines of the Curtis syndicate, Kitty’s first-person narration moves rapidly across a variety of registers and effects, holding together its heterodox genres and elements with a house style meant to engage the greatest number of readers possible, while filling its discourse with images and with sentiments designed to sell to that audience. In the case of this novel, however, the commodity ultimately being sold is no “swish beauty kit,” but an idea: the notion of Christopher Morley as arbiter and interpreter of modernity and as an artist with his finger on the American pulse. The resemblance of the narrator’s discourse to the snappy and up-todate sound of American magazine copy of the 1920s and ’30s was no accident, for Christopher Morley had been employed in crafting just such prose for several decades, both as writer and editor, before beginning Kitty Foyle. Born in 1890 in Haverford, Pennsylvania, he counted among his early jobs a stint from 1917 to 1918 editing readers’ submissions to the Ladies’ Home Journal, followed by work as a newspaperman for the Curtis Company’s Philadelphia Public Ledger and then for New York’s Evening Post, until he became one of the four founders in New York of the Saturday Review of Literature in the mid-1920s and continued there as a contributing editor through the early 1940s. His involvement with the Saturday Evening Post, during its golden era of editorship by George Horace Lorimer, was small, consisting only of a few contributions. But his sympathy with its ambition to reach out to every household by offering content that “entertained” was great, even if he could not endorse the magazine’s refusal to stray beyond the “safe” or, as Jan Cohn puts it, to accept
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“situations, characters, or ideas that undermined nineteenth-century American values and sensibilities,” particularly when it came to depictions of sexuality in fiction (Cohn 188–189). Christopher Morley’s own aesthetic ambitions leaned toward acts of cultural translation that would enable so-called lowbrow and middlebrow audiences alike to encounter what high culture offered the elite, including confrontations with new ideas. To Morley, the role of comedy in such an endeavor was crucial, for the comic mode had the potential to cut down to size what might otherwise register as pretentious. His difficulties, however, in accomplishing this goal stung him, at least until the enormous and widespread success of Kitty Foyle. Indeed, these earlier frustrations boiled over onto the pages of his 1939 novel, resulting in the inclusion of an episode quite irrelevant to his protagonist’s progress, yet painfully relevant to his own career. As Kitty Foyle tells it, this self-contained anecdote involves a speaking engagement by a male lecturer at a women’s club located in one of the solidly middle-class suburbs of Philadelphia: A funny little thing happened. Somebody at the Library gave me a ticket to go to a lecture at a club over in Germantown. There were a lot of dames hopped up with culture and good grammar and nowhere to park it between 3 and 5 p.m. I could tell by the way they chirped and rustled they were all set for a big shot of high-pressure literature. What shocked them was, the lecturer talked like he might to a crowd of men, as though they had a sense of humor. First thing they knew, they were laughing, and they hated it. They hadn’t come there to laugh, and it threw them off balance. I heard them afterward saying it was an insult to a club like that to come there and just be jocular. What they didn’t get, and it made me so sore I wanted to shout out about it, in between laughs that man was in savage earnest, he was really trying to tell them things. He was feeding them laughs to shake up their opinions. I guess it’s risky to tell people anything except the way they count on hearing it. (Morley 213–214) The narrator begins this episode by declaring herself in sympathy with the impulse toward self-improvement and cultural uplift that animates the women’s clubs: she is there, she confesses, because “Something ... put in me a yen for education” ( Morley 213). Yet Morley quickly distinguishes Kitty’s responses from those of other “dames.” Her incarnation of the modern perspective emerges through triangulation, for she mediates between the excessive refinement that is gendered here as feminine and
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the “savage” urge to instruct through humor and provocation that is gendered here as masculine – between private and public ends. Kitty’s first-person narrative also aligns her with the tactics and purposes of the masculine public lecturer, for she, too, deploys comedy to satirize the occasion, “feeding” the novel’s audience “laughs,” while delivering a didactic message to readers about the correct way to receive the very text she is writing. She functions as a surrogate not merely for the lecturer – as the feminine apologist for his techniques and aims – but for her creator, Christopher Morley. In doing so, she enables Morley to rewrite as successes his previous failures, except through his work for mass-market magazines, to “really tell ... things” to a mass audience, across the boundaries of gender. If Kitty Foyle was Morley’s “foil” in terms of gender – the breakthrough figure who gave him access not only to male, but to female audiences as well – she was also his “foil” in terms of class. Like those immensely popular creations “archy” and “mehitabel,” the talking, typing cockroach and alley cat invented for the New York Evening Sun by Morley’s friend and contemporary, the newspaper columnist Don Marquis (1878–1937), Kitty represented an idealized vision of the white ethnic working-classes and lower-middle classes as vital, down-to-earth, and unburdened with inhibitions, whether in their conversation or their sexual conduct. Inhabiting Kitty’s voice was, for Morley, an exercise in class impersonation that liberated him, at least temporarily, from the genteel, a quality he identified not with the modern, but with anachronistic and dying (if sometimes attractive) modes. And Morley certainly had reason to seek such liberation. The son of parents who were both born in England, he grew up in an academic and Anglocentric environment, with a father who was a professor of mathematics and a brother who went on to become president of Haverford College. His own early life promised to lead him down a similar Ivy-covered path, for he followed his undergraduate degree (Phi Beta Kappa) with three years at New College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar (Kunitz and Haycraft 987). Why didn’t Morley devote himself to academic pursuits or to recreating the model of Oxbridge life in some American college town? In later years, he would say of himself, jokingly, that his “best loved private associations were with people devoid of conventional culture, such as booksellers, shipmasters, traveling salesmen, headwaiters, and occasional professors of English literature” (qtd. in Kunitz and Haycraft 987). Many of his closest associates, in truth, were neither rough-andtumble fellows nor those who lived in a rarefied and bookish world, but men – first in Philadelphia and later in New York – involved in the
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making of print culture for the masses: journalists, critics, columnists, editors, and publishers. Indeed, these close contacts began at home, for one of his two brothers became editor for the firm of Harcourt, Brace. Morley’s analysis was both tongue-and-cheek and disingenuous, when he wrote of himself (in the third person): “he had something to say and he often succeeded in saying it. Whether anybody noticed it did not bother him too much” (qtd. in Kunitz and Haycraft 987). On the contrary, his drive to achieve the widest possible circulation for his pronouncements led him, in his younger years, to work for some of the most influential mass-market periodicals of the early twentieth century and eventually, at the age of forty-nine, to write both about and as Kitty Foyle, the irresistibly plain-spoken, confidential urban creature who reaches out unapologetically to a mass audience. From childhood on, Kitty is literally at home in print. She embraces the forces of capitalism, creating a “Dream House” for her paper dolls: “You cut out, from the advertising pages of magazines, furniture and rugs and trimmings for each room in a luxurious imaginary home” (Morley 53). “The splendors of the Dream House,” she explains, “are limited only by your industry with scissors and your access to the right kind of magazines.” Hers, she acknowledges wryly, “had perhaps too much of a Curtis Publishing Company touch,” since the Ladies Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post were among the staples of her parents’ household (Morley 53–54).5 But as Kitty Foyle matures, capitalism is not the only thing that she embraces so ardently. What gave Morley’s novel such breakthrough commercial success was its use of elements from romance fiction, especially its story of the relationship between a poor woman and an aristocratic man whose family opposes his involvement with her. Kitty, the one-quarterIrish daughter of a “night foreman at the machine shop” (Morley 9), falls in love with Wynnewood Strafford VI, scion of one of the first families of Philadelphia’s Main Line. (Morley took the name, in fact, from train stops along the Main Line.6) It is an unequal match, but as Morley makes clear, the deficiencies and inadequacies are all on the side of the well-bred man, whose manners and language alike are often little more than pale imitations of British originals of an earlier day. Despite Wyn’s superior education and literary aspirations, it is Kitty, with her native instinct for business who, as his secretary, even proves to be the better artist: I believe shorthand and practise getting things down condensed might be good training in literature. I could see right away how Wyn’s sentences scrambled all over the place. ... Bless his heart, he
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used to say “It’s wonderful how much better it reads when it gets typed.” He had no notion how much editing had been done on it. (Morley 153) From the start, theirs is an affair set against a background of print. Their first contact comes about through Wyn’s efforts to compile a book on the subject of one-hundred years of Philadelphia Cricket, a project that tags him immediately as the embodiment of deracinated and fading Anglophilic traditions (Morley 27). Deeper involvement occurs at the close of the decade of the 1920s, when Wyn hires nineteen-year-old Kitty as his secretary for a new Philadelphia-based magazine that he dreams of founding, publishing, and editing – a periodical geared toward the “smart” set and meant to have, as Kitty describes it, “Plenty of wisecracking stuff about football, and hunting, and cricket, and the Orchestra, and famous food and drink, and little articles about picturesque history.” Kitty suppresses her misgivings about this venture, telling another White Collar Girl, a friend from the Midwest, “He thinks Philadelphia is a big enough town to support a sophisticated magazine of its own, something like the New Yorker, but written for the Philadelphia crowd. He says they’ll call it Philly and begin publishing about the beginning of November” (Morley 165). But Kitty’s friend, a girl of her own class who sells furniture in Chicago in Palmer’s department store, has no doubt it is a doomed enterprise. Like Kitty, she is one of several figures in this novel – all of them female – who possess an innate understanding of the modern, which is identified always with business sense and a grasp of market conditions. As she says, “I don’t think it’ll work. The New Yorker’s grand because it’s edited by a lot of boys who are both smart and ambitious. You haven’t got ’em like that here. If they’re really peppy they clear out” (Morley 165–166). Cyrus Curtis’s magazines may have been produced in Philadelphia, but their visions and their target audiences were national, rather than regional. So, too, Kitty Foyle arises from the cultural milieu of Greater Philadelphia, but her perspective moves outward from there – first to the American heartland as represented by the Norman Rockwell-esque town of Manitou, Illinois, where she is educated, and later to Manhattan, where she becomes what we would now call a cosmetics executive and an expert in advertising. But Wyn has no concern beyond the local. His venture into magazine publishing with Philly is a bet placed on the wrong horse, one that expires after a very short run. Shortly before the magazine’s quite spectacular failure in the wake of the Stock Market Crash, the ironically named “Wyn” and Kitty sleep
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together for the first time. Wyn’s seduction of her is a tellingly textual – more than a sexual – moment, set in the offices of Philly magazine. Kitty recounts the scene: “Kitty,” you said. ... “Kitty. ... ” I remember how you spaced it out. [ellipses in original] “We’ve put the magazine to bed, why don’t we go to bed ourselves.” I didn’t even know what you meant, at first. (Morley 172) Merging with Kitty – the personification of the vernacular, the dynamic, the mobile, and thus of the modern – is Wyn’s best hope, indeed his only hope, for escape from stasis and irrelevance. So, too, an embrace of hybridity, as Morley’s novel insists, is the only hope for Philadelphia’s Main Line genteel culture. The seemingly private sphere of reproduction reverberates in the public sphere, as Kitty becomes the vehicle for an argument that links cultural survival and eugenics: “Still and all, if I was a Family I’d like to knit some genes into it that wants to get somewhere” (Morley 306). Fatally, however, Wyn permits himself to be dragged backwards, into the moribund sphere of another sort of print world: the pages of the “Society News” column, which will announce his engagement and then marriage to a rather dim woman of his own class.7 Upon discovering this announcement, Kitty, now working and living in New York, aborts the fetus that Wyn does not know she is carrying. But it is the “Society News” column that really kills their unborn child. Her friend Molly, with her canny ability to read the world through the lens of business, proves correct in unmasking the insidious political agenda of this older sort of genteel journalism: “Of course every one of those social announcements is really an advertisement for the Status Quo” (Morley 336–337). Unwilling to cast his lot with Kitty and thus to rise to the challenge of the new, “Wyn” proves a loser; so too does the city in which he remains. Kitty tells us, “Philadelphia hasn’t much idea what’s going on nowadays, all she wants is not to be bothered or embarrassed ... . Wyn said one time, she had her spell of modernism and revolution back in the 18th century and got through with it once and for always” (Morley 24). Wyn’s loss, Philadelphia’s loss, will be the gain of Chicago and New York, as future sites of invention. Let me pull back from Morley’s text for my conclusion. Historians of fin-de- siècle British print have been aided immensely by engagement with late-Victorian fiction. From novels such as George Gissing’s
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New Grub Street (1891), Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), Frederick Rolfe’s Nicholas Crabbe (ca. 1905; published posthumously, 1958), and “George Paston’s” (Emily Morse Symonds’s) A Writer of Books (1898) – as well as from magazine fiction by “New Women” such as Sarah Grand – they have learned much about the relationship between notions of modernity and market conditions, about the ways in which print was created and consumed, and about the ideologies and agendas that it enabled and enforced. So, too, scholars who study the late-nineteenth century American publishing industry in general and journalism in particular have put the fiction of William Dean Howells and Henry James to similar use, with great success. I have been suggesting implicitly that we not stop there. As we open up this larger field of “Transatlantic Print Culture, from 1880 to 1940,” and thus turn our gaze to the early-twentieth century, what documents will we require, in order to map and to theorize it more fully? Certainly, we need access to the full record of its material existence – all those magazine runs, all those advertisements. But our work might benefit from something else as well: attention to the literary, to the fictional, and to the recovery of once popular, now neglected texts, as sources of information. If we are willing to pay attention, novels such as Christopher Morley’s Kitty Foyle have much to tell us about the culture of print culture, as it looked to those shaping, working, and living inside it. Without their assistance as our Muses, our guides to the modern, I fear that, as Sarah Grand might have said, “nothing uncommonly great can be done” (Grand 287).
Notes 1. For more about this social and sexual type in American culture of the period, see Betty Israel, Bachelor Girl: The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. 2. See Ruth Brandon, The New Women and the Old Men: Love, Sex and the Woman Question. London: Secker and Warburg, 1990. 3. In an email of 22 April 2007 to the author, Steven Rothman, has pointed out that Christopher Morley’s nickname was “Kit.” It was perhaps a small step to move from that name to the creation of the literary identity of “Kitty.” I would like to thank Steven Rothman, who is at work on the authorized biography of Christopher Morley, for his assistance and encouragement throughout my writing of this essay. 4. For an account of how overlapping but different gender markets, as well as a common class-linked base, were established for those two periodicals, see Helen Damon-Moore, Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in the
Christopher Morley’s Kitty Foyle 145 Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, 1880–1910. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. 5. For a study of the production and the politics of the latter magazine during the period when Kitty Foyle’s fictional family would have been reading it, see John Tebbel, George Horace Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948. 6. Information supplied to the author by Steven Rothman, Morley’s authorized biographer, in an email of 22 April 2007. 7. In Philadelphia during the first third of the twentieth century, there was, according to John Henry Hepp, IV., a strong link between conservative social values and the “genteel metropolitan press,” both of which eventually went into decline. See John Henry Hepp, IV. The Middle-Class City: Transforming Space and Time in Philadelphia, 1876–1926. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. 130–131.
Works cited Cohn, Jan. Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989. Dixon, Ella Hepworth. The Story of a Modern Woman. London: William Heinemann, 1894. Gissing, George. New Grub Street. 1891. Rpt. New York: Penguin, 1980. Grand, Sarah [Frances Clarke McFall]. “The Undefinable: A Fantasia.” Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siècle. Ed. Elaine Showalter. London: Virago, 1993. 262–287. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. 46–47. Kunitz, Stanley J. and Howard Haycraft. Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1942. 986–988. Morley, Christopher. Kitty Foyle. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1939. Paston, George [Emily Morse Symonds]. A Writer of Books. London: Chapman and Hall, 1898. Rolfe, Frederick (Baron Corvo). Nicholas Crabbe, or The One and the Many: A Romance. London: Chatto and Windus, 1958.
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Part III Modernism on/in Print Media, Print Media in/on Modernism
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9 Journalism and Modernism, Continued: The Case of W.T. Stead Laurel Brake
It is notable that in modernist circles today “Victorian,” “journalism,” and “advertising” often retain, singly or in combination, the pejorative usage to which they were subject by the modernist press itself a century ago. “Victorian” commonly signals, audibly or tacitly, the alternative to modernism, with both terms momentarily reduced to unitary identities, while a press based on patronage is often favorably contrasted with the blight of advertising. Journalism is routinely opposed to Literature, and material in modernist journals is seamlessly termed literature, without noting its status as journalism. My study of the journalism conceived, edited, and published by W.T. Stead, a Victorian whose mid-life projects between 1890 and 1910 coincide with the emergence of modernism, will scrutinise the border or overlap of modernism and journalism. Observing components of modernism’s build-up of cultural capital on both sides of the border, it will compare the blueprint of high modernism’s claim to distinction with one mode of Stead’s journalism, his annuals. What emerges is the exclusiveness of modernism’s preferred focus on the “literary” and artistic, its disinclination to acknowledge formal experiments in journalism as well as in literature and art, and its advocacy of an economy associated with privilege, involving vilification of advertisements and embrace of patronage. My piece is divided into two parts – a section on Stead, modernism, and the nineteenth- century British setting of his debates about the “new journalism” with Matthew Arnold, followed by an exploration of how Stead’s annuals map onto modernism as it is currently configured. I argue not only that Stead superseded Arnold’s retro notion of a literary, old journalism termed “criticism,” but that 149
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Stead led in creating an alternative to criticism, a new journalism that overlaps with modernist projects. I will draw primarily on three of Stead’s annuals, one of the “political romances”: 2 + 2 = 4 (1893), and two social commentaries: Satan’s Invisible World Displayed, or Despairing Democracy: a Study of Greater New York (1898); and Mr Carnegie’s Conundrum: or £40,000,000. What Shall I Do with It? (1900). Stead was a British journalist, editor, proprietor and publisher who was born in 1849 and drowned on the Titanic in 1912. In his career (1871–1912), his theories of journalism, his journalism practice, and some of his titles participate in the early modernist press. Like many modernists’ view of the world and the market, Stead’s perspective was avowedly international, but like theirs its standpoint is complex and problematic (North, Reading 1922, 109). From Stead’s entry into the profession in 1871, as editor of a north of England regional daily, the Northern Echo, to his advocacy of “the Americanization of the World” in annuals published at the turn of the century, Stead’s career was “transatlantic,” marked by a prodigious interest in American culture and its press, as well as in Russia and journalism on the continent. His imagination often turned to what he called “the Republic,” onto which he projected his social plans for a Civic Church in Chicago and his professional models for the future of journalism. He invoked American authors and initiated dialogues in writing with Carnegie, Hearst, and various candidates for election in New York City. He may thus be viewed as an early modernist, in conversation with an “America” defined by its journalism. Stead routinely looked to other locations as well. He took a special interest in Russia, and later in southern Africa and the international peace movement. His view was variously imperialist, reflecting the lineaments of Empire in which he and other modernists in Britain were steeped. While Stead was highly critical of British policy and never a narrow nationalist, his deepest political loyalties ultimately related to English ethnicity. The loyalties, as he expressed them, were to the “English-speaking peoples” whether at home or in diaspora, and imagined in ways that unapologetically took part in racialist discourses that he mapped onto Imperial maps over time. This may be seen in his own journalism and quoted remarks on international affairs, in his early establishment of international editions of the Review of Reviews in North America and Australia, in his inclusion of continental titles in his annual Indexes to the periodicals 1890–1902, and in his repeated and stated interest in journalism styles and developments on the continent and in the United States.
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While Stead’s annuals were formally innovative, their rhetoric of change was journalistic rather than literary, and their content was grounded in news rather than the arts. In many respects these projects iterate problems and solutions identified by modernist editors, contributors, and critics, including the economic survival of publishers, editors, and titles. Outside and opposed to the mainstream press as he was from 1890, Stead is an unmistakeable denizen of modernity, and arguably a constituent of what have been called the “new modernisms”.1 Congruent with Ann Ardis’s plan in Modernism and Cultural Conflict to examine “other aesthetic and political agendas [that] were erased or discredited” by the “gigantic shadows” of modernism at the turn of the twentieth century (7, 4), and to examine “the edges, margins and limitations of modernism” as it “intersects with/borrows from/reacts to other cultural enterprises” (7), this article examines modernism’s border with a type of journalism not previously examined in modernist studies. While Rainey’s focus on tensions between modernism and commodification is also suggestive (“modernism ... is a strategy whereby the work of art invites and solicits its own commodification”), his contention that modernism “is temporarily exempted from the exigencies of immediate consumption”(3), is problematic, in light of work which demonstrates the unmistakeable implication of modernist journals in “immediate consumption” (Edward Bishop; Mark Morrisson; and Rainey’s own account of publication of “The Wasteland” in chapter 3). While the implication of modernism with magazines has long been evident, research on the modernist press has intensified notably in the last decade. The Modernist Journals Project (1996 ff) in the United States, the Modernist Magazine Project (2006 ff) in the United Kingdom, and monographs such as Morrisson’s illuminating study of little magazines (2002) are perhaps its most visible manifestations. By 2005 Robert Scholes could assume “We are all aware ... of the importance of magazines to the emergence of literary modernism – especially those magazines we call ‘little’ ” (Scholes). However, from the perspective of media history, the objects of study of much of this research are from a single category of serial publication, the magazine, or rather from the high culture, little and literary magazines, even though Andreas Huyssen observed over 20 years ago that “mass culture has always been the hidden subtext of the modernist project” (qtd. in Ardis 5). Here I want to augment study of the modernist magazine in relation to mass culture by locating it in the larger reaches of journalism, as an alternative to
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prevailing terms of analysis such as twentieth-century magazines, modernism itself and Literature. If these terms are naturalized in scholarly discourse on early twentieth-century literature and culture, this contrasts with nineteenth-century studies, where the focus of research on serials is seldom on their Victorian identity. Nor is the press normally studied as neatly or exclusively “literary.” In a century characterized by the serial miscellany rather than the specialist journal, nineteenth-century literary and other specialist discourses tend to appear interspersed among other kinds of content such as science, history, philosophy and news that literary scholars increasingly acknowledge as relevant (con)text. Given this structure of nineteenthcentury serials, scholarship about them is similarly multi-disciplinary, and unlikely to be exclusively or even preponderantly from scholars of literature and art history.
Stead, Arnold, and modernism In 1887, a year before his death, Matthew Arnold upbraided what he memorably termed “the new journalism” in a report on Parliament, “Up to Easter,” now otherwise forgotten. Arnold’s analysis was a tacit if highly public confrontation with Stead and the evening daily the Pall Mall Gazette, which Stead had been co-editing since 1880, becoming sole editor in 1883.2 Into the Pall Mall Gazette Stead and editors before him, since its inception in 1865, had steadily introduced novel elements to journalism aimed at the increase of circulation, which were retrospectively perceived as characteristic of the new journalism: these included headlines, sometimes two or three deep; personal journalism including interviews with celebrities, or ordinary people; gossip; investigative reporting where the press “makes” the news; sensationalist writing calculated to lure readers into regular purchases over time; puzzles and quizzes; and the introduction of visual materials such as illustrations, maps, and diagrams. Typographical layout and design more generally also changed, with an emphasis on lighter, more readable pages; paragraphs and articles were shorter, and separated from each other by more leading and ornaments. Denouncing the new journalism as “feather-brained” in the midst of an argument against Home Rule in Ireland, Arnold associated it with the worst elements of the “democracy,” that is, the new readers and potential electors of Ireland whom, Arnold alleged, were likewise
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“feather-brained.” Arnold might be said to be a seasoned journalist attacking the current politics of the Pall Mall Gazette, and invoking as an alternative a roseate version of his own past practice as a journalist. However, a further implication of Arnold’s hostility to the alleged “new journalism” of the Pall Mall Gazette is to separate Stead from the values of the middle-class establishment, with which Arnold identifies, and to imply Stead’s alliance with the worst, most dangerous sector of the mass market. Part of Arnold’s ire may indeed be involved with issues of social class in other than predictable ways: there is a mismatch between Stead’s interest in these years in luring the popular reader, “the democracy,” through populist verbal and visual formats, and the Pall Mall Gazette, a London daily identified with the upmarket, “clubland” readership of the smart West End. Stead’s introduction of these new journalism elements into this discursive space was antipathetic to the expectations of his extant, educated and wealthy readers and contributors, such as Arnold, and to his proprietor. While circulation rose sporadically, Stead did not normally target or reach the mass market in the Pall Mall Gazette. 3 It is not altogether surprising then that a loss of circulation followed the initial surge in 1885 that was stimulated by Stead’s sensationalist campaign “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” about child and “white” slavery; this eventually cost him his job in 1890 when, at the age of 40, his connections with daily journalism were severed for the rest of his life. While this paper will focus on his imaginative alternatives to daily journalism, Stead’s formal innovations in the Pall Mall Gazette were already formidable, and they relate to my general question: what is the relation of Stead’s alternative visions of the press, which involve innovations of visual and material aesthetics, of language, and of content as well as a shift of readership, to the innovations of modernism or modernisms? In the 1880s and in the case of the Pall Mall Gazette, Stead is seeking to broaden the readership to constitute a more democratic portion of the public sphere than that defined by its “clubland” readership, which included the government of the day, without specifying from what niches of the democracy they are to be drawn. Mark Hampton, in Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950, links this claim for the press as representative with the notion of the press as “the fourth estate,” itself not only “reflecting” the view of the broad electorate but at best constituting it in content and form. Hampton also distinguishes this
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model of the function of the press – which he situates in the period after 1880 – from its alleged alliance with universal education that characterized press theory before 1850. In other words, Hampton identifies Stead’s new journalism with a break from an earlier nineteenth-century “educational” model, in which the press was seen as contributing to the gradual development of a more informed populace. Still, in 1886, Stead’s notion of representation by the press of a broader, democratic base seems to envision a wider but still unitary public sphere rather than the “counter-public sphere” commonly associated with the readership of the modernist press (Morrison 11). However, in Stead’s Annuals and in his theoretical writing on journalism after 1890, he is aiming at an identifiable niche market that differs from the mainstream newspaper reading public. It includes women, for example, as well as a certain kind of male reader who is respectable, aspiring, interested in active citizenship as well as information, and uninterested in gambling or horse racing, two elements of “new journalism” absent from Stead’s publications. The opening up of the market to women is often associated with new journalism more generally, and disparagingly, as “feminizing”/weakening what had been a male sphere. However, through new journalism, the normalized readership categories of gender – male (the default), male/boy, female/ girl, and family, began to break down or conflate in relation to the press, for newspapers as well as periodicals. For example, women readers of dailies, traditionally aimed at male readers, might be wooed by editors as middle-class women began to join the labour force; to vote in local elections, and/or to enjoy better access to secondary and higher education. In addition to addressing potential women readers, Stead targeted the professional development of women journalists and the employment and training of women secretaries/administrators. As a vociferous and instrumental advocate of women in his writing and in the employment policies of his publications, Stead helped pave the way for professional female modernist writers, editors, and journalists such as Harriet Monroe, Margaret Anderson, and Jane Heap, and British women such as Virginia Woolf and Rebecca West who reviewed regularly for the press (Marek). Stead’s readership after 1890 was also delimited by his predisposal to address readers with the capacity for responsible and active citizenship. More than once Stead defines his vision of journalism across the classes, by planning simultaneous editions at different levels of the market, by price and literacy: a 2d daily, a ha’penny daily, and a free weekly paper (Mr Carnegie’s Conundrum, 152–155) for readers of different economic
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classes. Mark Hampton, coming from a perspective of mass newspaper readership, is derisory about Stead’s elitist readership base for the Pall Mall Gazette, and its failure to reach a mass market (115). However, once Stead left the daily market, his sales of the Review of Reviews were even lower, and twice he could not glean enough pre-paying subscribers to launch his Daily Paper.4 So, while Stead’s readership base for the Pall Mall Gazette and the Review of Reviews was larger than that of the modernist little magazines, it was smaller and quite distinct from that of mass-market dailies, as Hampton’s retrospective account makes clear. Stead’s journalism after 1890, in so far as it is directed to the potentially active citizen rather than to the ordinary consumer, may be counted as attempting to create a counter-public sphere. Stead’s optimism, his faith in the power of art – in this case the art of journalism – to reach, represent, construct, and matter to a self-defining, relatively small readership is, in any case, a project he shared with editors of the modernist press. If Stead’s discourses and fashioning of his Daily Paper experiments in 1893 and 1904 indicate clearly both his practical measures to construct an alternative public sphere and his steely refusal to conform to the desires of the mass market (no betting, theatre, fiction, or quack medicines in either of his papers), the annuals are no less outspoken. In their address and the theory they purvey, the annuals show that they are aimed at a segment of the popular market, not the mass market which, in the 1900 Annual, he refers to as “the heathen who live at our doors” and the “ignorant” readers of his free weekly paper (Mr Carnegie’s Conundrum, 155). In 1898 he avers his opposition to the ethos of capitalism as a sound basis for the press clearly: The habit of running newspapers as if they were mere commercial dividend-earning undertakings has so largely discounted the influence of the press as to lead many shrewd observers to declare that they would just as soon have the newspapers against them as in their favour ... “Mere newspaper talk” – nothing can be more contemptuous than that. (Satan’s Invisible World, 186–187) In 1900 his fear of the mass media of the future is technically a specter: The conclusion which many people have arrived at is that, if newspapers are to be left entirely to the unchecked operation of the law of supply and demand and open competition in the market, we have
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nothing to look forward to except the gradual evolution of a paper resembling a contents bill with gigantic “scare headings” across the page, and with everything printed in capitals. Newspapers will play to the gallery. (Stead, Mr Carnegie’s Conundrum, 148)
Accompanying this critique of layout and typography that foster sensationalism in 1900 is Stead’s plan to displace commercial news agencies by an exclusive agency of like-minded proprietors, sharing their news and telegrams only with each other (Mr Carnegie’s Conundrum, 157). By this time, it is unsurprising to see that Stead’s rejection of the commercial mass market includes his approach to advertising, which akin to that of the modernists is cautious, albeit from a different perspective. Where many modernist editors and proprietors preferred the economics of the feudal system of patronage to the vulgarity of trade, Stead’s reservations were moral and ethical, stemming from his non-Conformist convictions. He was extremely selective about the advertising he would accept for his publications after 1890, and in his theorization of the Daily Papers, he advocated the power of the editor to edit adverts, and even to write them. In Stead’s elaborate model of an alternative press and his disdain for advertisements that mirror popular taste may be seen his reaction against the mainstream press, a position that would increasingly characterize modernist writers and editors. Examples from the annuals’ material culture bear out Stead’s rejection of the mass market model, and in 1900, he outlines his alternative to papers’ reliance on the advertising/high circulation nexus to survive: the endowment of newspapers, which interestingly might be theorised as a latter-day form of patronage (Mr Carnegie’s Conundrum, 146–158). This is an idea that Stead attributes characteristically to a journalistic source by name,5 who argues that just as libraries and universities are endowed, so newspapers are ripe for this source of benevolent investment. Stead’s identification of journalism with established cultural institutions such as libraries and universities which had benefited from endowments may appear risible or normalized now, depending on one’s estimate of journalism, but this was a bold idea in the late nineteenth century in Britain. It is a measure of Stead’s concept of journalism at its best, as a dignified and defensible medium suited to occupy a place, along with English literature and modern languages, in the cultural pantheon that modernism was fashioning at the time.
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There is no question that Stead’s “faith” in journalism and optimism about it have their roots in his congregational upbringing, but his sphere by the 1890s is civic society, not religious communities, his text is the newspaper – “the Library of every day,” as he calls it in Mr Carnegie’s Conundrum (146) – rather than the Bible, and his Moses figures are editors, not priests: “This evangelistic missionary work can only be undertaken successfully by a newspaper” he writes in 1900 (Mr Carnegie’s Conundrum). In 1893 in 2 + 2 = 4 he is unselfconsciously open about the religious origin of his optimism about the possibility of social change: It is atheism to say that nothing can be done, and that swindling is business and that all business is swindling. A generation that has stamped out bribery and corruption at elections by a single Act of Parliament is not going to sit down helplessly before the non possumus of the Stock Exchange. (6) The volume goes on to carry an advert for a secular charity, “The Liberator Relief Fund,” for victims of the failed Building Society that had spurred the Annual; the meaning of the sum that comprises its title (2 + 2 = 4) is explained as an economic lesson – “the increase of power which arose from the combining of small numbers” (78) – which is secular rather than religious. Stead’s primary motive, as will become clear, also chimes with modernist editors to a point: his annuals are not commercial, and they promote enlightenment, but through representation of the people; moreover they desire to circulate and promote not only the messages but also the art of journalism. In their publication and dissemination of their journalism, both Stead and modernist editors are believers. Michael Levenson puts this memorably: “Shining luminously from so much of the work is the happiness of concentrated purpose and the pride of the cultural labourer, believing fully in the artistic task at hand ... these early century modernists are distinguished precisely by the earnestness of their resolve” (5). This is an important and underlying area of disagreement between Arnold and Stead. For Stead journalism is a modern form of art, whereas for Arnold, art is defined in terms of high culture based on impersonal classical values. For Arnold, art resides in the essay rather than the article, in criticism and literature rather than journalism, and in the content of the journal rather than the journal itself. The differences between Arnold and Stead have
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been interpreted retrospectively as part of the separation between literature and journalism, art and discourse for the masses, as represented in a partisan mode by George Gissing in New Grub Street (1891). But this division is not endorsed by Stead, who proposes a third way which, among other things, re-integrates literature and journalism in an ingenious if impractical solution,6 and by implication indicates some of the ways in which that oxymoron, the quality press, might be re-born in a new idiom.
Stead, Morrisson, and modernism In interpreting the debate between Arnold and Stead about new journalism, I am suggesting that although Arnold is associated with high culture, the gentleman amateur, disinterestedness, literature, elitism, and antipathy to the demos, and Stead with personal journalism, sensationalism, professionalism, the lower middle-classes, and enterprise, this does not result necessarily in a comfortable fit of Arnold with modernism or exclude Stead from its territory. Modernist magazines can be, as Morrisson and others argue, linked to aspects of the wider contemporary press; I want to turn Morrisson’s proposition around, and argue that Stead’s journalism after 1890 is, like that of modernist journals, seeking and constructing alternatives to the mainstream, popular press, which it is also selectively appropriating. Stead is also indebted to the little magazines in the design and generic innovation of some of his one-off annuals; in their technical experiments, verbal and visual; their internationalism; their definitions of an alternative public sphere; and the faith and seriousness with which they viewed their project. The character of Stead’s annuals make us ask whether historical accounts of modernism err by associating it entirely with high culture forms such as literature and the visual arts, or whether a popular art such as journalism as practiced by Stead may be located within the broader parameters of the new modernisms. While Stead’s maverick practices may safely be allocated to “the new journalism,” they seem too idiosyncratic to accommodate the strident professionalism and commercial outlook of other new journalists, such as George Newnes, whose Empire included Tit-Bits. Placing Stead’s journalism among the parameters of modernist media, I am suggesting, allows us to see both of them afresh.
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Let’s look again at the modernist elements of Stead’s practice, in his versions of new journalism. With respect to its experiments in format, how do they relate to formal innovations in modernism, which seeks to define itself against new journalism? Stead’s annuals are an interesting case in point. As soon as Stead left daily journalism and began his life as editor of the monthly Review of Reviews, he was forced to find additional means of income (Baylen). Between 1891 and 1907 he published annuals attached to the Review of Reviews, timed for the Christmas market. While linked to the monthly in name, to deploy it as a sales base, the annuals were sold independently of the magazine as well. Stead transformed this largely literary form of Christmas gift book into what may be termed a “journalism book,” a descriptor that comprises both Stead’s early fiction annuals or “political romances” and the later social treatises on contemporary and topical questions, which resemble the Penguin Specials of the 1960s and 1970s graphically (see Figure 9.1). The simplicity and boldness of one annual cover signal its alliance with modernity in its iconic image of a sum on a slate. Through lithography, it makes a clear break with the complex textures of nineteenth-century woodcuts and steel engravings. The annuals’ contents too are innovative. At first, Stead adhered to the annual’s literary character, with its original writing and illustration. However, he significantly transformed the genre of the fiction, by himself writing a type of novella closely related to topical issues treated in the news, which he called “political romance” (Satan’s Invisible World, 5). Stead’s customized fiction proposed a new genre for leisure reading in annual form. Somewhere between a tract and a novel, the volumes also included copious illustrations that were innovative; derived from the new investigative journalism, they included diagrams, maps, political cartoons, and tables as well as the more usual line drawings, engravings, and photographs that normally illustrated novels. An early example of this sort of “political romance” was the 1892 “Christmas story of the World’s Fair” called From the Old World to the New. Stead’s habit of thinking internationally and transatlantically, his entrepreneurial genius, and the cross-genre element of this novella are all evident in an admiring review, in the American edition of the Review of Reviews in January 1893, in which the writer treats the text as a romance and as a guidebook for prospective British visitors to the Fair.7 Such a multi-purpose function is typical of nineteenth-century
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Figure 9.1
Cover, “2+2=4,” Review of Reviews Annual 1893.
Note: Color lithography.
travel writing, but it is also typical of Stead’s commercial eye as a publisher/author. The reviewer derives four claims about Stead from the Christmas story: his ideological “faith” in the Fair, his “art” of writing, his enterprise, and his intellectual weight. They call attention to qualities appropriate to a journalist/editor/proprietor – his capacity to write well
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and his entrepreneurial appetite for a story. However, his secular “faith” in the story and the interestedness it implies reveal Stead’s distance from the neutrality and evenhandedness increasingly associated with best practice in the new profession of journalism. Stead’s advocacy of “personal” journalism was famous; in this he is similar to the founders and editors of the little magazines of the day, such as the Yellow Book and Savoy, each of which staked out its ideology in pre-publication manifestos and leaks. Of his faith in the United States, the reviewer writes in the superlative: “no other man in Europe has looked forward to the World’s Fair at Chicago with such unbounded faith in it, such eager expectancy regarding its possibilities, and such profound belief in the influence it is destined to exert upon the world – particularly the English-speaking regions” (Anon.). She goes on to praise the enterprise and style that accompany Stead’s enthusiastic endorsement of the fair, a faith that is all the more surprising given that “Mr. Stead has never crossed the Atlantic” and has “so drawn upon the knowledge” from interviews – as the “best interviewer [in] the modern profession of journalism” – “to construct a symmetrical conception of Chicago” (Anon.). Stead’s choice of the city as a symbolic space of modernity, evident in this 1892 story, was to become a reiterated motif in his subsequent writing about New York (Satan’s Invisible World, 17). The combination of his development of the discourse of the city and his dystopian critique of its vice, poverty, and tenements link him not only to Booth of the Salvation Army but to Joyce’s Dublin, soon to appear in the first of its guises, and eventually to the London of “The Waste Land.” While appreciating the lavish illustrations of the World’s Fair volume, which make it suspiciously popular, the reviewer insists that its treatment of “many of the most recent phases of thought and the most stirring topics of the day” do “full justice to Mr Stead’s reputation as an aggressive thinker and an audacious and brilliant journalistic expositor” (Anon.). So, Stead brings his intellect and politics effectively to the romance form, in this reviewer’s opinion. Stead returns to the romance novella in 1904, now calling it “journalistic fiction” as befits a newspaper. This time around, he insists that “journalistic fiction” is a basic and necessary ingredient of his Daily Paper, and the only form of fiction (suitably journalized) he will allow.8 Stead’s reluctant turn to fiction, dictated by its popularity with his readers, may be viewed as the inverse of the interaction of modernist writers and artists – Rebecca West, Joyce, Eliot and Woolf,
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Beardsley and George Braque – with the phenomenon of the popular press, in their equivocal citation and representation of journalism in modernist texts. Stead’s efforts to accommodate fiction to journalism are also notable in their timing: when others such as Henry James and Gissing view fiction and journalism as irrevocably separating, he is trying to join them up. In his later annuals, Stead ostensibly abandoned fiction for factual treatises that were, however, written dramatically, including many features found in prose fiction, such as characterization, plot, and rhetorical writing, as seen for example, in Mr. Carnegie’s Conundrum in 1900. Stead again illustrates these factual annuals with a conflation of types of illustration introduced into the press by the new journalism, such as diagrams, maps, and photographs as well as engravings. Like the early annuals, the later journalism books are unmistakably generic experiments, not least in their hybridity, a form of heterogeneity that Eliot’s fragments and pastiche, Joyce’s juxtaposition of a day in Dublin with Odysseus’ journey across the classical world, and Braque’s and Picasso’s collages share. The diversity of the ingredients of all of the annuals reveal their common plan: they are centered on a governing topical event either drawn from the daily news, or an event constructed by Stead on the basis of a news item, such as Andrew Carnegie’s plan to spend the family fortune. Secondly, they all have an element of romance or personal journalism, so that both Hearst in 1898 and Carnegie in 1900 are subjects of dramatized biography. Lastly, they are all visibly linked with the subject of journalism, either instrumentally as in 1893 with Stead’s first launch of a Daily Paper, where the “political romance” includes a whole section on the launch of the title, and a subscription form is tipped into the Annual, or in terms of critique of the contemporary press, as in 1898 where Pulitzer’s World and Hearst’s New York Journal are subject to robust review, or where Stead’s models of the press of the future are expounded. If journalism is an art for Stead, journalists are among the artists of the modern world. Carnegie’s genius is proven by Stead through a representation of the young man as a telegraphic boy “always ... at home with the newspaper men” (16), while Hearst, “the young Californian millionaire-editor” has “such a chance of combining all the elements that make for righteousness and progress in the city”; in 1900 Stead is looking for “a journalistic captain”, or “a journalistic Moses”; Hearst has the potential to “make his newspaper the organising, vivifying, rallying centre for all the best forces and influences of the city ... if New York is
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to be raised to the position of being the ideal city of the New World” (Satan’s Invisible World, 187). Here Stead’s projection of his great hopes for journalism onto the United States is evident. Chapters in these annuals reflect Stead’s tendency to focus on the United States: In “The British American United States” for example, “African” Cecil Rhodes with his advocacy of “Empire and Conquest” is juxtaposed unfavorably with Carnegie the naturalized “American,” who is associated by Stead with “Peace and Arbitration”; Stead looks forward to a time when British and American citizenship are interchangeable (107–118), and he returns to the United States as a subject in 1902, devoting an entire annual to The Americanization of the World. The experiment of the republic and the rapid pace of development, especially in journalism at the turn of the century, are in concert with Stead’s restless optimism and his hopes for journalism. For Stead, the idea of “America” was neither a lie nor a disappointment (Huntington). Unlike British little magazines of the 1890s such as the Yellow Book and the Savoy, Stead’s annuals did not root their critique of the mainstream press in the aesthetic/decadent tradition. Rather, the annuals’ combination of formal innovation, literature, and politics derives from two sources of popular media: the annual and journalism. Among the little magazines, one similar hybrid appeared a decade later in 1911, in the Masses, but a plethora of earlier, analogous, British titles appeared in the 1890s, including the New Age and the Woman’s Signal, all of which combined politics and technical innovation. How do Stead’s annuals compare with the Masses as analysed by Morrisson? Proprietor editors conducted both publications; both were critical of the commercial press, while desiring wide circulation. Both resorted to dramatic and sometimes sensational writing, though other aspects of their styles differed: the Masses’ critique was ludic, visual, and satiric, while that of the Annuals was earnest, hortatory, and preponderantly verbal. Both treated commerce and commercial copy with caution, reserving the right to select advertising; both favored ads that functioned as ideological interventions that chimed with their journal’s mind-set. Both supported the new woman, but included racist discourse. Both involved information and political networks, though Stead’s tended to be familial and international, if less collective and communal than those of the Masses. Notably, the annuals and other titles with the Review of Reviews imprint tended to emphasize the editor and make little of their contributors, unlike the Masses. For Stead, a strong, visible
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editor was crucial. Calling editors “Captain[s],” he didn’t cavil at invoking naval protocols of command. If Stead’s annuals are unmistakable confections, products for an international Christmas market, they are superior products, innovative examples of good popular literature – imaginative, informed, intellectual, crafted, experimental, and original. In their formal restlessness, their niche market, their faith in their medium, their transatlantic, European, and Imperial parameters, and their short run, they parallel the early Modernist press in its resistance to the mainstream at the turn of the twentieth century, and might be counted among the new modernisms.
Notes 1. The “new modernisms” is marked by critical attention to work by AfricanAmericans, women, and feminists, as well as works, editors, and authors connected with pulp formats. See North, Dialect, Marek, and Ashley respectively. 2. For more on Stead, the Pall Mall Gazette, and the new journalism, see Brake, “The Old Journalism,” Dawson, Eckley, Schults and Wiener. 3. At 1d (a penny), the price of the daily Pall Mall Gazette under Stead (1883– 1889) normally ruled out daily purchase by individual working class readers, as did its range of coverage. By comparison, its fellow London evening paper, the Echo, sold at a ha’pence, half the price of the PMG. 4. According to Eckley (33) citing Scott, the average circulation of the daily Pall Mall Gazette remained between 20,000 to 30,000 per day compared to the Daily Telegraph’s 250,000. The circulation of the monthly Review of Reviews climbed from an initial 80,000 copies to 200,000 worldwide as reported by Stead in 1891 in ‘After Two Years’, his report to his readers in the journal itself. For Stead’s ‘Daily Paper’ projects, see Brake, “Who.” 5. Stead cites the journalist Henry E Rood in the North American Review, 1890, as a literary critic or historian might cite a philosopher or famous author such as J. S. Mill (Mr Carnegie’s Conundrum, 148). 6. Stead names this ‘political romance’ and ‘journalistic fiction’ in various oxymoronic combinations. See above p. 150. 7. That he intended it to sell in both Britain and the United States is shown by an 18-page appendix on “How to get to Chicago.” 8. His plans were thwarted by his failure to find staff to write copy based on daily injections of current news.
Works cited Anon. “W.T. Stead’s Novel on the Chicago Exhibition.” American Review of Reviews (January 1893). http://www.attackingthedevil.co.uk/reviews/Chicago. php; accessed 8 April 2007.
The Case of W.T. Stead 165 Ardis, Ann. Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Arnold, Matthew. “Up to Easter.” Nineteenth Century xxi (May 1887): 629–43. Ashley, Michael. The Age of the Storytellers. British Popular Fiction Magazines 1880–1950. London and New Castle, DE: British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2006. Baylen, J.O. “W.T. Stead as Publisher and Editor of the Review of Reviews.” Victorian Periodicals Review 12 (1979) 70–84. Bishop, Edward. “Re:Covering Modernism – Format and Function in the Little Magazines.” Modernist Writers and the Marketplace. Eds. Ian Willison, Warwick Gould, and Warren Chernaik. Houndmillls: Macmillan, 1996. 287–319. Brake, Laurel. “The Old Journalism and the New: Forms of Cultural Production in London in the 1880s”, in Wiener 1–24. ——. “Who is ‘We?’: The ‘Daily Paper’ Projects and the Journalism Manifestos of W.T. Stead.” Marketing the Author. Ed. Marysa Demoor. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004, 54–72. Dawson, Gowan. “The Review of Reviews and the New Journalism in Late-Victorian Britain.” Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical. Eds. Geoffrey Cantor, G. Dawson, G. Gooday, Richard Noakes, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jonathan Topham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Eckley, Grace. Maiden Tribute. A Life of W.T. Stead. Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2007. Hampton, Mark. Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Levenson, Michael. ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Marek, Jayne E. Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History, Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. Morrisson, Mark S. The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-century Literature. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. ——. Reading 1922: a Return to the Scene of the Modern. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Popular Culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Scholes, Robert. “Modernism in the Magazines.” Lecture at Exhibition: “New Art in The New Age: What was Modern? 1910–1914.” Providence, RI: Brown University, 2005. http://orage.modcult.brown.edu:16080/exhibit/index.html; accessed 8 June 2008. Schults, Raymond L. Crusader in Babylon: W T Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972. Scott, John W Robertson. The Life and Death of a Newspaper: the Story of the Pall Mall Gazette. London: Methuen, 1952. Stead, W.T. “From the Old World to the New.” Review of Reviews. London, 1892. ——. “2 + 2 = 4.” Review of Reviews. London, 1893.
166 Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940 ——. “Satan’s Invisible World Displayed, or Despairing Democracy: a Study of Greater New York.” Review of Reviews. London, 1898. Stead, W.T. “Mr Carnegie’s Conundrum: or £40,000,000. What Shall I Do With It?” Review of Reviews. London, 1900. ——. “Americanization of the World or The Trend of the Twentieth Century.” Review of Reviews. London, 1902. Wiener, Joel, ed. Papers for the Millions: the New Journalism in Britain, 1850s to 1914. Westport, CO: Greenwood, 1985.
10 Journalism, Modernity, and the Globe-Trotting Girl Reporter Jean Marie Lutes
In the last years of her life, celebrated foreign correspondent Martha Gellhorn – whose war reporting career spanned more than fifty years – described herself to a friend as “permanently dislocated” (qtd. in Moorehead 9). It was an apt self-description for a woman who, at age 81, traveled without a hotel reservation to cover the U.S. invasion of Panama. But the term has wider applications as well. This essay looks back at some of Gellhorn’s predecessors to chart a fast-moving target, the figure of the American newspaperwoman abroad at the turn of the twentieth century. The New Woman as foreign journalist embodied many of the possibilities of her age: new avenues for female wage-earners, as well as new technologies and new models of time, space, and motion – models that seemed even newer when they involved women, whose increased mobility outside domestic space was itself an innovation. My exploration of the cultural significance of the modern newspaperwoman’s dislocations turns first to her most famed fictional avatar, Henrietta Stackpole of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. I then move to newspaper accounts of the real-life reporter Nellie Bly, whose globe-circling stunt inspired world-wide publicity and a children’s board game, before circling back to James’s fictional female reporter, whose author changed her character in response to changing times. Taken together, these print-culture remnants from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century illustrate not just changing times, but changes in conceptions of time. In both fiction and fact, the newspaperwoman abroad represents the unsettling prospect of being “permanently dislocated” from one’s birthplace, one’s gender identity, even one’s present moment. Anchored in her body but zipping through time and space, this reporter becomes less a cultural figure than a conduit, an ongoing experiment in translation and transmission. 167
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Circular motion Henrietta Stackpole, Isabel Archer’s intrepid friend in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), causes a ripple of disquiet in the novel even before she steps off the train and into the presence of James’s characters. An American journalist whose letters for the New York Interviewer are “universally quoted,” Henrietta has come to Europe to report on her travels abroad, and her hard-charging work ethic stands out among the meditative parlor-dwellers of James’s novel. “Here I am, my lovely friend,” she writes to Isabel upon her arrival in England. I managed to get off at last. I decided only the night before I left New York – the Interviewer having come round to my figure. I put a few things into a bag, like a veteran journalist, and came down to the steamer in a street-car. Where are you and where can we meet? ... Do appoint a meeting as quickly as you can.1 The letter stresses Henrietta’s professional identity and her concern with time, speed, and mobility. A single wage-earner, she is determined to be efficient, and she carries her brisk attitude from New York Harbor to the serene lawn of Gardencourt, James’s Old World setting for Isabel’s New World dreams. This essay began as an attempt to consider the impact of a singularly modern image of the woman writer at the turn of the century: that of the female foreign correspondent. As I pursued this image, James’s characterization of Henrietta Stackpole demanded special attention, in part because he made two of her – the original, oddly charming Henrietta of 1881 and the revised, far less sympathetic Henrietta, who appeared in the New York edition of Portrait in 1908.2 Although James had some real-life models in 1881 for his original lady-correspondent, by 1908 he had many more. The number of women in journalism in the United States grew substantially in the years immediately after Portrait’s publication, and in the interval between the two editions, several female foreign correspondents achieved celebrity status writing for daily newspapers. The changes in Henrietta Stackpole’s character, then, register shifts in perceptions of U.S. newspaperwomen abroad.3 Those shifts proved significant to James’s novelistic vision, at least in part because he had invited an ironic comparison between his own writerly profession and Henrietta’s, by giving her a name derived from his own and by having this “literary lady,” as Ralph calls her, express a desire “to see as much as possible of the inner life” (78).
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Initially, I imagined Henrietta as a central figure around which my analysis of the globe-trotting newspaperwoman would revolve; I would rely on her to exert a centripetal force, pulling toward the center. I found, however, that Henrietta often seemed to be operating in the opposite way, as a centrifugal force, pulling outward, away from the center. She kept moving me away from my focal point, directing my attention away from the significance of women correspondents abroad and toward modernity itself, especially toward the changing perceptions of time and space that newspaperwomen helped to promote. I invoke the Newtonian model of centripetal and centrifugal forces not to label Henrietta unmanageable, but rather to call attention to motion – to the preoccupation with movement through space and time, to the repeated crossings of personal and national boundaries – that are central to her character and to the mode of journalism with which she is associated.4 I’m not the only one who has had trouble in handling Henrietta. James himself labels her a contrary force. In the preface to the 1908 edition, James apologizes at length for her, describing her as more weed than person: “I may well be asked, I acknowledge, why ... I have suffered Henrietta (of whom we have indubitably too much) so officiously, so strangely, so almost inexplicably, to pervade” (13). Henrietta is often discussed in terms that echo James’s dismissive commentary, as a character who somehow got away from him, like an invasive foreign species. The uncontrollable excess that James associates with Henrietta reflects, at least in part, the explosive possibilities of transnational publicity, which promised to spread American democracy abroad but also launched an unpredictable exchange of ideas and judgments – about women, progress, reform, and the United States itself, at a moment when the nation was emerging as an imperial power. James’s difficulties with Henrietta bear reluctant witness to the women who made careers out of such unpredictable exchanges at the turn of the century. Moreover, her frequent outbursts about American superiority, which seem intended to sound amusingly provincial in 1881, probably struck readers’ ears differently in 1908, after the United States had gone to war with Cuba, seized the Philippines from Spain, and annexed Hawaii. Given Henrietta’s insistence that the American way is always best, her role as a professional translator of foreign customs for readers back home positions her not only as a conduit for culture, but also as a potential contributor to political imperialism. Her pursuit of what one critic has called “glocal color” can be understood as a disguised quest for homogeneity; she reinforces American hegemony even as she expresses interest in foreign ways (Pryse 77).5
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The U.S. foreign correspondent corps did not come into its own until World War I, and relatively few American journalists, male or female, reported from overseas in the nineteenth century. As the century drew to a close, however, Americans received a substantial quantity of foreign news, especially during the Spanish-American war (1898–1899), the Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902), the Philippine insurrection against U.S. occupation (1899–1901), the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900), and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Much of this news was reprinted from British newspapers, but some of it was written by U.S. correspondents (Emery xi–xii). A few bold women – all the more visible because of their minority status – joined flamboyant male reporters such as Richard Harding Davis, Jack London, and James Creelman in pursuing careers abroad. Distinguished by their mobility and intrepidity, these women included Elizabeth Banks, who became known for her “Campaigns of Curiosity” in London in the 1890s; Ida B. Wells, whose first antilynching pamphlet, Southern Horrors, was published in London as U.S. Atrocities and whose British lecture tour in 1893 catapulted her into prominence at home and abroad; Anna Benjamin, who covered the Spanish-American war and went on to post dispatches from the Philippines, Japan, China, and Russia; short-story writer Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton), who reported on Montreal’s Chinatown in the 1890s and spent six months in Kingston, Jamaica, writing human-interest stories for a daily newspaper; even famous muckraker Ida Tarbell, author of The History of Standard Oil (1904), who went to Paris as an unknown in 1891, soaked up salon culture, stayed three years, and produced the manuscript of what would become her first published book, a biography of French revolutionary heroine Madame Roland, all the while paying her expenses by writing articles about French culture and interviewing celebrities such as Emile Zola and Louis Pasteur for newspapers in the United States. As this partial list indicates, women reporters abroad did not follow a single path. They took up different topics and approached them in different ways. However, female correspondents faced similar professional conditions. Although most journalists abroad occasionally put their personal experiences to public use, the women who traveled outside the United States at the turn of the century were more likely than men to find that their very presence abroad was deemed newsworthy.6 Women were also less likely to be assigned to cover traditional foreign news such as diplomatic negotiations or acts of war. When the Pittsburgh Dispatch published Nellie Bly’s series on life in
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Mexico in 1886, a typical headline highlighted first Bly’s presence in Mexico, then her success in documenting Mexicans’ private lives: “Nellie in Mexico: The Odd and Strange Sights and Scenes Within Cozy Mexican Homes.” The article detailed one family’s mealtime and told readers it was rare for a Mexican to admit an outsider to “the secrecy of his house” (Bly 9).7 When Elizabeth Banks interviewed Li Hung Chang, a leading Chinese minister, in 1896, the New York Tribune published a story about her accomplishment headlined “She is an American: The Wee Mite of a Woman Who Interviewed Li Hung Chang: A sample of true United States courage is this little Miss Banks who just now hails from London town” (5). The jingoistic article opens by observing how predictable it is that a woman of achievement like Banks would be an American. Whether these reporters were advocating American superiority or exposing American hypocrisy, their comings and goings forged a highly visible model of the woman writer in a publicity machine that exceeded any single nation’s borders. Henry James did not endorse this model, and Henrietta Stackpole’s evolving characterization in Portrait of a Lady manifests his discomfort. Attending closely to James’s intensifying expressions of antipathy toward newspaperwomen abroad, however, reveals more than a predictable animus against publicity-seeking females. The hard-edged Henrietta of 1908 also reflects her creator’s recoil from the newly standardized, increasingly abstract notions of space and time associated with foreign correspondence. Circular motion and standardized time are fundamental to the story of the best-known woman reporter in America, the same Nellie Bly who shared her impressions of Mexico with Pittsburgh Dispatch readers in 1886. Just a few years after that trip, Bly attained media stardom in 1890 when she circumnavigated the globe in 72 days in a journey sponsored by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Pitting herself against the fictional record set by Phileas Fogg, the hero of Jules Verne’s Around the World In Eighty Days (1873), Bly took a small handbag, a change of undergarments, and no chaperone on her quest. Adding to the interest of her trip was some unexpected competition: a rival periodical sent another woman reporter, Elizabeth Bisland, around the world in the opposite direction to try to beat Bly. (Bly won.)8 A highlight of Bly’s trip was her meeting with Jules Verne in France; the two apparently exchanged pleasantries through an interpreter for about 30 minutes before Bly sped away to catch her next train. In part because the World couldn’t publish any of Bly’s reports until after she returned and had time to write them, the newspaper promotions
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inspired by her journey were as important to the enterprise as anything Bly herself wrote. They vividly reflect the themes central to her trip: time, measured in regular intervals, and dizzyingly fast movement through space, imagined in circular fashion, so that every place encountered acquires significance only in relation to the point it occupies on Bly’s circle of the globe. To keep up reader interest, the World came up with a Nellie Bly Guessing Match: Readers had to guess, down to the second, how long it would take Bly to circle the globe. The grand prize was a trip to Europe and £50 spending money. The World also published a board game of Bly’s trip, which was reproduced in a full-color version by the McLoughlin Brothers in 1890. In the top left corner of the illustrated game board, Bly, clad in her plaid traveling outfit and holding her small bag, faces a path of brightly colored squares that spirals toward the board’s center. Each square has a captioned picture of a place (Suez Canal, China Sea, Sierra Mountains), an incident (Collision, Indian Mail Accident, Stuck on Sand Bar), or a weather report (Fair Sailing, Stormy, Clear). Two, three, or four players can play the game by throwing dice and moving their pieces accordingly. The first person to reach the center wins. A white-bearded Jules Verne appears on the board’s upper right corner, along with a shadowy fleeing figure captioned “Good By Phileas!” The path begins with a “Start” square labeled “1st Day” and spirals toward each player’s goal: the center of the board, New York City, where “First Part of 73rd Day” trumpets “All Records Broken” and a train with a car labeled “Nellie Bly” sits on a railroad track that curves past the Statue of Liberty toward New York City, where Bly’s trip began and ended. The game restructures geography and melds narrative modes with playful abandon. It places New York at the world’s center and it celebrates an American’s factual triumph over a French author’s fictional British hero, imagining Nellie Bly vanquishing a literary character (“Good By Phileas!”) through judicious use of modern transportation.9 Indeed, Bly’s identity becomes one with her means of transit. All the vehicles pictured on the game board are labeled with her name: a steamship captioned “Speeding Across the Atlantic” flies a Nellie Bly flag; a train captioned “Over a Mile a Minute” pulls a car labeled Nellie Bly. (Railroad officials did, in fact, name a train car after Bly on the final leg of her journey.) Subsequent versions of the board game appear to have been made at least into the 1920s; telephone poles spring up behind Bly in one adaptation, and an airplane appears in another. In each one, the new technologies are sucked into the colorful spiral of her journey, integrated after the fact into the U.S. triumph over the world.
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Making the world flat: the girl reporter as global phenomenon Bly’s reporting shrunk the world to the size of a game board that would fit easily under a Christmas tree. Her travelog was long on details – train schedules, steamer mishaps, bad food – and short on cultural depth. The Topeka, Kansas, Daily Capital quoted Bly as saying, “There is really not much for Americans to see in foreign lands. We’ve got the best of everything here; we lack in nothing; and when you go over there you must be robbed, you get nothing fit to eat and you see nothing that America cannot improve upon wonderfully” (qtd in Kroeger 168). Coverage of Bly’s trip emphasized not just her pluck, but also her essential consistency, the way that her identity, her Americanness, was untouched by her contact with other cultures. When she came through Pittsburgh, her hometown, on the final leg of her journey, the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette covered the event on the front page in an article titled “Home Again/Nellie Bly Reaches Her Native City This Morning”: When the Chicago train bearing Nellie Bly steamed into Union station early this morning there was a big crowd of people in waiting to welcome the fair and enterprising product of this great and growing city. The newspaper fraternity in particular was well represented, all being friends of Nellie’s. Although she had succeeded in skimming around the globe in the fastest time on record, the achievement had not affected her the least bit. She was the same bright-eyed girl who used to hustle on local in this city. (“Home” 1) Plenty of women had traveled the world before Bly. None, however, had sought or achieved her level of celebrity; the image of Bly in her traveling outfit was so popular that women copied the uniform for more than decade (Scatamacchia 512). And no one had done it with speed as the explicit goal. Bly’s already proven ability “to hustle on local” – in other words, to move quickly to get breaking local news for the city desk – translated nicely to far-distant locales. Nicholas Ruddick reads Bly’s “distinctive modernity” as an indication of “the American age” that was dawning, an age that featured “an unprecedented spatiotemporal dispensation, features of which include accelerating change, the compression of events, and the apparent shrinking of distance” (2). Bly’s trip centered on motion: where she was mattered far less than how fast she was moving. Her story was about pacing, noting the intervals of
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time through which she moved, the obstacles that slowed her down, and the machines that sped her along. My interest in this model of circumnavigation – which Bly did not invent, but rather copied from Jules Verne’s even-tempered English gentleman – has been influenced by Wai Chee Dimock’s suggestion that literary critics need a changed understanding of time in order to develop a transnational critical vision. Dimock writes that American literature is best “seen as a crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying ... These are input channels, kinship networks, routes of transit, and forms of attachment – connective tissues binding America to the rest of the world” (3). One powerful way to explore those connections, Dimock suggests, is to reclaim literature as the home of non-standard time, allowing for the possibility of a less regularized, less abstract, more idiosyncratic experience of time and space. Dimock counters theorists such as Benedict Anderson and Anthony Giddens, who posit standardized time, made possible by the mechanical clock, the wireless telegraph, and the rise of the nation-state, as the distinguishing mark of modernity. Standardized time, introduced in the United Kingdom in the 1840s to establish regular train schedules, came to most of the rest of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In 1883, the U.S. government, pressed by railroad companies to coordinate train departure times across the continent, introduced four time zones, and by the second decade of the twentieth century, an international system for determining and transmitting standardized time around the globe was in place. According to Giddens, standardized time creates systems that bind time and space across continents, so that temporal and spatial conditions in one locale can affect conditions in a far-distant place. Once this is possible, Giddens suggests, “disembedding mechanisms” arise, so that modern social relations are lifted from local contexts and gain new meaning and structure as they move through time and space to other places (19–21). Dimock, however, insists that the disembedding process is not as comprehensive or complete as this theory suggests. Even under modern systems, she contends, human beings do not “always experience time as a measuring tape, uniform and abstract, untouched by locality, and untouched by the differential weight of the past” (2). Rather, she suggests that time, especially as represented in literature, is far from abstract. It may extend in irregular ways, flouting national borders and dispensing with fixed intervals. These experiences of time have “irregular duration and extension, some extending for thousands of years or thousands of
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miles, each occasioned by a different tie and varying with that tie, and each loosening up the chronology and geography of the nation” (4). Dimock argues, then, for a new concept of “deep time” to encourage readers to recognize how the imaginative play of a literary work may evoke histories and continents far distant from the conditions of its own origin. Set against Dimock’s concept of “deep time,” Bly’s journey stands out as particularly invested in the abstract, schematized conception of time that Giddens identifies with modernity. Newspapers, of course, are not generally understood as the home of non-standard time, and Dimock’s concept articulates a vision that Bly’s newspaper stunt could never provide, despite its origins in a literary narrative. Rather, Bly’s venture can be seen as an extended, spectacularly successful exercise in abstraction and dislocation, all made possible by standardized time and modern transportation. Her around-the world trip offers little encouragement, then, to the scholar who hopes to apprehend the circulation of identities and ideas through and across national borders. “Deep time” has no place in Bly’s stunt; her travelog details multiple channels, networks, and routes of transit, but as she rockets around the world, her path is insulated, practically cauterized. Instead of Dimock’s criss-crossing pathways, we find a single unified movement, serenely focused on its national origin, which constitutes both its beginning and its ending. Bly’s model of time – as typified by this game – is flat as a board, and just about as deep.
Making the world wait: back to Henrietta Henry James, of course, did not celebrate compression and speed at the expense of understanding. For an illustration of his commitment to “deep time,” we need look no further than Isabel Archer’s lyrical contemplation of Rome’s ancient landscape and architecture in Portrait of a Lady. In this moving passage, which describes the sadly grown-up Isabel’s “haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot,” we find one of James’s most compelling refutations of modernity’s standardization of time and space. Isabel has already loosened her geographic ties to the United States by living in Europe. Now, in her sorrow and isolation, she enters a new timeline altogether: she “rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright” and “felt the touch of a vanished world” (430–431). This is not to say, however, that James cultivated simple-minded nostalgia for ancient ways. On the contrary, he reckoned seriously with rapid changes that were occurring in print culture and, more broadly,
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in the public sphere.10 Critics have long noted that the inspiration for The Reverberator, James’s most extended fictional treatment of newspaper publicity, came from a young woman who wrote for a newspaper. Mary Marcy McClellan, daughter of the Civil War general George B. McClellan, caused a scandal when she published a gossipy letter in the New York World (14 November 1886) about a family with whom she was staying in Venice. James wrote that he was “struck” not just by the letter itself, but also by “the strange typicality of the whole thing” (Notebooks 40–41, emphasis original). His oxymoron – “the strange typicality” – calls attention to the oddity of being startled by something that has, in fact, become common. He went on to say, “one can’t say a pretty and ‘nice’ American girl wouldn’t do such a thing, simply because there was a Miss McC. who did it.” In the familiar passage that follows, James asserts that novelists must find a way to depict “the invasion, the impudence and shamelessness, of the newspaper and the interviewer, the devouring publicity of life” (Notebooks 40–41, emphasis original). James thus identifies “the devouring publicity of life” with the unexpected familiarity of the pretty and nice American girl abroad who writes for a newspaper back home. James’s intensifying awareness of the female correspondent’s strange typicality casts new light on his alterations to Henrietta’s character in 1908. In both editions, Isabel views Henrietta as “proof that a woman might suffice to herself and be happy” (55). In the 1908 edition, however, Henrietta is made so unpleasant that her appeal to Isabel, or to anyone else, becomes increasingly baffling. When the narrator refers to Henrietta and Bantling, the British gentleman she befriends with startling speed, in 1881, they are “harmless confederates.” In 1908, the same passage calls them “groping celibates” instead, employing a phrase that leaves little room for these two consenting adults to be anything other than sexual failures or sexual hypocrites (189). It’s not surprising that the new Henrietta’s sexuality has become perverse. Likened to a series of inanimate objects, the revised Henrietta is so thoroughly a product of her profession that her body becomes a thing, all surfaces and hard edges, with moving parts. In the 1881 version, when Henrietta gets off the train, she appears “decidedly pretty” and self-contained. “She was very well dressed, in fresh, dovecoloured draperies, and Ralph saw at a glance that she was scrupulously, fastidiously neat. From top to toe she carried not an ink-stain.” Her primness is stain-proof. In the revision, Henrietta is not so much tidy as frighteningly mass-produced. When she gets off the train in 1908, she is no longer pretty, only “fair,” and she is no longer “well dressed”: “She
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rustled, she shimmered, in fresh, dove-coloured draperies, and Ralph saw at a glance that she was as crisp and new and comprehensive as a first issue before the folding. From top to toe she had probably no misprint” (80). Now she embodies her profession: she has become a newspaper. Moreover, everything about her appears to be in motion. She rustles and shimmers; she is even about to be folded. Throughout the revised novel, her physical person is figured as machine-like, even metallic. James’s revisions to Henrietta’s gaze are among the most striking. Her eyes, originally described as “polished buttons,” become in the revised version “buttons that might have fixed the elastic loops of some tense receptacle” (80). Later, when Ralph wrongly assumes that Henrietta is trying to trap him into a marriage proposal, Henrietta fixes him with a serious gaze. In 1881, her “brilliant eyes expanded still further,” but in 1908, Henrietta hardly has eyes at all: her “ocular surfaces unwinkingly caught the sun” (86). The original Henrietta’s bright gaze expressed curiosity and honesty; the new Henrietta’s gaze indicates no character traits at all. Recast as a shiny surface that catches the sun’s glare, it is just a glinting effect. In 1881, when Henrietta sees Isabel in Rome after her marriage, the narrator observes, “her eye had lost none of its serenity.” In 1908, we are told instead that, “Her remarkably open eyes, lighted like great glazed railway-stations, had put up no shutters” (406). This description links Henrietta to rapid transit and artificial illumination, casting her as a brightly lit station stop, a building through which travelers move. By imagining Henrietta’s eyes as railway-stations, James also reminds us of her investment in standardized time. Henrietta’s relationship to time comes up again in the novel’s ending. She gets the last word in both editions, but James’s treatment of those words changes considerably. In 1881, after Henrietta delivers the news to the desolate Caspar Goodwood that Isabel has left for Rome, the novel closes with a suggestive exchange between the two: “Look here, Mr. Goodwood,” she said; “just you wait!” On which he looked up at her. The novel closes with Henrietta – who is always on her way somewhere else, who has been in a hurry from the moment we met her – instructing Goodwood to be still, to be patient, to wait. She probably has nothing to say that will help him; she never has before. Yet, by advising him to change his attitude toward time, Henrietta intimates that she may have
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changed her own. (She has, after all, already given up her country: she plans to marry Bantling and move to London permanently.) Has this brisk newspaperwoman, moved by Isabel’s circumstances, felt the touch of a vanished world? James refuses to foreclose the possibility. In 1908, however, he does just that when he elaborates on the final sentence fragment at Henrietta’s expense: “Look here, Mr. Goodwood,” she said; “just you wait!” On which he looked up at her – but only to guess, from her face, with a revulsion, that she simply meant he was young. She stood shining at him with that cheap comfort, and it added, on the spot, thirty years to his life. She walked him away with her, however, as if she had given him now the key to patience. (490) This Henrietta, as superficial and rushed as ever, is also arrogant and controlling. Her attempt at consolation ages Goodwood by decades. Rather than unlocking a door into a new time and space – remember that we have left Isabel standing with her hand on the latch to Gardencourt, about to follow a “very straight path” (490) back to the deep companionship of Roman time – this Henrietta offers a key to patience that appears suspiciously mass-produced. She shines with “cheap comfort.” She is false, mechanical. No wonder her eyes look glazed. In her groundbreaking theoretical study of time as a positive phenomenon and the body’s relation to time, Elizabeth Grosz imagines a different sort of key, not to patience, but to the future. It becomes possible to invent the future and to create change, Grosz suggests, only when we dissociate ourselves from the dominant forces of the present and see the present time itself as unstable and insecure: “Only if the present presents itself as fractured, cracked by the interventions of the past and the promise of the future, can the new be invented, welcomed, and affirmed” (261). With this perspective, we can read Isabel’s lightning-bolt kiss from Caspar Goodwood as the precipitating event that enables her to invent a new future. We can even speculate that when Goodwood looks up after the 1881 Henrietta tells him to wait, he discovers that she is cracking the present open, rather than securing him within it. In the decades that followed the first publication of Portrait, James apparently decided that his little journalist joke – his playful comparison of his own expatriate authorship with that of a young American newspaperwoman abroad – was no longer funny. As he withdrew from the association, however, he
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left us with a remarkable reflection on modernity, print culture, bodies, and time.
Notes 1. James, The Portrait of a Lady, Norton Critical Edition, 78. This edition includes James’s 1908 revision and an appendix with the original 1881 edition. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text. 2. The revisions to Henrietta are among thousands of changes James made. See Matthiessen and Baym. 3. I have argued elsewhere, in a larger study of reporter-heroines in fiction, that Henrietta’s evolution reflects the changing position of newspaperwomen within the United States. See Lutes, chapter 4, esp. 94–101 and 113–117. 4. Also relevant here is Northrop Frye’s well-known categorizing of fictional texts as “centripetal,” in which the reader’s focus is directed inward and absorbed in the world of the text, and nonfictional texts as “centrifugal,” in which the reader’s focus is directed outward, toward people and events outside the text (73–74). I am less interested in distinguishing between fiction and nonfiction narratives than in studying productive crossings of the two. Henrietta’s centrifugal tendencies, however, mark her liminal status in my own essay: I read her as a fictional character who evolves, through James’s revisions, in response to conditions outside the novel in which she appears. 5. For a helpful account of the phenomenon of “glocalization” and a critique of the concept of the global “modern,” see Pryse. 6. Women remain a significant minority among foreign correspondents. At the end of the twentieth century, about a quarter of the U.S. correspondents stationed abroad were female (Hohenberg 311). 7. Many of Bly’s reports from Mexico were headlined “Nellie In Mexico.” See, among others, the Pittsburgh Dispatch 7 March 1886, 14 March 1886, 4 April 1886, 18 April 1886, 25 April 1886, and 9 May 1886. 8. For more on Bisland’s competing narrative and her more slow-paced, genteel-magazine model of reporting, see Roggenkamp, “Dignified Sensationalism.” 9. For an analysis of Bly’s stunt as a competition between discourses of fact and fiction, see Roggenkamp, Narrating the News. 10. On James and publicity, see Salmon, Robertson, Bell, Margolis, Jacobson, and Strychacz.
Works cited Baym, Nina. “Revision and Thematic Change in The Portrait of a Lady.” The Portrait of a Lady. Ed. Robert D. Bamberg. New York: Norton, 1995. 620–634. Bell, Ian F.A. Henry James and the Past. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Bly, Nellie. “Nellie in Mexico: The Odd and Strange Sights and Scenes Within Cozy Mexican Homes.” Pittsburgh Dispatch (28 February 1886): 9.
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Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Emery, Michael C. On the Front Lines: Following America’s Foreign Correspondents Across the Twentieth Century. Washington, DC: American University Press, 1995. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004. Hohenberg, John. Foreign Correspondence: The Great Reporters and Their Times. 2nd ed. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995. “Home Again/Nellie Bly Reaches Her Native City This Morning.” Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette (25 January 1890): 1. Jacobson, Marcia. Henry James and the Mass Market. Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1983. James, Henry. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. ——. The Portrait of a Lady. Ed. Robert D. Bamberg. London: Norton, 1995. Kroeger, Brooke. Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist. New York: Random House, 1994. Lutes, Jean Marie. Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880–1930. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006. Margolis, Anne Throne. Henry James and the Problem of Audience. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985. Matthiessen, F.O. “The Painter’s Sponge and the Varnish Bottle.” 577–596. The Portrait of a Lady. Ed. Robert D. Bamberg. New York: Norton, 1995. Moorehead, Caroline. Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2003. Pryse, Marjorie. “Literary Regionalism and Global Capital: Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women Writers.” Tulsa Studies In Women’s Literature 23(1) (Spring 2004): 65–89. Robertson, Michael. Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Roggenkamp, Karen. “Dignified Sensationalism: Cosmopolitanism, Elizabeth Bisland, and Trips Around the World.” American Periodicals 17(1) (2007): 26–40. ——. Narrating the News: New Journalism and Literary Genre in Late NineteenthCentury American Newspapers and Fiction. Kent and London: Kent State University Press, 2005. Ruddick, Nicholas. “Nellie Bly, Jules Verne, and the World on the Threshold of the American Age.” Canadian Review of American Studies 29(1) (1999): 1–11. Salmon, Richard. Henry James and the Culture of Publicity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Scatamacchia, Cristina. “From the Grand Tour to the Tour Du Monde: Nellie Bly and the Metamorphosis of Women’s Travels at the End of the Nineteenth Century.” America and the Mediterranean. Ed. Massimo Bacigalupo and Pierangela Castagneto. Proceedings of the Sixteenth Biennial International Conference, 2003. 507–513.
The Globe-Trotting Girl Reporter 181 “She Is An American: The Wee Mite of a Woman Who Interviewed Li Hung Chang.” New York Tribune (15 October 1896): 5. Strychacz, Thomas. Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Verne, Jules. Around the World in Eighty Days. New York: Penguin, 2004.
11 The Fine Art of Cheap Print: Turn-of-the-Century American Little Magazines Kirsten MacLeod
Western College Magazine: The literary garden is being overrun with rag-weeds in the form of miniature magazines ... [a] bilious outburst of disordered sentiment in the form of red and yellow colored pamphlets ... Their tone is melancholy, and their typical stories are vague, inconsistent, bombastic ravings. (“Bubble and Squeak,” December 1896, 295) Between 1894 and 1903 a barrage of inexpensive, artistically designed periodicals – over 250 in number, with such quirky titles as the Dilettante, Miss Blue Stocking, M’lle New York, the Clack Book, the Enfant Terrible, the Bohemian, and Whim – flooded the newsstands of America (Figure 11.1). Mainly literary and belletristic periodicals, many of them modeled on British and French magazines, these publications were established by literary aspirants and amateurs from all parts of the country – from New York and Boston to Wausau, Wisconsin and Muskegon, Michigan. They came in a variety of formats, though usually they were small – chap-book or pamphlet size – and slim – containing between 16 and 48 pages. Their intention, according to one little magazine founder, was to “raise ... an intellectual revolt against the tyrannical, intolerant Smugocracy in letters,” to “create a more catholic taste in letters in America,” and to bring about a “modern era in English letters” (“Bubble and Squeak,” February 1897, 60). These magazines represented a new, as yet undefined genre, their novelty attested to by the numerous labels ascribed to them, including chap-books, fadazines, fadlets, mushroom magazines, ephemerals, bibelots, brownie magazines, periodical 182
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Figure 11.1
A selection of turn-of-the-century American little magazines.
bantlings, decadents, freak magazines, magazettes, greenery-yallery periodicals, dinkeys, toy magazines, and so on. As both high art and a popular fad, as an American phenomenon greatly indebted to British and continental European literature and the arts, as artistically produced yet ephemeral and irregular publications, and spanning the transition years between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these magazines challenge what Ann Ardis has called the “four great divides” that have structured modernist studies: the high/ low cultural divide; the British/American divide; the divide between “literature” and periodical press writing; and the divide between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (“Before the Great Divide[s]”). It is perhaps this uncategorizability that has led to their neglect, both in modernist studies and in scholarship on the periodical press of this era. Though extensively documented in bibliographies by Frederick Winthrop Faxon in 1897 and 1903, the turn-of-the-century American little magazines disappeared from view in subsequent bibliographic histories. David Moss’s 1932 bibliography of 376 little magazines, for example, includes only 41 turn-of-the-century titles. Fifteen years later, Frederick Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn Ulrich – whose history and bibliography of the little magazine is still regarded as the definitive account of the genre – deem only three turn-of-the-century titles worthy of “significant recognition”; the rest are dismissed as “not very inspiring” (7). A similar neglect has also characterized recent American periodical history, which has been largely concerned with mass-market magazines and their link
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to the rise of national advertising and the development of consumer culture.1 Happily, a bibliographical record of this neglected body of magazines is now included in the Modernist Journals Project’s digital database of English-language magazines of literary and artistic interest from 1890 to 1922. Why did Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich deem these magazines as “not very inspiring”? And what value might they have for the new modernist studies and its revisionist aims? I deliberately call these magazines “little magazines” rather than “bibelots” (the term used by Faxon and in the Modernist Journals Project), despite their exclusion from Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich. I do so because they meet Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich’s objective criteria for defining a little magazine in terms of their experimental form, non-commercial intent, revolt against the mainstream, and promotion of unknown writers and new artistic movements (2–6). The criteria these magazines fail to meet by Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich’s standards are merely subjective: namely, that a magazine ought to, “in the authors’ estimation, have had some importance in the history of modern literature or have published some work of merit” (emphasis added) (vii). This phrase might more properly read “modernist literature,” for Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich’s study is a classic example of the institutional sanctioning of high modernism’s anxious and territorial mapping of its field. In this context, these turn-of-thecentury magazines must be excluded because they could only undermine modernism’s efforts to achieve cultural legitimacy. After all, unlike the modernist little magazines which, as Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich claim, published “80% of our most important post-1912 critics, novelists, poets and storytellers” (1), these magazines published very few emerging American writers who were later to become canonical. They do not accord, therefore, with the triumphalist narrative of the modernist avant-garde’s “battle for a mature literature” (Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich 1).2 And yet, as Robert Scholes has recently argued in his defense of non-canonical modernism, “we need the full range of Modernist literature and art in order to understand Modernism” (31). Following Scholes’ lead, and taking on the recuperative and revisionist aims of the new modernist studies, I contend that these works are important in the history of modern literature for at least two reasons. First, this body of neglected magazines can contribute significantly to our understanding of the transatlantic nature of modernist literary exchange at the turn of the twentieth century. The influence of fin-de-siècle British and French
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literary movements on America’s cultural development in this period has been underestimated.3 The turn-of-the-century American little magazines, so many of whose editors and contributors looked to the culture of Britain and France for inspiration, represent a substantial and important medium for examining fin-de-siècle modernism as a more broadly transatlantic literary and artistic phenomenon than has been claimed. Second, the turn in new modernist studies from an interest in products to processes and from texts to the broader domain of print culture and/or cultural studies invites us to think differently about the achievement of these magazines. The turn-of-the-century little magazines may not have produced a considerable canon of work. They did, however, engage vigorously with the artistic and cultural debates of the day at what was felt to be a crucial moment in America’s cultural development as a nation. An examination of this engagement reveals much about both the process of canon formation and, as Bourdieu postulates, the literary field’s function as a site of struggle for cultural authority. Positioned in opposition to both the emerging mass-market magazines of the period and the genteel family house magazines, the little magazines spoke for those who felt marginalized from the culture represented in these two venues, creating a space for artists and writers to set out their own cultural agendas. Like their high modernist counterparts of the succeeding generation, as characterized by Mark Morrisson, turnof-the-century little magazine editors engaged with both public and counter-public spheres: some sought to reform the existing literary and cultural sphere while others, engaged in more radical aims, sought to create and address counter-publics. While these aspects of turn-of-the-century little magazines – their importance to transatlantic studies and as a venue for intervention in cultural debates – are central to the larger project of which this essay is a part, my main intention here is simply to introduce this vast and largely uncharted terrain of turn-of-the-century print culture. Given the unfamiliarity of these magazines to contemporary scholars of modernism and historians of the periodical press, it seems more important in this context to provide an overall impression of these magazines and their aims than to offer detailed micro-histories of specific magazines. To this end, this essay introduces the cultural context out of which these magazines emerged and describes their relationship to two “revolutions” that occurred in the print world of their day: the “revolution” in fine printing, which constituted an aesthetic revolt in the domain of book production;
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and the “magazine revolution”4 that marked the emergence of cheap, mass-market magazines.
The turn-of-the-century little magazine as fine art: the “revolution” in fine printing The little magazines that emerged between 1894 and 1903 were part of a broad cultural movement in post-Civil War America. America’s rise as a modern industrial nation in this period was accompanied by a keen interest in cultural development. This interest was served by the founding of schools of higher education, professional schools, museums, libraries, and artistic, literary, and cultural societies, institutes, and clubs of various kinds. More Americans were traveling abroad and large exhibitions such as the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair exposed them to the culture of other nations. British Arts and Crafts and Aestheticism exerted a particularly strong influence in the American cultural field of this era, an interest encouraged and sustained by the visits of Oscar Wilde, Walter Crane, and other figures associated with these artistic movements. In the domain of print culture, these movements inspired what Susan Otis Thompson has called a “revolution” in fine printing. This revolution was an American corollary to the revival of fine printing in Britain led by William Morris. In addition to Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts, it looked to other British and continental European artistic movements such as Decadence, Art Nouveau, and Symbolism. In America, it was a “revolution” rather than a “revival” because, as Thompson explains, in a nation where printing had been largely driven by utilitarian aims, there was no tradition to revive (1). Those involved in this revolution were a product of the cultural conditions of America’s Gilded Age. Many of them were born into culturally aspiring middle-class, professional, and wealthy families. Some, including Herbert Stone and Will Bradley, had fathers in the publishing, magazine and newspaper, or printing trades and some had engaged in these activities as a childhood hobby. The emergence of a cheap novelty press aimed at a youth market led to a craze for amateur printing and publishing from the 1870s on. This engagement in amateur journalism or the “miniature world of letters,” as a historian of the field has described it (Truman Spencer, qtd. in Horvat), served as one of the foundations of the revolution in fine printing and the emergence of little magazines in the 1890s. These pursuits were further fostered into early adulthood as young people founded and joined cliques of would-be
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writers, artists, publishers, and printers that emerged in and around formal and informal literary and bibliophilic societies in cities and towns, at universities, professional schools, and art schools, and in artistic communities. Spurred on by a zeal for cultural reform, inspired by emerging British and continental European art movements, and eager to establish a significant American literary culture, these young enthusiasts established presses, publishing houses, and magazines. The influence of Arts and Crafts, Aestheticism, Art Nouveau, Decadence, and Symbolism exerted itself at all levels of book production – from private presses, jobbing printers, and commercial printers to literary and trade publishers.5 Turn-of-the century little magazine editors were either directly affiliated with these enterprises or were inspired by their aesthetic innovations, which they transposed to the medium of the magazine. By linking their periodicals to the revolution in fine printing, little magazine founders consciously opposed the mainstream periodicals of the day – both traditional and genteel family house magazines such as Harper’s and newly emerging mass-market magazines such as McClure’s. Titles such as the Scroll, Papyrus, and Lotus evoked materials used in the pre-industrial manuscript age, distancing these magazines from the commercialized realm of turn-of-the-century periodical publication. Titles such as Rubric, Fly Leaf, Bradley, His Book, and Ex Libris demonstrated an alignment with book culture. Terms such as book, booklet, chap-book, and pamphlet in little magazines’ titles, subtitles, and mottoes also positioned them within the rarefied bibliophilic realm. In terms of advertising, too, little magazines differed from their mainstream counterparts. At a time when mainstream magazines were completely dependent upon this medium, often including up to one hundred pages of ads (Mott 21), little magazines included few advertisements. Many little magazine editors insisted that they would only carry advertisements in keeping with the quality of their publication. Most were for small presses, publishers, booksellers, other little magazines, and possibly for local businesses, especially those involved in the cultural sector, including piano sellers and antique stores. Another limit set on advertising included the stricture that ads be designed in-house. In these ways, little magazine editors carefully controlled the aesthetics of their publications, while supporting the fine book trade and the related elite cultural realm. The revolt against mainstream periodicals and the association with book culture also had a profound influence on the design of these magazines, which were meant to be works of art in themselves and to
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appeal to bibliophiles. As individual issues, the magazines resembled chap-books and pamphlets that were sought after by collectors, while, when covered in attractive publishers’ bindings, they presented an elegant, book-like appearance. The little magazines also shared many features of books produced under the influence of the revolution in fine printing: small formats; wide margins; plentiful white space; fleurons and other decorative ornaments, sparingly used; decorated initial letters; rubrication; old style and experimental typefaces, especially Caslon, Jenson, and gothic; handmade laid paper or imitation handmade paper with deckle edges; floral motif decorations; woodcut illustrations; decorative features and illustrations demonstrating the influence of japonisme and British and continental European poster art.6 (Figure 11.2). At the same time, there was much experimentation with typography, layout, and design as well as a concerted effort to relate type and illustration to content. Sometimes experimentation went to extremes. Gelett Burgess’s one-off publication Le Petit Journal des Refusées, for example, was trapezoidal in shape and printed on wallpaper. Some magazines experimented with different papers, including bamboo and butcher’s paper, and with different colors of ink. Aesthetically, then, they differed
Figure 11.2 The aesthetic appearance of the turn-of-the-century little magazine. Source: Clack Book 3.1 1897.
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radically from mainstream magazines, which featured densely packed pages, half-tone photo-engravings, and a plethora of ads. Many little magazine founders were as keen to effect a revolution in letters as they were a revolution in fine printing. In this endeavor, too, they opposed themselves to their mainstream counterparts, seeking to make an intervention in the cultural discourse of the public sphere. Little magazines were, as Walter Blackburn Harte, editor of Lotus and Fly Leaf declared, “a medium ... for the advocacy of ideas and ideals ignored and smothered in conventional publications” (“Bubble and Squeak,” February 1897, 60). They were engaged, to varying degrees, in the following projects: the promotion of elite, alternative, and/or avantgarde literary and artistic movements; the construction of alternative literary and artistic canons; and the publication of works by young and emerging writers. In these aims, the little magazines of this period were involved in critical debates about the development of a national literary culture, many of which centered on the degree to which America’s literature ought to follow British conventions.7 While these debates were carried out throughout the nineteenth century, they were refueled with the implementation of the International Copyright Act in 1891. Suddenly, authorship as a profession became a more viable option than it had been previously when publishers relied heavily upon British material, and the 1890s saw a boom in those identifying themselves as professional writers (Mott 38). Still, a sense of cultural insecurity vis-àvis Britain continued to pervade American letters. In 1897, for example, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly complained, “the British yoke has remained upon our minds, though we have cast it off our necks. Our literary men, especially, have deferred to English models and English ideas” (Torrey 569). What, then, did developing a distinctive American literature mean in the context of the turn-of-the-century little magazines? While by no means unanimous in their views, little magazine founders and editors tended to favor British and/or continental European-based models.8 Native schools of literature such as “local color” writing were often disparaged by little magazines, which promoted writing with an international or “universal” applicability.9 The ideal American literature was frequently characterized as mediating between the European and the American. For Harte, for example, an Englishman who, rather ironically, advocated for the development of a distinctive American literature, the ideal was a transatlantic and transcultural endeavor, combining the “audacity and rebellion” of America’s “new generation” with “the French naturalists and realists, Ibsen and the Scandinavian
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and modern German school, and the English so-called ‘decadent school’ ” (“A Resume”). He cultivated this ideal in Lotus, which he claimed was “the only American periodical in America,” an “American bibelot of American literature” (“A Resume”). The tensions inherent in this project of creating a distinctive American literature through a combination of American attitude and British and continental European aesthetics led to much work that was imitative of the Aesthetic, Decadent and Symbolist schools. The contribution of these magazines to a revolution in letters, then, was less significant than their role in the “revolution” in fine printing. Most American contributors never achieved canonical status or even literary fame, a central reason for the exclusion of these magazines from Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich’s study. Yet, in other respects, in which their modernist successors may be said to have failed, these magazines accomplished a great deal. Though short-lived and largely forgotten after 1903, these little magazines successfully brought new experimental work and cultural debate to a much larger audience than that served by their modernist counterparts. For although, as I have demonstrated, turn-of-the-century little magazines were intrinsically linked to the “high” cultural revolution in fine printing, they were also connected, as I will now show, to the “low” realm of the mass-market magazine, a characteristic that ensured that they reached a broader audience.
The little magazine as cheap print: the magazine revolution For all the elitist disdain for mass culture expressed in turn-of-thecentury little magazines, they were as much a product of the magazine revolution that marked the rise of cheap mass-market magazines, as they were the revolution in fine print. In a 20-year period (1885–1905), during which time 7,500 new periodicals were established in the United States (Mott 11), the little magazines garnered much attention. Moreover, at five or ten cents per issue, they were priced to sell, costing the same as their mass-market counterparts and considerably less than either the 25 to 35 cent genteel magazines or the expensive British little magazines of the same period. Initial print runs of between three and five thousand were relatively common and sales of between five and ten thousand were not unusual. More successful ones, such as the Chap-Book, eventually achieved sales of 16,000, while Bradley, His Book claimed a circulation of 25,000. These magazines were distributed all over the country, some even overseas. Though their sales were inconsequential
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in comparison with mass-market and genteel magazines, which sold in the hundreds of thousands (Mott 16–17), they far outstripped those of their modernist successors and of their contemporary British counterparts. Modernist little magazine circulation, for example, rarely exceeded one thousand (Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich 2), while fin- desiècle British little magazines such as Page, Elf, and Quest printed only a few hundred copies. The circulations achieved by many American turnof-the-century little magazines place them on a par with their most popular British contemporary, the Yellow Book, which sold between five and seven thousand copies, itself a remarkable feat given its high price of five shillings at a time when novels cost three shillings sixpence and magazines cost sixpence (Nelson 108; Stetz and Lasner 7). Like Yellow Book editor, John Lane, who, as Margaret Stetz has argued, was savvy in his ability to exploit the interest of the middle-class in cultural development, American little magazine editors successfully popularized high art. The popularity of these magazines is even more striking if we look beyond the sales of individual titles to combined sales across the dozens of titles available in any given month. American turn-of-the-century little magazines were, indeed, quite popular for an elite genre. The exploitation of the genre for aims that were more popular than highbrow is a testament to the impact they made on the public. The newsstands were flooded with imitators and parodists who appropriated the high art format to promote popular fads. There were, for example, little magazines devoted to cycling, smoking, posters and poster collecting, Rudyard Kipling, and astrology. Little magazines themselves were exploited as a fad in parodies such as Chop-Book, a parody of the Chap-Book; Bilioustine, a parody of Philistine; and in more generalized parodies of the genre such as the Book Booster and the Bauble. At the same time, early all-fiction magazines such as Black Cat – precursors to twentieth-century pulp magazines – also sometimes adopted features of the little magazine format. The format was also exploited for radical and progressive causes such as the single tax movement, the co-op movement, and socialism. Yet another significant outgrowth of the artistic little magazine was what Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich call “oneman magazines” (237, 245–246), largely editorial magazines focusing on the iconoclastic social and/or artistic and literary views of its founder. The most successful of this type was Elbert Hubbard’s long-running Philistine (1895–1915), a title chosen in defiance of the elitist literary community that disparaged him, with a circulation that eventually reached 200,000 (Hamilton 147). Both the serious-intentioned little magazines and their imitators profited from this interest in the genre.
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Little magazine publishers and editors exploited the popular appeal of the genre, working hard to expand readership. They advertised in their pages for local agents, exchanged advertising space and promotional “puffs” with other little magazines, reported with pride their increasing sales figures, and embraced sales opportunities represented in newsstands. Newsstands underwent massive growth in the 1890s (Mott 19), and little magazine publishers recognized the importance of aesthetic appearance in this non-subscription-based distribution system. Indeed, the small size, strange shapes, and odd formats of the magazines were deliberately designed to attract the attention of casual passers-by. In addition, little magazines were among the first magazines to feature new covers with each issue (Finlay 48). Such strategies were unnecessary before the 1890s when most magazines reached readers through the mail. Though these magazines included little advertising, their founders were not averse to self-promotion and they exploited the developing field of mass-market advertising. In particular, they embraced the poster. In the 1890s, British and continental European artists such as Eugène Grasset, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Aubrey Beardsley became famous for their poster art and advertisements. Initiated by this movement, a craze for poster art swept America. Poster exhibitions were held across the country; an American school of poster artists emerged; poster parties with people dressed as their favorite poster personality were a popular fad; the bold colors used in this medium influenced women’s fashion; and poems, songs, stories, and plays on poster themes abounded, particularly in the pages of little magazines (Margolin 21). Though initially used by magazines for advertising at newsstands and in bookstores, posters became highly sought after by collectors. Recognizing the revenue-generating potential of the poster, little magazine publishers soon offered posters in exchange for subscriptions and also sold them separately. Whereas the magazines themselves cost only five or ten cents, the posters might sell for between 25 cents and a dollar. Little magazine publishers embraced the poster despite the fact that it was also used by mainstream magazines – most famously in Edward Penfield’s posters for Harper’s – because, though it was a commercial medium, it also had a high art status. J.M. Bowles, for example, founder and editor of Modern Art, an art magazine associated with the little magazine movement, appreciated the poster as a means of spreading culture to a wide audience. The poster, he said, was “daily art for the people” and “bridged” the “separation between art and commerce”
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(“Echoes”). Will Bradley, who, as graphic designer, typographer, publisher, printer, writer, and editor was the “renaissance man” of the movement, shared this view. In his magazine, Bradley, His Book, beautiful posterstyle advertisements blended seamlessly with highly decorated literary and artistic pages and were an intrinsic part of the final product. Indeed, in many ways, his magazine was an ad for what it advertised. Bradley, for example, used the papers he advertised, indicating in the ads on which pages particular papers appeared. He also advertised the ink he used, the photo-engraving and electro-typing company involved in the magazine’s production, the printing press the magazine was printed on, and even the electric motor that powered the press. Bradley produced much commercial work, calling his advertisements “illuminated advertisements,” a term that linked the newly emerging medium of commercial advertising with artisanal practices of the manuscript age. Bradley was praised for his efforts in “the revival of artistic printing and the development of decorative advertising” and his advertisements were declared “poems in themselves” (“End of the Book” 112, 113). He was likely playfully engaging with such commentary in his advertisement for Ayer’s Vigour, a hair-loss treatment (Figure 11.3). In the ad, which could easily be mistaken for the literary/artistic content of the magazine, a Pre-Raphaelite “stunner” frames a poem entitled “A Ballade of Baldness” with the punning refrain “when folly kills the follicles.” Little magazine producers, it seems, did not always take themselves too seriously. Though they expressed anxieties about mass-market culture, it is clear that they also saw in it many possibilities for the promotion of high culture. As Wendy Kaplan argues of the Arts and Crafts movement in America more broadly, Americans were less ambivalent about the relationship between craft and industry than the British and “saw no contradiction between championing both the handcrafted and the improvement of the mass-produced” (Kaplan 306). William Morris’s unwillingness to compromise his aesthetic ideals in his production of domestic products and books made it impossible to realize his aim to make widely accessible beautiful goods (Weingarden 10). In America, by contrast, similar undertakings were successful. Thomas Mosher, for example, put “beautiful” works of “literary distinction ... within reach of those who appreciate beauty but cannot possess it at exorbitant prices” (Blumenthal 42). Similarly, Hubbard made Craftsman-style products available to Americans of more modest means and cultivated among them a love of fine books (Boris 216; Kaplan 319). Little magazines, which both these men also produced, were also often
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Figure 11.3
Ad for Ayer’s Vigour, Bradley, His Book 1.2 (1896).
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similarly designed to cultivate the aesthetic and literary tastes of a broader audience.
Is a fine art of cheap print possible? The little magazines, then, were at once high and popular art, using new mass-market technologies and strategies in the service of high art. Ironically, however, it was the contradictions between the high and the popular that killed them off. First, these cheap but artistic magazines were not economically viable in an advertising-based market and the kind of patronage system that arose during the era of high modernism was not yet well sustained.10 At five or ten cents and with minimal advertising, magazines that sold only three to five thousand copies generated little income – even without the burden of paying contributors (a practice of many of these magazines). Those that sold ten thousand or more, such as Chap-Book, also struggled to survive. And, while posters brought in extra income, they were expensive to produce and were not particularly successful at selling magazines. In the end, posters competed with magazines because many people, as one journalist of the period noted, “did not think of buying the magazine advertised; they only wanted the poster” (qtd. in Finlay 51). Posters sold posters, not magazines. Even those magazines that mediated successfully between the high and the popular were often victims of their success. Increased sales necessitated changes in production, investment in more and better equipment, changes in format, and attention to securing advertising revenue to underwrite higher production and distribution costs. Small formats and handmade papers were not practical for either large-scale production or for advertising purposes. Attempts to develop little magazines into a more commercial product without sacrificing the aesthetic and literary ideals that had inspired them rarely met with success. Their publishers and editors did not have the experience to compete in the broader mainstream market. While for a time these magazines were able to be both fine art and cheap print, they could not, it seems, be both little and big at the same time. By 1903, though little magazines continued to emerge, the little magazine as a “phenomenon” died out and was quickly forgotten.11 Yet, for a few years at least, little magazines prevailed as a fine form of cheap print that democratized high art by bringing it to the attention of a wide audience. Today, they are worthy of re-examination in scholarly studies for their efforts to shape a “modern” American literary culture, as a forum for debate about the development of this culture, and as a medium that represents a significant American contribution to Aesthetic, Decadent, and Symbolist literature and print culture.
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Notes 1. See, for example, Ohmann, Reed, Garvey, and Damon-Moore. 2. Interestingly, Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich’s work almost told a different story. According to correspondence between Hoffman and Ulrich in the Frederick J. Hoffman Papers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM Manuscript Collection 141), Ulrich, a serials librarian at the New York Public Library who was undoubtedly aware of Faxon’s bibliography, wanted to include about two hundred more titles, many of which must certainly have been turn-of-the-century magazines. I thank Robert Scholes for alerting me to the existence of this correspondence. 3. Jonathan Freedman’s work on British Aestheticism and American culture, James Doyle’s study of Walter Blackburn Harte, and Edward Foster’s anthology of American Decadents, Symbolists, and Aesthetes are among the few recent literary studies that draw attention to this phenomenon. In contrast to the general neglect of the influence of British and continental European fin- desiècle artistic culture in literary scholarship, there has been much stimulating work on this topic done in the realms of cultural studies, book history, art history, and the history of the decorative arts. See, for example, Blanchard, Thompson, Kaplan, and Shand-Tucci. 4. The “magazine revolution” is a term used by magazine historians such as Frank Luther Mott and Richard Ohmann to describe the explosion of periodical print in this period. 5. See Thompson and Blumenthal for thorough coverage of these printing and publishing enterprises. 6. See Thompson for a detailed examination of the influences of these movements on book production at the turn of the century. More examples of the aesthetic appearance of these magazines can be found on my “American Decadence” website 1 July 2007 . 7. For more on this issue see Hutner (1–4) and Zwerdling (3–18). 8. In “ ‘Art for America’s Sake’: Decadence and the Making of American Literary Culture in the Little Magazines of the 1890s,” I provide a more detailed examination of how little magazine editors positioned American literature in relation to British and French models by focusing on the editorial practices of two magazines, the Chap-Book and M’lle New York. 9. For a different account of the avant-garde’s relationship to local color writing, see Brad Evans’s “Howellsian Chic: The Local Color of Cosmopolitanism,” in which he argues that local color writing was rendered “chic” by American writers in the 1890s who drew on “transnational aesthetic fashions” such as Aestheticism and japonisme in their work. 10. My research on the economics of publishing these little magazines is in its infancy. There are virtually no archives for these magazines and often very little information, if any at all, about their publishers. Quite a few were financed as a sideline attached to jobbing presses or more commercial enterprises. Another financing method, used by Elbert Hubbard of the Philistine and Michael Monahan of the Papyrus, was to create lifetime memberships costing ten dollars.
Turn-of-the-Century American Little Magazines 197 11. Only a few titles, notably Hubbard’s Philistine and Mosher’s Bibelot, lasted through the next flourishing of the little magazine in the modernist period.
Works cited “A Ballade of Baldness.” [Advertisement] Bradley, His Book (June 1896): n.p. Ardis, Ann L. “Before the ‘Great Divide[s]’: ‘Periodical Communities’ and the Public Sphere, 1880–1922.” Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms Symposium. University of Delaware, Newark. 27 April 2007. Blanchard, Mary. Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Blumenthal, Joseph. The Printed Book in America. Boston: David R. Godine, 1977. Boris, Eileen. “ ‘Dreams of Brotherhood and Beauty’: The Social Ideas of the Arts and Crafts Movement.” “The Art That Is Life”: The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1875–1920. Ed.Wendy Kaplan. Boston: Little Brown, 1998. 207–222. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Bowles, J. M. “Echoes.” Modern Art 3 (1) (1894): n.p. Damon-Moore, Helen. Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, 1880–1910. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Doyle, James. The Fin-de-siècle Spirit: Walter Blackburn Harte and the American/ Canadian Literary Milieu of the 1890s. Toronto: ECW Press, 1995. “End of the Book: Some Kindly Comments of the Press and Public.” Bradley, His Book (July 1896): 110–113. Evans, Brad. “Howellsian Chic: The Local Color Writing of Cosmopolitanism.” ELH 71 (2004) 775–812. Faxon, Frederick Winthrop. “A Bibliography of Ephemeral Bibelots.” Bulletin of Bibliography 1 (1897) 21–23. ——. “Ephemeral Bibelots.” Bulletin of Bibliography 3 (1903–1904): 72–74, 92, 106–107, 124–126. Finlay, Nancy. “American Posters and Publishing in the 1890s.” American Art Posters of the 1890s. New York: Abrams, 1987. 45–55. Foster, Edward ed., Decadents, Symbolists, and Aesthetes in America: Fin-de-siècle American Poetry. Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House, 2000. Freedman, Jonathan. Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Garvey, Ellen Gruber. The Adman in the Parlour: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Hamilton, Charles Franklin. As Bees in Honey Drown: Elbert Hubbard and the Roycrofters. South Brunswick, NJ: Barnes, 1973. Harte, Walter Blackburn. “Bubble and Squeak.” Lotus (December 1896): 295–300. ——. “Bubble and Squeak.” Lotus (February 1897): 57–66. ——. “A Resume and a Prophecy.” Lotus (December 1896): n.p.
198 Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940 Hoffman, Frederick H, Charles Allen, and Carolyn Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947. Horvat, Martin. “Amateur Journalism History from APPA.” 30 June 2007 . Hutner, Gordon. American Literature, American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Kaplan, Wendy. “Spreading the Craft: The Role of the Schools.” “The Art That Is Life”: The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1875–1920. 298–319. MacLeod, Kirsten. “ ‘Art for America’s Sake’: Decadence and the Making of American Literary Culture in the Little Magazines of the 1890s.” Prospects 30 (2006): 309–338. ——. ed., American Decadence. University of Alberta. 1 July 2007 . Margolin, Victor. American Poster Renaissance: The Great Age of Poster Design 1890– 1900. Syracuse, NJ: Castle Books, 1975. Morrisson, Mark S. The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Moss, David. “A Bibliography of the Little Magazine Published in America Since 1900.” Contact 1–3 (1932): 91–109, 134–139, 111–124. Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines 1885–1905. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1957. Nelson, James. The Early Nineties: A View from the Bodley Head. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971. Ohmann, Richard. Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century. London: Verso, 1996. Reed, David. The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States 1880–1960. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Robert Scholes and Sean Latham ed., Modernist Journals Project. Brown University and University of Tulsa. 1 July 2007 . Scholes, Robert. Paradoxy of Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Shand-Tucci, Douglass. Boston Bohemia 1881–1900: Ralph Adams Cram, Life and Architecture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Stetz, Margaret Diane. “Sex, Lies, and Printed Cloth: Bookselling at the Bodley Head in the Eighteen Nineties.” Victorian Studies 35 (1991): 71–86. Stetz, Margaret Diane and Mark Samuels Lasner. The Yellow Book: A Centenary Exhibition. Cambridge: Houghton Library, 1994. Thompson, Susan Otis. American Book Design and William Morris. New York: Bowker, 1977. Torrey, Bradford. “The Demand for an American Literature.” Atlantic Monthly 77 (1896): 822–829. Weingarden, Lauren. “Aesthetics Politicized: William Morris to the Bauhaus.” Journal of Architectural Education 38 (3) (1986): 8–13. Zwerdling, Alex. Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London. New York: Basic Books, 1998.
12 The Newspaper Response to Tender Buttons, and What It Might Mean Leonard Diepeveen
In 1914, every newspaper editor in the United States seems to have assigned someone to the Tender Buttons beat. Generating what is probably the most voluminous response to any modernist text, within a couple of years Tender Buttons had attracted what currently amounts to several large boxes of material, now housed in Stein’s clipping archive at Yale.1 It took me a week to read through them. Yet while the amount of response is exhilarating; its contents are often deeply discouraging. The boxes initially provide amusing reading. One reporter opens with a lengthy quotation from Tender Buttons, followed by: “Am I insane, O sister, or has the printer gone insane before me?” (Chicago Herald). Another chuckles, “Certainly the attempt to make sense out of such nonsense is calculated to put her readers into insane asylums” (“Rev. of Tender Buttons” Detroit Free Press). Five minutes later, reading further in this same box of material, one finds: “For the benefit of those who are planning to go crazy the following extract from the volume is offered as a model” (“Officer,”), followed by “Gertrude Stein ... casts away every vestige of intelligibility in her madness” (Pittsburgh Dispatch). And so on, and on, and on, simultaneously grinding down one’s spirit and the ability to discriminate. The archive’s promise begins – and apparently ends – with its massiveness. Jocular and dismissive clichés and banality, replicated in hundreds of different locations, seem to offer nothing but conformity and predictability. Not only do the clippings quickly stop offering new angles on Stein, the angles they do offer seem lifeless. And, because the articles are usually short, the thinking is presented without nuance, with the result that these ideas are effortlessly duplicated, from the New York 199
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Sun to the Toledo Blade to the San Antonio Light. These complacent witticisms quickly become predictable, blurring into each other, smirking in unison. By the dominant standards of current literary criticism, responses like these are inadequate – inadequate not because their overwhelmingly negative response landed them on the wrong side of history, but because this endless parade of one-liners doesn’t behave very well as evidence. Scrutinizing the clippings with the usual activities of literary scholarship – such as privileging the best-argued and developed responses, examining the evidence behind central claims, or using as central those responses that most clearly show change and development in the way culture thought about things – these activities go unrewarded. Yet these boxes of short, predictable responses are significant. Their interest lies precisely in those aspects that literary historians leave behind: in their ritualized and truncated nature, a form of response centered on dismissal and refusal to read, a form which transformed Tender Buttons from a text into an event. And their significance goes beyond the form of the response, for the form was uniquely able to manipulate some heavyweight ideas. Denying richness to Stein’s text, reporters did so by mobilizing ideas of mimesis, pragmatism, imitability, theory, and the self-evident nature of art – and in so doing set the terms for what would become modernism’s self-justifications. Blunt instruments can do significant cultural work. The clippings’ work was peculiarly suited to their genre and consequent purposes. The Tender Buttons clippings show that many responses to Stein (and indeed to modernism in general) were not formal, measured reviews, the kind of texts that dominate academic reception histories. While the clippings consist of some extended reviews, they contain many more short notices, daily “wheezes” by staff columnists (short columns containing parodies, brisk commentary, jokes, cartoons, and other light and current fare), letters to the editor (some real, some not), and feature columns (where primary attention is paid to the personality of the feature writer as he or she meditates on exceptional events). In these pieces, critical analysis proceeds by argumentation, but also by way of parodies, witticisms, narratives of the reading experience, comic filler, and by using Tender Buttons as an analogy in articles dedicated to a more primary purpose. The paper’s regular reviewers wrote some pieces and beat reporters, feature columnists, or readers wrote many more. Few had as their purpose sustained, measured analysis of the text. While the archive does contain a few clippings from national magazines and newspapers with national distribution, most clippings were gleaned from a great range of newspapers, from big, national ones
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like the New York Times, to the Louisville Courier-Journal, to the St. Joseph News-Press. This range shows that Stein’s work, within a few months of Tender Buttons being published in an edition of only 1,000, was known on some level to general readers in places like Toledo and San Antonio. Because of changes in distribution over the previous few decades, the scandalous texts of modernism quickly could become national events. Even when their print run was small, texts could circulate widely, and local newspapers were eager to be part of a national discussion. But the geographical range has more to tell; it also suggests that a look at the New York Times and a few other newspapers of record will not adequately represent the public response to modernism. Notions of quality also do not help limit the range, for major newspapers did not produce responses radically different from those of smaller centers. Various pressures kept both on the same page. Most notably, there was a powerful default aesthetic at work that few reporters stepped outside, and the short length of most of these pieces ensured that the default aesthetic could not be given much nuance. As well, the quick availability of newspapers from other centers, reporters’ limited access to the text, and the temptations of plagiarism in the face of short deadlines encouraged a relatively homogeneous discussion. Perhaps most consequential was the agreement over the kind of event that Tender Buttons created. As many writers of the time noted, rapid increases in the volume of published creative writing made it difficult to choose which works to pay attention to, creating anxiety over the principles by which one chose one work to review over another. Newspapers justified covering Tender Buttons because it was spectacular, and on two levels. It was not only an astonishing text, but, as more and more newspapers took it up, it became news, and that made it not just a text, but also an event. The strength and purpose of the clippings did not lie in providing close readings, but in turning Tender Buttons into an event, and interpreting it through that frame, resulting in a focus on the social and biographical conditions that had made such a text possible to be written and garner such serious attention. All of which is to say that when this aspect of the public sphere engaged with high modernism, it did so on its own terms. As I have argued in The Difficulties of Modernism, to automatically evaluate this kind of writing by the standards of professionalist literary criticism is to impoverish it. This is not writing on a different level from, say, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”; rather, it is a different kind of writing that is performative and persuades by wit. A one-paragraph response to Tender Buttons sets itself a different task than does “Tradition and the
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Individual Talent.” While the clippings tend to have different estimations of Tender Buttons’ value than would later professional literary criticism, the conflict is not just about the value of Tender Buttons. The conflict is larger; it is a conflict about different ways of interacting with a work of art. How do the clippings engage with Tender Buttons, then? They rely heavily on extended quotation, and plagiarize spectacularly. Most important, they are short, and so whatever arguing they do happens in shorthand. These are not places for expanded arguments, and, since the clippings work with a loose sense of what can be included in a discussion and what can’t, neither do they employ strict guidelines for what counts as evidence. Arguments, in the context of daily publishing and a pre-professionalist understanding of literary criticism, are rarely developed. Employing concepts that were often simply assumed, these pieces argued through mobilizing predictable tropes, not through developing complicated arguments. Arguments happen in abbreviated form, and in this manifestation a different set of rules applies. In this kind of intellectual debate, nuance and evidence aren’t central; rather, debate proceeds schematically, and arguments are cited rather than used. The responses to Stein are also stylized, with the result that, in order to make these clippings’ work visible, one must redirect the typical methodology used in literary criticism, which centers its evidence on uniqueness, or on moments that show change, or on richness. In working with Stein’s clippings, though, developed or unique arguments are not the most telling arguments. Here, the archive’s work becomes visible when one works with the apparent weaknesses of this writing – its clichés, banality, and sheer repetitive bulk. That redirection to the recurrent and typical is possible only because of the bulk of the response. The clipping service provides what is, in effect, a database, a database uniquely made possible at this juncture in history. One of the new manifestations of the late nineteenth-century explosion in newspapers and the modern interest in publicity, a clipping service like Romeike (begun in 1881 and touting itself as “The First Established and Most Complete Newspaper Cutting Bureau in the World”) shows at its barest that Stein cared enough about her public reception not only to pay attention but to pay – a tantalizing fact, but whose implications lie outside the scope of this essay.2 More central for the kinds of knowledge it reveals, though, is that the archive allows for a reading practice impossible at the time – no one at the time (other than Stein, as subscriber to the service) could have read both the Toledo Blade and the San Antonio Light on Tender
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Buttons. And it is that enabled reading practice that allows a glimpse into the workings of the daily life of commonplace ideas. While one can’t productively generalize on the basis of, say, a dozen short sources, generalization becomes more reliable as the number of sources increases. An archive the size of Stein’s, then (which is still by no means complete), with its multiple, parallel sources on the same event, becomes visible through typicality. Typicality gives my research the flavor of sociological inquiry, though it is not the same as sociology. Following John Guillory, I advocate a sociologically informed methodology for literary studies, in which critical arguments are based on the typical, but for which typicality is not put to the same uses as it is in sociology (Cultural Capital; “Toward a Sociology”). Because of the anonymity and range of its contents, the clipping service archive does not reliably indicate class or race or educational background. But it does efficiently indicate modes of thought prevalently displayed in mass culture, and it allows one to see how they were put to work.
*** Understanding how the stylized succinctness works begins with turning from the content of the dismissals to their form. This redirection doesn’t so much reveal what was under contention as what was not. These writers were confident that they represented common agreement, a confidence which extends to the form of their prose: the shortness of the responses and the brevity with which reporters stated their central principles reveal that these writers believed their central principles were commonly held and understood. Consequently, while we might, occasionally, see a good argument cited in these pieces, we won’t see one put to use. Succinct, dismissive responses to Stein were premised on both reporter and reader believing certain aesthetic principles to be obvious. Because newspaper responses depended for their effects on being addressed to like-minded readers, the principles that mobilized them needed to seem beyond question to their audience, requiring neither explanation nor defense. Reporters thus did not defend the basic principles of art; they just stated them. Art, for these reporters, was self- evident – and they simply demonstrated this with a sweeping gesture to Tender Buttons itself, implicitly arguing that art like Stein’s, which seemed to need a discourse to articulate its aesthetic value, was a lesser art. What makes art art should be easily articulated. Conversely, the poverty of Stein’s writing was equally simple to point out. These reporters used the very form of their writing to suggest that
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Tender Buttons’ value and raison d’être could be simply explained – more time did not need to be spent on it. This ritual display of commonsensical beliefs encouraged curtailment, a shutting down of analysis. Stein’s readers critiqued Tender Buttons in the very form of their central rhetorical device, in all those succinct, aggressively curtailed explanations. One reporter, frustrated with the attention given to Stein by “crack-brained enthusiasts,” snapped: “It is all very funny, and very sad. Listen to it once more: ‘A little lace makes boils. This is not true.’ This is silly, stupid maundering; and this is true” (Burton). Another commentary on Tender Buttons was headlined “Officer, She’s Writing Again.” The merging of content and form in these responses was fortuitous, for the argumentative curtailment exploited the necessarily limited space. It’s not just the brevity that asserted social agreement, either; the brevity worked with several other techniques. The humor performs the same function: laughter is agreement, and these pieces fail in their purposes if they don’t provoke laughter. You don’t keep your job at the Pittsburgh Dispatch dispensing quips to an unamused public. Their techniques of succinctness helped these pieces function as displays of belief more than as arguments, and begin to explain why these responses to Stein can today seem so self-satisfied. Generic, truncated, and routinized, they often work more like a ritual than like an argument. (Of course, they seem self-satisfied because the principles they use as self-evident are not self-evident to us today.) One can assent to the assertions in these pieces, or be challenged by them, but they are not satisfactorily argued for or with. Proof being neither necessary nor the point, the essential function was a witty display of belief. These beliefs, displaying mimicry and agreement more often than working through the implications of what they assert, have as much a social as they do an argumentative function. That redirection to the social brings these clippings into focus, allowing one to see that these beliefs created and sustained Stein’s work as an occasion that could thrive only under the illusion of common consent. Not surprisingly, since the form of this writing did not push inquiry forward, reporters settled down on several recurrent and meager interpretive frames for Tender Buttons. Many of these, like their quips, were forms of refusing to read. Basing itself more heavily on quotation than was the norm for the time (many responses spend well over half of their length quoting from Tender Buttons, creating a punchy, one-two rhetorical structure), one common form of interpretation was silence. Thus, a reporter for the Chicago Advance speculated on the theoretical
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context into which one might insert Stein’s writing, but would not venture past that: “At last the world knows what literature would be if daubed on with the big brush after the manner of the cubist.” Following this with a lengthy quotation from the book, the reviewer went on: “We could comment on the foregoing but we forebear. We leave the matter to the tender judgment of our readers” (“Cubist Poetry”). A simple description or quotation of the offending work was supposed to speak for itself. In the default aesthetic of the time, experiencing the virtues of art required neither language nor interpretation. Turning this premise on offending art was devastating. A reviewer for the New York City Press noted: “We do not understand it and as there is no translation furnished (admirers of Gertrude’s writings say they can ‘translate’ them) we simply offer a few extracts from the book” (“New Books”). The gesture was simple and eloquent: the quotation or bare description, presented with no or minimal comment, set aside all the explosive and distracting social context, and allowed for a moment of pure and honest attention in which the work was supposed to speak for itself. This response of quotation followed by silence suggests that in their interpretations reporters, refusing to particularize about Stein’s work, denied it complexity and richness. Indeed, for these readers one could take any passage at random, as many of them claimed to do. One reporter cynically noted, “One peculiar advantage of this new method in word-painting is in its elimination of consecutiveness. It doesn’t make any difference where the reader starts or stops, or whether a leaf or two is missing or not” (“Gertrude Stein as Literary Cubist”). The consequences of this lack of richness for quoting Stein quickly becomes apparent: This incoherent series of effusions, evidently cubist or ultra postfuturist essays, is said to deal with “Objects, Food, Rooms.” Perhaps it does, who can tell? The reader may judge for himself, from the following extract, taken at random, whether he desires to expend a dollar for the little canary-colored volume. (“Nonsense that is not Sense”) For these readers, quoting this kind of reverse touchstone, there was nothing to differentiate in Stein’s work: it was just one mass of similar stuff. Moving away from standard reviewing practice, the quotation exemplified the whole, instead of illustrating a moment of particular beauty, poignancy, or evident sincerity – moments that in the default aesthetic of the time would have been understood as richness.3 Quoting
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randomly suggested the limits of interpretation for Tender Buttons, and pushed richness, development, and nuance outside of these limits. At best, one was left with symptoms of something larger. The truncated responses to Stein encouraged other kinds of interpretation, kinds that required little explanation. A recurrent interpretation demonstrated how Tender Buttons violated commonsense notions of representation and mimesis, and how that violation made it (and the aesthetic that had spawned it) unusable for pragmatic life. The work of this powerful interpretive dismissal begins plausibly enough, with reporters invariably presenting quotations from the book as descriptions of the titles. While that is not a bad premise, it meant that mimesis always drove evaluations of Tender Buttons, and that Tender Buttons always failed this test. That is, it failed unless readers asserted that a passage could be mimetic of Stein’s impression of, say, a chicken – in which case she was mad. Further, the transfer from Stein’s impression to a reader’s impression was, at best, wobbly. Thus, the St. Paul Pioneer Press noted that “When cubist art was first brought to American attention by the international exhibition in New York a year or more ago, the related work in letters of Gertrude Stein came up also for the amused consideration of a practical public.” After quoting part of Tender Buttons, the reviewer went on: Sounds a little like nonsense, doesn’t it? But you must remember that Gertrude Stein is using words to convey sensations, not ideas. The cubist artists justify themselves by the claim that they do not paint what you see but the emotions which you experience in the act of seeing. If you chant Miss Stein’s incantation in the right key you may get the same sensation that you have when you sit down to dinner. Or – you may not. I do not guarantee the result. (“Amazing Gertrude Stein”) Employing different means for this same end, many reporters objected pragmatically, arguing that Stein’s writing just wasn’t very useful for persuasive argumentation or real-world communication. They demonstrated this by presenting whimsical interpretations of what Stein’s text really referred to, or by describing the gruesome collision between some real-world practice and Steinese descriptions of it. Thus, an article entitled “Our Own Polo Guide: The Game Explained a la [sic] Gertrude Stein” purported to give the rules for polo by employing “the phraseology of Gertrude Stein for the purpose because it harmonizes so well with our clear understanding of the game and all its
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ramifications, hot or cold.” It offered the following: “Polo, a game not a basket but nevertheless, molasses running up Woolworth but Wu Ting Fang, yes, no, no, yes, certainly, but by hakes and that which is a turnip is not a peanut notwithstanding.” The list of daily human activities reworked into Steinese was long, and included men’s futurist clothing, women’s cubist hats, domestic argument, music composition, Fanny Brice’s theory of comedy, baseball reporting, political conflict in Ireland, items from the New York City Daily Trade Record, a ruling from the Supreme court, and a mosquito-control manual from the Bureau of Municipal Research. With a bathetic juxtaposition of title and text, these alternate explanations recast Stein’s “seriousness” as pretension. Aggrieved and incredulous, they suggest, as pragmatic objections always do, what should be obvious.
*** Those truncated forms of response/interpretation – silence, random quotation, and mimesis – were all about bleakness, about refusal, about cutting things off. But there also were gestures to interpretation that weren’t just based on refusing to read. I note two kinds in particular. A central form, integral to how the twentieth century would understand Stein, turned to Tender Buttons’ larger context, moving away from the work, and designating it a symptom of something larger. Often, as part of their dismissals, reporters generalized all the radical new aesthetic movements together, and subsumed individual works like Tender Buttons under that. Thus, one reporter dispatched Stein with the claim that she was “merely a red flag waved by the Zeitgeist” (“Flat Prose”). For these readers, the form of Tender Buttons was so baffling that one needed to reach outside of it. This common attempt to understand Tender Buttons in terms of a larger movement meant that readers argued about its originating impulses (including theory and methodology), and its enabling social context, more often than its specifics. While interpretive, these responses were more about interpreting social role and intent than they were about interpreting textual meaning – reporters did not follow the articulation of context with a close look at the specific instance, Tender Buttons. Tender Buttons was “merely” an instance of the larger category. Reporters most often invoked Futurism and Cubism (although they did not usually distinguish these movements from each other). A typical claim asserted “Gertrude Stein is to literature what the Cubists and Futurists are to art, maybe worse than that. She writes crazily about everything and nothing, all mumbled in a scramble of meaningless
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words” (Pittsburgh Dispatch). This analogical context not only gave reporters an interpretive handle, it made writing about Stein a bigger occasion by making her stand in for other things. The “other things” that she stood in for were stylized, and invariably placed Stein in a context of a generalizable aesthetic theory and social power. Reporters stated the theoretical connection baldly: “Cubism in literature would seem to transcend all the bounds of possibility. Yet the work of Gertrude Stein reveals with almost stunning obviousness that the forward movement is not confined to painting” (Pittsburgh Post). Writers connected Stein to a larger context of social power through ideas of fashion, fraud, and sincerity: It was to be expected that the Futurists, having ceased to dismay us with their art, and having foisted their primary and violent colors upon us in the outre fashions of the moment, would address themselves to literature. Forthwith, Doctor Dippy is outdone. Gertrude Stein has perpetrated the latest Cubist joke. (“Futurist Literature”) For these reporters, Tender Buttons’ fit into a larger theoretical/social context was a sign of its weakness, not its strength. The interarts argument that has become so central to understanding Stein thus was more often motivated by an attack on methodology and fashion than it was by defenses of its conceptual rigor. Tender Buttons’ larger context could also be articulated through the publicity and fashion uniquely available through modern print culture, mechanisms opposed to traditional ideas of sincerity. Many writers believed that the new forms of writing could attract praise only through abusive uses of power, as the Toronto Empire and Mail makes clear: When a person made bold to criticize the futurist paintings, he was promptly informed by some devotee of the art that he was mentally and spiritually incapable of appreciating them. That will probably be the fate of anyone who dares to express the opinion that the little book, “Tender Buttons ... ” by Gertrude Stein ... does not possess much literary value. (F.J.) Reporters tagged Tender Buttons’ professed interpreters as a central manifestation of how fashion and power worked. People who claimed, straight-faced, to be able to interpret Tender Buttons were seen as being “in on it,” from Don Marquis’s recurring figure of Hermione and her group of Serious Thinkers to the Los Angeles Times’ “posing class which
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is deliberately unintelligible in the hope of being thought elusively wise” (“Futurist Essays”). This abuse of power, reporters claimed, revealed how the literary landscape was changing, to one based on insider knowledge, in which deception was uniquely possible. These writers’ concerns about power and fashion came out of an aesthetic that validated art not by its formal features or any sense of “pure aesthetics,” but by its sincerity and “seriousness” – values aloof from power and fashion. By asserting that literature like Stein’s was based on power and publicity, these writers argued that it was working out of the wrong social contract: fashion, power, and publicity were all abuses of trust. Understood through this aesthetic, the responses to Tender Buttons become performative gestures, removing it from the realm of serious aesthetic discussion by attacking its sincerity (often seen in how easy this text was to imitate and parody). These accusations changed how one read Stein, turning the experience of reading away from a private communion between two souls and into a public game, an occasion. The occasion, more often than not, was based on outperforming others in whimsical interpretation. Thus, a letter to the editor of the New York Evening Sun: Sir: You misunderstood the purport of Miss Stein’s query, “Why is there no oyster closer?” The trouble with you, as with others, is that you fail to fathom her meaning. She was not looking for a machine or a utensil with which to close an oyster. What good is an oyster if it is closed, anyhow? The fact is that Miss Stein, being unfamiliar with the game laws, went looking for an oyster stew in the middle of July. On being informed that this was the closed season for this particular kind of stew and that no oysters were to be had until September, she was naturally prompted to ask, “Why is there no oyster closer?” That is, why are all oysters so far away? There is a real pearl in each of her thoughts if you but knew how to open the shell. (J.E.M.) A second major interpretation, often but not always tied to a larger context, articulated the methodology and theoretical framework that created this work. For reporters, working with limited space and within a rhetorical strategy of truncation, representations of Stein’s method
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weren’t nuanced and they typically reduced a complex aesthetic production to a single pertinent aspect. The reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, recall, made the following analogy: The cubist artists justify themselves by the claim that they do not paint what you see but the emotions which you experience in the act of seeing. If you chant Miss Stein’s incantation in the right key you may get the same sensation that you have when you sit down to dinner. Or – you may not. Another reader summed things up in this way: “A performance of Tender Buttons for piano could be arranged by placing candy on various keys and letting the family dog eat freely” (qtd. in Marquis, “Sun Dial,” 1915). Or, reporters regularly characterized her writing as nothing but a straightforward application of madness. One writer claimed that Stein’s work was a symptom of aphasia; while the reporter for the Pittsburgh Dispatch, who had grumbled that “She writes crazily about everything and nothing, all mumbled in a scramble of meaningless words,” went on: For nouns she misuses adjectives, and vice versa, and obeys no rules of composition. With her you are on unknown seas without a pilot. She casts away every vestige of intelligibility in her madness. She is the most talked-about creature in the intellectual world today, and is either a genius or – or something else.4 It was a peculiar kind of madness, however, for it resulted in a text that had no variation, no movement, and no progress (small wonder reporters believed it could be quoted at random). Tender Buttons – like any work dependent on a theory – was monomaniacal. For skeptical readers, works that had a simple explanatory genesis, one that wasn’t psychologically rich, were impoverished. Stein’s compositional procedure turned what ought to be nuance and complexity, an interaction between life and art, into something mechanical, rigidly unable to interact with the life before it – which partly explains why Tender Buttons was so resolutely useless for pragmatic action. Consider this response in the New York Sun. Its review of Tender Buttons ends: “Fill a thousand, ten thousand cards with single words or phrases. Shuffle, deal; align in ‘hands’ of assorted sizes, and send the result to the printer. It is the children’s game of ‘consequences’ with reduced chances for amusing coincidences of collocation. Unhappy ‘future’ ”! (“When the White Hunter”).5
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Skeptics believed Stein’s easily described compositional process further impoverished her art because such an aesthetic made for works that could be effortlessly replicated – anyone could simply set the motivating theory in motion, and quickly and effortlessly churn out similar material. One reporter grumbled that: “Maeterlinck could depict strange ideas without throwing a fit. Tennyson could evidence a mood without becoming incoherent. Any schoolgirl can copy jagged words out of Roget’s Thesaurus” (Crane). If Stein’s work was this easy to produce, if it was, indeed, “a scramble of meaningless words” (Pittsburgh Dispatch), then parodies were far too often far too close to hand. A letter to the editor of the New York Evening Sun offered the following as “an appreciation of Gertrude Stein:” She was something saying nothing. A vivid stewpan, an example of tender courage, but do buttons ever migrate? A vibrant oyster seldom saunters yet – how late is action. A proverb, a piece of cheese, a crimson doormat to see but never weary. How sensitive is all illumination; in chosen colors all will centre blindly. It is, that those were seeming. (M.E.S.R.) Often an attack on the theory that had produced Tender Buttons, or on the social context that gave it serious attention, parody not only asserted the poverty of the forces that produced Tender Buttons. The many parodies were also founded on an aesthetic in which great art was inimitable. The theoretical reduction, the curtailment, the random quotation, and the homogenizing also begin to explain a curious aspect of Stein’s reception: the many terrible parodies of her work. While the parodies do show what readers thought were bad aesthetic decisions, they don’t tell us a lot about Stein’s work, in the way that good parodies do. Parodies are a form of interpretation, but readers couldn’t fix on the features of Stein’s work, they didn’t know which qualities of her writing they could stretch. After all, how does one parody featurelessness? Wouldn’t that simply produce a work indistinguishable from the original? Having declared that Stein’s work had no nuance and no movement, being just one lump of indistinguishable material, reporters had trouble coming up with what, from today’s vantage point, look like good parodies. Too much dependent on a mimesis-based whimsical discrepancy between the title and the content, which reporters used in conjunction with the burlesque techniques of bathos and the deflationary word, the parodies vary Stein’s texture too much, turning it into bad surrealism, or even doggerel. Unable to fix on a good formal critique, the focus of the parodies seemed
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more directed at Stein’s apparent method of composition or the social forces that had motivated it. As these disappointing parodies of Tender Buttons suggest, Gertrude Stein’s clippings, then, were inadequate on many levels: they gave forced interpretations of the text, and they displayed a weak use of evidence. If evaluated or argued with on these grounds, they fail. But the clippings also show that not all the important uses of language are about change; not all uses of language should be evaluated by the evidence and proof they provide for their assertions. Their logical and evidentiary weakness are not central to the clippings; the work they accomplished is. This work was not completely exhausted by the end of 1914, for these dismissive responses to Stein were integral to a larger context that helped set direction for the future by provoking a response from modernism’s proponents. In response to their skeptics, modernists attempted to rework what “serious” meant when it came to producing art – in the modernist version, “seriousness” was not first of all verified through conventional definitions of trust, sincerity, and emotional expression; rather, it was achieved through technique, theory, and professional development. (Indeed, in this redirection sincerity could be side-stepped altogether with the introduction of irony as the century’s dominant aesthetic value.) Modernism’s proponents would argue that in the case of writers like Gertrude Stein it wasn’t just a procedure that was being enacted; it was a theory whose implications were being explored. Art was becoming inquiry. Modernism-motivated literary criticism, over the next 30 years, employing a different genre of writing, would also take on each of these dismissive readers’ central terms – mimesis, theory, and art’s relation to pragmatism – and rework them so that texts like Tender Buttons could reveal features that would show richness and development, so that Tender Buttons’ relationship to a motivating theory could make it more rather than less interesting – so that high modernist texts could be canonical.
Notes 1. Unless noted otherwise, all newspaper citations are from the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It appears that Toklas and Stein collected the earliest clippings in the Beinecke archive, but that by the time of Tender Buttons Romeike had taken over the collecting. The clippings are unannotated, and are organized in boxes and folders according to the works to which they refer. Within this category they are roughly arranged by date, although for some clippings the bibliographic information is incomplete.
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2. More contemporaneous data is unavailable, but in 1932 Time magazine noted that Romeike clients for some time had been paying a monthly fee of $5, plus 7½ cents for each clipping up to the first 100 per month. Larger numbers would be discounted (“Clipping Service”). 3. It’s also clear that many reporters didn’t have a copy of Tender Buttons, and were just quoting a passage that had been quoted elsewhere, making it stand in for an imagined whole. 4. As did more than a few reporters, this writer incorporates into his article unacknowledged quotations from the Claire Marie publicity brochure, which seems to have enjoyed wider distribution than the text itself. 5. The similarity of Tristan Tzara’s 1920 “How to Make a Dadaist Poem” to this review is astounding but, so far as I can tell, unconnected.
Works cited Anon. “The Amazing Gertrude Stein.” St. Paul Pioneer Press 5 July 1914. YCAL MSS 76 Box 75, folder 1371. ——.“Clipping Service.” Time May 30 1932: 22. ——. “Cubist Poetry.” Chicago Advance June 18 1914. YCAL MSS 76 Box 75, folder 1371. ——. “Flat Prose.” Atlantic Monthly 114 (September 1914): 431–432. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein Ed. Michael J. Hoffman. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986. 38–39. ——. “Futurist Essays.” Los Angeles Times 9 August 1914. YCAL MSS 76 Box 75, folder 1371. ——. “Futurist Literature.” Detroit Free Press 11 June 1914. YCAL MSS 76 Box 75, folder 1372. ——. “Gertrude Stein as Literary Cubist.” Philadelphia North American 13 June 1914. YCAL MSS 76 Box 75, folder 1371. ——. “New Books by Gertrude Stein ... ” New York City Press 7 June 1914. YCAL MSS 76 Box 75, folder 1371. ——. “Nonsense That Is Not Sense.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle 21 November 1914. YCAL MSS 76 Box 75, folder 1372. ——. “Officer, She’s Writing Again.” Detroit News 6 June 1914. YCAL MSS 76 Box 75, folder 1371. ——. “Our Own Polo Guide: The Game Explained a la [sic] Gertrude Stein.” New York Evening Sun 13 June 1914. YCAL MSS 76 Series VI. Clippings. Box 142, folder 3334. ——. “Rev. Of Tender Buttons.” Chicago Herald 29 June 1914: 15. YCAL MSS 76 Box 75, folder 1371. ——. “Rev. Of Tender Buttons.” Detroit Free Press 28 June 1914. YCAL MSS 76 Box 75, folder 1371. ——. “Rev. Of Tender Buttons.” Pittsburgh Dispatch 6 June 1914. YCAL MSS 76 Box 75, folder 1371. ——. “When the White Hunter Hunts.” New York City Sun 21 June 1914. YCAL MSS 76 Box 75, folder 1371. Burton, Richard. “Posing.” Minneapolis Bellman 17 October 1914. YCAL MSS 76 Box 142, folder 3334. Crane, Dr. Frank. “The Three-Card-Monte School in Literature.” [date and source illegible] YCAL MSS 76 Box 77, folder 1408.
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Diepeveen, Leonard. The Difficulties of Modernism. New York: Routledge, 2003. F.J. “Futurist Language and Ancient Verse.” Toronto Empire and Mail 11 July 1914. YCAL MSS 76 Box 75, folder 1371. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ——, with Jeffrey J. Williams. “Toward a Sociology of Literature: An Interview with John Guillory.” The Minnesota Review 61–62 (2004): 95–109. J.E.M. “The Gertrude Stein Club.” New York Evening Sun 26 September 1914. YCAL MSS 76 Box 142, folder 3334. J.R.G. “Tender Buttons.” Pittsburgh Post 4 July 1914. YCAL MSS 76 Box 75, folder 1371. Marquis, Don. “The Sun Dial.” New York Sun 18 January 1915. Rpt. in Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas: A Reference Guide. Ed. Ray Lewis White. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. 10. M.E.S.R. “C’est Magnifique, Mais Ce N’est Pas La Gertrude.” New York Evening Sun 16 October 1914. YCAL MSS 76 Box 142, folder 3334.
Part IV An Experiment in Pedagogy
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13 Modernist Periodicals and Pedagogy: An Experiment in Collaboration Suzanne W. Churchill with
Drew Brookie, Elizabeth Burkhead, Jamie Butler, Hall Carey, Cameron Hardesty, Joel Hewett, Ruthie Hill, Nakia Long, Kristen Psaki, Kat Schulmann, Amy Trainor, Ruchi Turakhia, Christian Williams, and Lauren Yero
“A review is not a human being saving its soul, but a species of food to be eaten,” writes Ezra Pound in 1930, underscoring a magazine’s function as an item for consumption (697). His emphasis on material products (rather than great minds) presages by decades the shift in modernist studies from a focus on individual genius toward an accent on modernity as a complex cultural milieu. As Sean Latham and Robert Scholes observe, periodical studies has emerged as a crucial field, requiring not only new methodologies for research, but also new approaches to teaching (517–518). Magazines offer students a glimpse of the diversity and chaos of modernism, revealing literature’s entanglement in the commerce of everyday life. With the expansion of digital archives such as the Modernist Journals Project (MJP), periodicals have become a more accessible teaching resource – a tempting item to serve to students of the “Net Generation,” who prefer web-surfing to trekking over to the library. This essay will lay out theoretical grounds for teaching modernism with magazines, discuss practical applications, and offer a case study of an experimental undergraduate seminar. Collaboration, I conclude, is key to periodical pedagogy.
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Theoretical grounds “This course is great in theory, like communism is great in theory.” Anonymous Course Evaluation There are many good reasons to use periodicals to teach modernism, but I will limit myself to four: 1. Magazines generate interest Research in educational psychology over the past 20 years demonstrates what we know from our own classes: interest fosters better learning, comprehension, and retention (Hidi 195). Whereas anthologies and critical editions may appear daunting or dull, magazines offer the lure of something new and different, yet familiar and approachable. Asking students to conduct research in magazines allows them to make choices based on their personal interests. It can also generate “situational interest” by presenting texts in new, multi-media formats (194). This is not always the case: the text-cramped columns of the Egoist can make a Norton anthology seem like easy reading. But journals ranging from Scribners to Blast provide a wealth of visual stimuli. Digital archives with search engines make magazines more attractive to students by providing immediate access, allowing them to look up topics of their choice, and affording the instant gratification of a results page. Some digital archives even restore what the bound volumes in many library collections have stripped away: arresting covers and advertising pages, which stimulate still more visual interest (Latham and Scholes 520). Modernist periodicals not only generate enthusiasm for coursework in the current semester, they also take students back to the excitement of modernism in its heyday. In the first decades of the twentieth century, writers, artists, activists, entrepreneurs, and ad agents experimented not only with ideas, but also with forms – including forms of periodicals. Reading these periodicals gives students what Ann Ardis describes as, “that sense of being ‘in the moment’ ... that feeling of being thrown in the middle of on-going debates about art and politics rather than being asked to stand back and revere ... the aura of great ‘masterworks’ ” (28 June 2007). Magazines immerse modernist texts in a welter of ideas, forms, trends, and merchandise. But the aura of the masterwork is not lost altogether. Patrick Collier says his students get a charge from “seeing pieces by famous authors sitting there, prosaically, among advertisements and other ephemera.”1
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2. Magazines illustrate the diversity of modernist practices Once they’ve aroused students’ interest, magazines offer valuable lessons about the diversity of modernism and the limits of any definition of the period. These lessons underpin Collier’s top two reasons for teaching with magazines: 1) it emphasizes, as nothing else can, what a very narrow slice of things we get when we read “modernism” in class ... , and 2) ... it places literature in a new and unfamiliar context for [students] – one that’s probably not epistemologically over-determined as the anthology or even the nice paperback trade edition with footnotes. Encountering modernism through magazines can be an exciting, if dizzying, prospect for both students and professors. Magazines radically widen the textual field of the period, presenting a broad view of modernity. By exposing students to a wide range of familiar and forgotten authors, they inhibit the “unthinking acceptance of anthologized writers’ status” (Weekes 461). They allow students to become their own anthologists and agenda setters, upsetting the hierarchies of the canon and the classroom. As a result, magazines introduce a degree of uncertainty for professors as well. According to Sean Latham, teaching modernism through magazines is “like working without a net, since my students’ research often takes them ... into territory unfamiliar to me.” Some students (and some professors) will have a higher comfort level with the resulting indeterminacy than others. They may long for the security of a canonical reading list and authoritative anthology. But they may also seize the opportunity to unearth artifacts that extend the limits of modernism, even as they discover connections that confirm a zeitgeist at play. For a collaborative research project involving modernist periodicals, my students did both. One group explored the influence of Japan on poetic images in Poetry and political images in The New Yorker, a project that acknowledged modernism’s international borrowings and connected little magazine interests to more mainstream preoccupations. Another group investigated the Crisis and Fire!!, finding that a shared enthusiasm for youth culture linked the two rival Harlem Renaissance magazines not only to each other, but also to the white avant-garde and to mass-market print culture. As these projects show, periodical research compensates for any loss of security by proffering access to the astonishing diversity and confluences of modernism. It also makes students aware of their own role in constructing (or trespassing) the boundaries of the period.
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3. Magazines maximize the skills of the net generation Though teaching with magazines may leave professors without a safety net, it capitalizes on the skills of a generation of students accustomed to researching on the Internet. The Net Generation comprises “young adults who have grown up with digital technologies integrated as an everyday feature of their lives” (Andone et al., 41). According to one study, daily use of the Internet by students at Seton Hall University doubled between 1998 (40.2 percent) and 2001 (84.3 percent), and nearly 90 percent used it for academic research (Bao 254). Today, those figures are probably close to 100 percent. Research suggests that digital technologies affect cognitive function: digitally-minded students “tend to learn visually and socially,” “enjoy enhanced interactivity and connectivity with others, and expect to learn in groups which may be physical or virtual”; they “want information fast but they want it presented visually and interactively”; and “they prefer ... learning by doing, discovery, or practice” (Andone et al., 42, 47).2 The traits of the Net Generation seem ideally suited to what Latham and Scholes identify as the distinguishing features of periodical studies – its interdisciplinary nature, its engagement with contemporary culture, its use of digital media, and its emphasis on collaboration (517–518). Using digital archives enables students to work together, apply their technological know-how, and connect the seemingly remote literary past and their own media-saturated lives. Magazine research also allows them to customize their reading and writing, so that they have a greater personal stake in their studies. If periodical studies suits Net Generation students, it may also benefit those of us who teach them. Jean Lutes, who teaches at Villanova University, theorizes that the lessons we learn from periodical studies can enhance our understanding of today’s students and enrich our own research practices: Studying historical periodicals with rigor – which means trying to understand how readers made sense of multiple stimuli, including text and visuals, advertisements and headlines – may well make us better at understanding how our own students read today. Interruptive, erratic, unpredictable practices of reading did not originate with the Internet. Newspapers and magazines bombarded readers with multiple stimuli long before “clicking” began to replace turning pages. So, inviting students to investigate periodicals may allow them to build on some tactics for reading that are already familiar to them. And it could foster new theories about interpretive
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processes in everyday life. When we start refusing to reduce historical periodicals to convenient, easily distinguishable items of text, we open up a new range of textual interpretation. We may well create a whole new set of possibilities for creative exchange with the rich, complex, and fluid textual environment that our students navigate with regularity. Lutes’s theory suggests another way that periodical studies can productively destabilize classroom hierarchies. Working with periodicals enables teachers to learn from students – to use their study habits to understand modernist magazine reading practices, and perhaps even to develop new research methodologies inspired by their cognitive abilities. Teaching with magazines also has the potential to improve students’ research skills – and they need it. The Net Generation prefers the convenience of the Internet for academic research: most work from home, rather than campus libraries, and use search engines like Google or Yahoo, rather than subscription databases (Wang and Artero 75, Bao 255). Alarmingly, 40 percent of students in a 2005 survey deemed the information they found on the Internet to be “as trustworthy” as what they found in academic journals and books (Wang and Artero 75). Though students navigate the Internet with regularity and confidence, they lack crucial skills in information literacy. Asking them to interpret and evaluate information in early-twentieth-century periodicals, presented in digital forms, calls upon and develops the very skills students need to navigate the current digital world. If beleaguered professors, struggling to master ever-changing technological resources, do not feel capable of teaching these skills, librarians can help. Indeed, I would argue that collaboration with librarians is essential to successful periodical pedagogy. College and university librarians are experts in new digital resources, and they can tailor training sessions to your needs. For a course on “Modernism & Magazines,” Barbara Green took advantage of this resource: “We met with a librarian repeatedly to work with various reference resources, with film, and to develop new research tools,” she explained, adding that, “It is difficult ... to wean students from an exclusive reliance on the Web for research, but well worth it.” Working in the more controlled environment of digital archives such as the MJP can help students develop information literacy skills. As they search these databases for modernist artifacts, they can begin asking: What institution or patron underwrites this magazine? Who is its intended audience? What biases might it have? Who is the author? What conclusions can I draw based on this advertisement? These are
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the kinds of questions students should be asking about the information they find on the World Wide Web, made more manageable and intriguing within the more limited realm of digitized modernist magazines. 4. Magazines provide new opportunities for research and collaboration The final, most fundamental reason for teaching with magazines is that it encourages new, collaborative models for research in the humanities. Literary research is typically conducted by the lone scholar in the library carrel. The sheer volume of magazines calls for more sustained collective effort. Collaboration is also in keeping with the spirit of magazines, which are, as Latham and Scholes point out, “by their nature collaborative objects, assembled in complex interactions between editors, authors, advertisers, sales agents, and even readers” (529). To develop research models adequate to the task of periodical studies, Latham and Scholes suggest that we borrow from the sciences, where research is conducted in laboratories by teams of professors and students, often resulting in multi-authored publications. They envision the “creation of humanities labs: similarly collaborative networks of researchers and institutions that lend their collective expertise to textual objects that would otherwise overwhelm single scholars” (530). On a large scale, such collaborations are resulting in tremendous electronic resources such as MJP, which has institutional support and is staffed by a graduate student labor force. But such labs can also be conducted on a smaller scale. Latham, co-director of the MJP, conducts classes in periodical culture “as a humanities lab where, like a lead researcher, the professor helps point students to new areas, provides them the necessary tools, and then gives them the structured space for experimentation and discovery. Not all such experiments work out,” Latham admits, “but they do provide some compelling research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students alike.” Humanities labs provide compelling research opportunities for professors, too, whether we work at large universities or smaller liberal arts and community colleges. Adam McKible, who manages a 4/3 teaching load at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is hard-pressed to find the time to scrutinize every page of the Saturday Evening Post, the way he did as a graduate student. So instead, he will ask his students in a graduate course on ethnicity, race, and pseudoscience in the early-twentieth century to research and report on a 12-month span of the Post – an assignment that will no doubt generate useful “finds” for his current project. I teach at Davidson College, a small, teaching-intensive liberal
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arts college. After more than a decade of teaching, I rarely encounter a student who can find something new to say about “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” but I’ve been amazed by what they discover in magazines – finds that generate my own interest, making me eager to read their papers. Some of these papers could even be publishable, if only we had the time and means to develop them. Last semester, I decided to conduct an experiment in collaboration with my undergraduates. The results of this seminar, which I describe below, confirm for me the value of the humanities lab. According to course evaluations, students were turned on by the laboratory model as well: “I think the group work aspect is a good addition to the English major,” wrote one student. “I got it in Biology and Chemistry, but it was fun to get it in [an] arena I actually like.”
Practical applications “I would suggest we spend more time looking at magazines.” Anonymous Course Evaluation For all its theoretical advantages, teaching with magazines raises practical issues of access, classroom space and equipment, and course design and coverage. Though each class will likely present a unique set of challenges, several common hurdles emerge in the collective wisdom of numerous colleagues in modernist studies, as well as in my own experience. Access “Convenient access to reading material ... [is] associated with more frequent reading” (McQuillan and Au 225). Presumably the reverse is also true: if it’s not convenient, they won’t read it. Most college and university libraries have collections of bound periodicals and microfilm. But bound periodicals are cumbersome, often lack covers and ad pages, and cannot be circulated. In our library, they’re in the basement, a veritable researchers’ crypt. Microfilm offers more coverage, but is buried deeper (in the back of the basement) and more difficult to read (scrolling through reels may generate mild to severe vertigo). Moreover, there’s something symbolic about housing materials in remote spaces that suggests their marginality to the scholarly enterprise; the British Library’s Colindale newspaper dungeon – located in a grimy suburb off the northern line in a depressing 50s-era bunker – serves as the symbol par excellence of the historical expulsion
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of “periodicals” from “literature,” documented by Laurel Brake in Subjugated Knowledges (xi–xiv). In order to get the magazines out of the dungeon and into students’ laps, I’ve photocopied single issues and had them spiral bound. But copy quality is poor, and the effort is timeconsuming and impractical for serially published texts. Photocopies or scans can also be placed on reserve at the library, but scan quality may be poor and printing costs daunting. Reprints are available for some magazines, such as Fire!!, Tambour, and The New Yorker (now available on a searchable DVD), but these are few in number, sometimes difficult to acquire, and may be cost prohibitive. Digital archives ameliorate the problem of access.3 Like the MJP, the best of these electronic collections offer full-color, searchable scans of entire runs of a magazine. New Internet resources are popping up daily, as libraries such as the University of Delaware and the Beinecke post digitized scans of their holdings on their websites. Many sites provide useful bibliographic information on modernist magazines.4 Here again, librarians can help you locate new digital resources and train your students to navigate them. Classroom space and equipment New digital resources require classrooms equipped to accommodate them. Whereas “business schools now have classrooms set up for collaborative group projects and for work with computers,” Green observes, many humanities classrooms do not. To work effectively, humanities labs need Internet access and computer projection, so that professors can model research techniques, and students can see and discuss digitized texts. A computer lab setting allows students to work individually or in small groups during class time, and then reconvene to discuss their findings. Just as different classroom spaces shape teaching and learning practices, different formats alter reading practices. “There are real differences between teaching periodicals in print form, as reproduced on film, and as digitalized texts,” Green argues. A wired classroom provides immediate access to magazines in digital archives. But a searchable database also adds a mediating layer between the magazine and the researcher. According to Latham and Scholes, digital archives introduce variables generated by editorial decisions (such as whether to treat ads as texts or images) and technical errors (such as those generated from text recognition software used to generate searchable versions of the original magazines) (521–525). Moreover, each search effectively creates a singular text that never existed before – a set of “hits” that
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becomes an interpretable object. A digitized classroom enables you to draw attention to the ways technology both facilitates and mediates research. As you lead students through a search of a digital archive, you can instigate discussion about how the search engine propels your analysis and conclusions. Course design and coverage Once you determine what magazines and classroom spaces are available to you, you face the next hurdle: incorporating magazines into your courses. You have a wide range of options, and sample syllabi and assignments are available on the MJP.5 You might test the waters by introducing an optional assignment for the intrepid student: give a presentation, make a report, or write an essay describing a magazine, analyzing a text in its original publication context, or tracing the appearance of an author, trend, or issue. Or, require the entire class to do the assignment, so that it contributes to their collective knowledge. Mark Wollaeger designed a collaborative assignment that requires students to work in pairs to research, present reports, and write papers on The New Age. Their presentations are spread out throughout the semester, providing a developing context for the assigned texts they read in books and anthologies. The focus on a single periodical has the advantage of providing a stable and recognizable context, but it runs the risk of exaggerating the magazine’s importance in students’ minds. You can offset this risk by making students aware of the scores of modernist magazines (and thousands of periodicals in the larger print market) and acknowledging that the New Age is one example, but not an exemplar. In addition to exposing students to the contexts of modernism, magazine assignments can open up a realm even more remote to them: secondary criticism and theory. Both Ardis and Green have had success using George Bornstein’s Material Modernism to introduce students to the concept of bibliographic codes. Ardis found that her visually savvy students were adept at analyzing page design (19 April 2007). Green’s students enjoyed reading texts mediated by their contexts, looking at Ford Maddox Ford and Rebecca West in Blast and Katherine Mansfield in The New Age. “The surprise here was that students produced much more subtle close textual readings when they were asked to look beyond and around the text,” Green says. Students are typically less proficient at reading secondary criticism; in fact, Ardis’s undergraduates in a senior seminar reported never having been asked to read criticism at all. She required them to summarize and synthesize other critics’ arguments,
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and found their critical reading and writing skills sharply improved. “Bornstein’s way of reading materially and contextually was deeply appealing to them,” Ardis says (28 June 2007). Perhaps the appeal of this approach, combined with the material attraction of the magazines themselves, motivated students to see themselves as critics. Applied to the material contexts of modernism, criticism may seem less abstract and esoteric – it becomes, like magazines, something students can handle. Because getting students to read magazines well requires familiarizing them with scholarly methodologies, covering all the material in a course on modernism can be a challenge. It is no small task to teach them to read the linguistic codes of modernist texts, the bibliographic codes of magazines, and the jargon of literacy criticism, as well as to show them how to apply new theories and methodologies to their own writing. Assigning The Waste Land in an annotated version, along with the November 1922 issue of the Dial in which it first appeared, and a few chapters of Bornstein for a single class session may produce a catastrophic case of information overload. For this reason, you may have more success devoting a course entirely to modernist periodical cultures. Taking this approach generally means sacrificing coverage of modernist masterpieces in favor of a sampling a slice of modernity – a choice made more difficult if modernist course offerings are limited at your institution. Courses focused on modernist print culture tend to be upper-level seminars, such as Mark Morrisson’s “Researching Modernist Little Magazines,” a graduate seminar that explores five little magazines. In a senior capstone course on “Periodical Culture,” Latham assigns a few watershed essays on magazines, followed by three “case studies” of Scribners, Others, and the New Age; he then meets with students in tutorials, guiding their individual research papers. Green’s undergraduate course, “Modernism & Magazines,” examines a variety of periodicals, including littles, slicks, advocacy papers, and womens’s magazines, in order to give students a sense of the “messiness of early 20th century literary culture.” That messiness may productively spill over into your courses. In a course evaluation for my seminar on “Modernism in Black & White,” one student appreciated that “we were able to cover a large period of time and come to a better understanding of a complex era of literary history,” yet lamented that, “the course didn’t have a true center.” This frustration indicates to me that the student learned an important lesson from modernist periodicals: modernism doesn’t have “a true center,” but it’s a fascinating network to navigate.
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A case study in periodical pedagogy: “ENG 487: modernism in black & white” “It was an experiment, but she was flexible.” Anonymous Course Evaluation I modeled my upper-level undergraduate course on a collaborative research seminar designed by John Wertheimer, a colleague in the history department. Out of this seminar, Wertheimer has produced half dozen articles on legal history, co-authored with undergraduates and published in juried academic journals.6 Inspired by his results, I decided to collaborate with my students on research in modernist periodicals, hoping that the experiment might result in a publishable article. Serendipitously, I had been invited to give a paper at a symposium on transatlantic print culture, which was to be held toward the end of the semester.7 This symposium offered a more immediate and accessible goal: if the collaborative papers were good enough, I would take two students with me to present them. According to Wertheimer, “organizational detail” is “the devil of the collaborative research seminar, or any effort to teach outside the box” (n.p.). His meticulously organized syllabus was my guardian angel. Still, I struggled to adapt his model to literary study and to meet several ambitious goals. Whereas Wertheimer’s seminar focused solely on historical methods, I wanted to introduce students both to methodologies of periodical studies and to masterpieces of modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. I was determined to diversify my course offerings and counter what I perceived as a neglect of the Harlem Renaissance in modernist studies and anthologies. Blackwell’s Modernism: An Anthology (2005) was a call to action. The hefty textbook claims to be “the most comprehensive anthology of Anglo-American modernism ever to be published,” yet it does not include a single African-American writer in its 1181 pages. Aiming to redress this negligence, our seminar would use the methods of periodical studies to challenge the color line dividing modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. The seminar title, “Modernism in Black & White,” suggested the perfect merging of theme and method, referring both to the volatile race issues and to the lively periodical culture that shaped modernism. As we read classic modernist texts by W.E.B. DuBois, T.S. Eliot, Nella Larsen, and Virginia Woolf, we would research modernist periodicals, seeking correspondences between Anglo-American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance.
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I divided the weekly, 3-hour seminar meetings into two parts, the first half focusing on assigned texts and the second, a “lab session” devoted to the collaborative research project. Following Wertheimer’s model, the syllabus outlined a careful sequence of assignments and deadlines. The first assignment was to read the symposium’s call for papers and write a topic proposal. Students then read and voted on each other’s proposals, ranking their preferences.8 Getting 14 students to agree on two viable topics involved more negotiation than I’d anticipated. The most popular proposals involved little magazines and canonical authors – topics that didn’t seem appropriate to the symposium. There was less interest in what I regarded as the most promising and original topics, such as exploring Willa Cather’s involvement with women’s dress patterns in McCall’s, or investigating the shipping practices that enabled magazines to make their transatlantic crossings. I had to explain why some topics that seemed exciting to students would not be of interest to scholars and to rally support for less popular topics. In short, I sounded more like a bossy know-it-all than the silent facilitator I’d envisioned. We eventually settled on two projects that promised to take us “beyond little magazines”: youth culture in Crisis and Fire!!, and the influence of Japan on American modernism in Poetry and the New Yorker. The topic vote was my first lesson in facilitating collaborative research. You must, as Wertheimer advises, “trust your students” – “motivate, coordinate, but do not dominate their efforts.” But I quickly learned the importance of the executive branch in a democracy, even as I strove for a productive balance of powers. I thought the students could lead the research once the organizational framework was in place. But even with a meticulously organized sequence of assignments, the students often struggled to advance. I learned to take a more proactive role as the “lead researcher” in the humanities lab. Before each class meeting, I reviewed their completed assignments, making my own notes about how they might collate and compile their individual efforts. Instead of lurking on the outskirts during lab sessions, I joined their circles, helping them articulate viable theses, organize their research, and outline their arguments. The size of the teams was both an aid and an impediment to progress. Each group comprised seven students, which gave them lots of brainpower, but made it more difficult to achieve consensus and coordinate meetings outside class. Next time, I will divide them into smaller teams of 4–5 students. Once again, each student will research and write an individual section of the research paper, but I will have them assign
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overarching roles earlier in the process based on their strengths: editor-in-chief, proofreader, fact-checker, bibliographer, stylist (or “sexerupper,” as the students dubbed the job). Designated roles will, I hope, clarify responsibilities, facilitate decision-making, and lead to more efficient and thorough research and writing. Assigned jobs will also allow me to hold students accountable for their individual contributions. No matter how many regulations I put in place, however, I will not be able to eliminate the human variable that makes collaborative research so interesting – and so challenging. Each group was different, and I had to adjust my tactics accordingly. The Crisis/Fire group, or “Cri-Fi’s,” developed a strong thesis early in the process: The Crisis and Fire!! are two important magazines of the Harlem Renaissance, but here, their resemblance seems to end. The Crisis will soon celebrate its centennial while Fire!! appeared as just one issue ... The Crisis was founded and edited by W. E. B. Du Bois and drew institutional backing from the N.A.A.C.P., whereas Fire!! was instigated by Wallace Thurman and a small cadre of struggling artists. Boasting a striking cover and daring depictions of AfricanAmerican individuals, Fire!! positioned itself as a youthful rebellion against a stodgy patriarch; its foreword declares: “FIRE ... flaming, burning, searing ... to boil the sluggish blood” (3). Scholarship has reinforced the opposition between the two magazines. Robert Hemenway describes Fire!! as “a child’s adolescent revolt against his parents” (49). More recently, Anne Elizabeth Carroll has argued that Fire!! sought to “create a space where African American writers and artists could present images that were dramatically different from the images included in The Crisis” (191). The perceived opposition between Crisis and Fire!! obscures a deeper connection between the two magazines: the shared prospect of forming a youth culture. Despite their differences, both magazines are saturated with discourses on youth and the “younger” generation. In its resistance to The Crisis’s paradigm for educated, pre-professional African-American youth, Fire!! stages a form of artistic rebellion that is less a direct challenge to The Crisis than a contribution to the larger project of constructing an active, vibrant African-American “youth culture.” Despite the strength and originality of this thesis, the Cri-Fi’s struggled to organize a supporting argument. At lab sessions, they would return again and again to the question, “But what’s our thesis?” “You have a
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thesis,” I insisted, laboring with them to resolve conflicts, motivate research, and synthesize findings. I scheduled evening work sessions in my home, where a change of scene (as well as food and drink) helped us break through stumbling blocks and work toward a common vision. At times, I had to devote as much attention to group dynamics as to intellectual development. But the excitement I got from their ideas kept me feeling more fueled than depleted by the effort. Ultimately, they developed a lucid structure for a manageable argument, as they put it in the final version: “We looked at the yearly Education Numbers published by Crisis, and compared them to the sole issue of Fire!! Our paper focuses on the visual and literary images printed in each magazine to show how both used similar strategies to depict and ‘sell’ African-American youth culture.” The paper went on to compare cover designs, illustrations, advertisements, and fiction in the two magazines. Whereas the Cri-Fi’s struggled to break out of the gate, The Poetry/ New Yorker group, or “PoNYs,” were off and running. To my surprise, the PoNY’s worked effectively not because they had a strong leader, but because they had none. Instead, they each dedicated themselves equally to the project. I heard occasional murmurs of frustration or friction, but they resolved the tensions on their own. The ease with which they worked together was reflected in the fluency of their writing: In 1913, Poetry magazine published Ezra Pound’s two-line poem, “In a Station of the Metro.” Although critics have labeled Pound’s variation on traditional Japanese hokku as “Imagism’s enabling text” (Barbarese), by 1917, Pound made the claim that “China is fundamental, Japan is not. Japan is a special interest ... But China is solid” (qtd. in Qian 18). Despite Pound’s denial, Japanese influence on American modernism extended well beyond the first years of Imagism to the end of World War II. The representations of Japan in the American consciousness – through graphic images, poetic images, and photographic images – form a narrative that bookends the period of modernism spanning the early 1900s through 1945. ... From the beginnings of Imagism in Poetry, through John Hirshey’s “Hiroshima” issue of the New Yorker, we can trace the power of images to transform, ostracize, and ultimately conflate the image of Japan with American identity. Although the PoNYs composed this cogent and elegant framework with little help from me, they required more assistance later in the process, when it came to the tricky hinge in their argument – the transition
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from Poetry to the New Yorker. They struggled with how to explain the disappearance of Japan from Poetry in the 20s, before its reappearance in the New Yorker in the 1930s. How could they make an argument about something that wasn’t there? How could they make a claim they lacked the evidence or expertise to back up? The PoNY’s ambitious topic forced them to venture outside the safe zone of close readings into the dangerous territory of theoretical hypotheses. This was risky territory for me, too. Normally, I discourage undergraduates from making theoretical claims they cannot back with concrete evidence. But in this case, I felt their research justified the leap, so I jumped into the fray and worked with them to formulate a hypothesis: From its first volume in 1912, Poetry published more than 40 poems and articles with overt relation to Japan. However, by 1923, Japan appears to cease to be of interest to the American modernists featured in Poetry, and China becomes the new source of inspiration. According to Zhaoming Qian, China represents the exoticism of the Orient that Japan itself esteems; China is the authentic resource, Japan a mere imitator (18). But if Japanese culture was rich enough to inspire early modernist poetic experimentation, then another explanation for the loss of interest in Japan is due. Perhaps the island nation was simply becoming too modern to serve as a symbolic resource for modern American poetry. Around the same time that Japan began to evaporate from the pages of Poetry, Americans became increasingly aware of Japan’s attempts at economic and cultural modernization. Only decades after first opening its ports to Western ships, Japan began to compete with world powers on a financial level and to modernize its own industrial and military enterprises. The modernization of Japan, therefore, may have repelled American modernist poets because their obsession with an inspirational “other” needed to be grounded in antiquity. After dropping out of Poetry and Modernist favor in 1921, Japan did not feature prominently in American publications for nearly a decade. However, Japan did not disappear entirely; it merely took on a different form. In the 1930s, Japan erupted in the New Yorker in the form of seven Japan-themed covers between March and October 1930 and one more in 1931. The first of the series depicts a young Japanese girl playing ping-pong somewhat awkwardly while her parents look on in shock and horror (Irvin, 1 March 1930). In the New Yorker of the 1930s, artists no longer use an apolitical poetic
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image to represent Japan but rather adopt a cartoon image tinted with Orientalist fascination and political anxiety. In writing these two paragraphs, the students learned several valuable lessons: (1) that unearthing “nothing” can be a significant research finding; (2) that arguments can be based not only on close readings of primary texts, but also on critical analyses of history and scholarship; (3) that forceful arguments can be articulated as hypotheses, rather than truths, thus opening doors for further research. As the excerpts from these papers demonstrate, the collaborative experiment produced stronger papers than I typically get in an upperlevel undergraduate seminar. Working in groups allowed students to take on more ambitious topics. They were able to conduct more extensive research, reading across magazines that covered a period of several years or even decades. They also learned ways to set productive limits on research, as when the Cri-Fi’s decided to limit their investigation to the yearly education issues of the Crisis. They worked together to solve intellectual puzzles, as when the PoNYs developed a hypothesis to explain the disappearance of Japan from the pages of Poetry. The final papers were better – more articulate, insightful, and persuasive – because students revised and edited each other’s work, refining and developing their arguments in the process. In planning the course, I anticipated that the two halves would fuse into a harmonious whole, with the readings providing a foundation in literary modernism, and the collaborative research unearthing a broader context. The literary texts would build a bridge between modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and the periodical findings would reinforce it. In practice, the two parts often competed for attention. Because neither project focused on crossing the color line, the course readings seemed distant from the collaborative research. One student evaluation explains: “The collaborative paper seemed to dominate the day-to-day coursework, and so the readings seemed to get lost in the shuffle. Not sure of the remedy for this, since collaborative topics may vary/depart greatly from the readings.” One remedy would be to follow the example of the sciences and conduct the collaborative work as a 3-hour lab that meets outside regular course hours. It’s an intriguing idea, but logistically daunting and bureaucratically impossible at some universities. Another remedy would be to assign research topics related to the course readings, but like Wertheimer, I believe “it is pedagogically preferable for students to generate their own topics – even if it means slower starts and, possibly (though not necessarily), weaker papers.” In my experiment,
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student-generated topics produced slower starts but stronger papers. A third remedy is to merge the seminar’s theme and methodology, focusing exclusively on periodical culture. The first weeks of the semester could be devoted to reading core texts in periodical studies and modeling analyses of modernist magazines, with the remaining time dedicated to collaborative research projects. None of these remedies is perfect, but they draw attention to the importance of setting reasonable goals when teaching modernism with periodicals. Because the territory is so vast, and the material so new to students, periodical research cannot simply be added to an already full seminar agenda. Challenging the color line between modernism and the Harlem Renaissance is itself an ambitious goal, one I hope to pursue in a separate course. Next time I teach a collaborative research seminar, I will scale back on coverage of literary works in order to focus on research methods in periodical studies. Though my model can be improved, the core value of collaborative research is evident in the students’ accomplishments. Both the CriFi’s and the PoNY’s sent a representative to the symposium, where their presentations received high praise. More than one observer said that their papers were as good as any others, and better than some. The full-length versions of both papers are worthy of publication (with some revision). Though the students grumbled about the intensity of the workload and the difficulty of working in groups, their course evaluations attest to the value of collaborative research in modernist magazines: The collaborative project, though frustrating, was a very fulfilling experience. Ultimately, I also thought that short writing assignments each week kept us sharp and focused on the reading. I appreciated the way the collaborative essay made me think. [The course was] interesting, informative. Opened my eyes to a new genre, which is exciting.
Notes I would like to thank Patrick Collier for his thoughtful suggestions, careful editing, and unfailing sense of humor, all of which made the writing of this essay a satisfying collaboration. 1. The quotations from Ardis and Collier, and several subsequent ones, are drawn from e-mail correspondence with colleagues who teach modernism at other institutions. The topics and dates of these exchanges are listed in Works Cited.
234 Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940 2. See also Napoli and Ewing for an excellent discussion of Net Generation habits. 3. See Latham and Scholes for a detailed discussion of new digital resources. See also “Appendix D: Electronic Indexes and Web Resources for Little Magazines,” in Churchill and McKible (eds.). 4. The website “Little Magazines & Modernism: a select bibliography,” co-authored by undergraduates at Davidson College, offers a useful starting point. Accessed 9 June 2008. 5. Materials from many of the courses discusses below can be found at “Teaching With the MJP.” Accessed 9 June 2008. 6. See Wertheimer for a detailed description of the course and his methodology. 7. On the symposium, see Ardis and Collier’s introduction to this volume. 8. All assignments were stored and exchanged electronically in public folders accessible only to students enrolled in the course. To avoid chaos and confusion, I created folders for each assignment in advance.
Works cited and consulted Andone, Diana, Jon Dryon, Lyn Pemberton, and Chris Boyne. “E-Learning Environments for Digitally-Minded Students.” Journal of Interactive Learning Research 18 (1) (2007): 41–53. Ardis, Ann L. “Re: My course.” E-mail to the author. 19 April 2007. ——. “Teaching with Magazines?” E-mail to the author. 28 June 2007. Bao, Xue-Ming. “A Comparative Study of Library Surveys of Internet Users at Seton Hall University in 1998 and 2001.” Colleges & Research Libraries 63 (3) (May 2002): 251–259. Barbarese, J.T. “Ezra Pound’s Imagist Aesthetics.” The Columbia History of American Poetry. Ed. Jay Parini and Brett C. Miller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Accessed 9 June 2008. Bornstein, George. Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page. Cambridge, Eng., and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2001. Brake, Laurel. Subjugated Knowledges. New York: New York University Press, 1994. Carroll, Anne Elizabeth. Word, Image, and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Churchill, Suzanne and Adam McKible eds., Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches. Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. Collier, Patrick. “Re: Teaching with Mags?” E-mail to the author. 12 April 2007. Fire!! 1926. Reprinted by Fire Press (Metuchen, N.J., 1982). Green, Barbara. “Teaching Modernism with Magazines.” E-mail to the author. 28 June 2007. Grimes, Deborah J. and Carl H. Boening. “Worries with the Web: A Look at Student Use of Web Resources.” College and Research Libraries 61 (2) (January 2001). 11–22. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Hidi, Suzanne. “Interest, Reading, and Learning: Theoretical and Practical Considerations.” Educational Psychology Review 13 (3) (2001): 191–209.
Modernist Periodicals and Pedagogy 235 Latham, Sean. “Re: Teaching with magazines?” E-mail to the author. 23 April 2007. Latham, Sean, and Robert Scholes. “The Rise of Periodical Studies.” PMLA 121 (2) (March 2006): 517–531. Long, Kim Martin. “Recent Scholarship on American Periodicals: a Two-Decade Sampling of Selected Resources for and about Periodical Pedagogy.” American Periodicals 12 (2002). 227–234. Lutes, Jean. “Conference Query.” E-mail to the author. 18 June 2007. McKible, Adam. “Re: Teaching with Periodicals.” E-mail to the author. 11 April 2007. McQuillan, Jeff. and Julie Au. “The Effect of Print Access on Reading Frequency.” Reading Psychology 22 (2001): 225–248. Napoli, Julie. and Michael T. Ewing. “The Net Generation: An Analysis of the Lifestyles, Attitudes and Media Habits.” Journal of International Consumer Marketing 31 (1) (2001). 21–34. Pound, Ezra. “Small Magazines.” The English Journal. 19 (9) (November 1930): 689–704. Qian, Zhaoming. Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Wang, Yu-Mei, and Artero, Marge. “Caught in the Web: University Student Use of Web Resources.” Educational Media International 42 (1) (March 2001). 71–82. Weekes, Karen. “Taking Stock in Live People: Using Contemporary Literary Journals in the American Literature Classroom.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 5 (3) (2005): 461–464. Wertheimer, John. “The Collaborative Research Seminar.” The Journal of American History 88 (4) (2002): 23 pars. 30 June 2007.
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Index Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures.
activism, 26, 36–38, 43, 51, 55, 76 see also specific movements activist-based periodicals, 26, 51 advertisements, 4, 38, 44n9, 70, 125, 137, 156 for appliances, 124 for Ayer’s Vigour, 193, 194 blind ads, 44n5 for Corona typewriters, 106, 107, 108, 110 for correspondence courses, 100–101, 106 for “Defiant” kitchen table, 123 feminine modernity and, 121–123 “illuminated advertisements”, 193 versus non-advertising content, 32–33, 35, 44n5 see also advertising advertising, 19, 36, 44n5, 66, 149, 187, 189 advertising industry, 2–3, 6, 8 advertorials, 70 feminist, 66–79 little magazines and, 192 posters and, 192 rise of, 184 suffragists and, 67 see also advertisements; marketing advocacy press, 22, 27n15, 226 Aestheticism, 186, 187, 195, 196n3, 196n9 aesthetics, 7, 37, 42, 49, 50, 153, 164, 188, 201 feminism and, 49 modernist, 42, 43 race and, 37 aesthetic value, 50 Africa, former English colonies of, 9 African Americans, 36 African American activists, 3
African American artists, 229 African American press, 36–38, 43 African American writers, 9, 227, 229 depiction of in Fire!, 229 youth culture, 229 see also Harlem Renaissance agents, 3 Allen, Charles, 183, 184, 190, 191 Allen, Grant, 42 All in the Family, 23 alternative media systems, 8 alternative press, 18, 21–22, 23, 26, 88–89 Amalgamated Press, 117 Americanization, 4 American studies, 3, 5 see also English studies; United States Anderson, Benedict, 22, 174 Anderson, Margaret, 42, 154 Anglo-American (term), 9n1 Anglophilia, 86–87 Anglophobia, 86–87 annuals, 149–151, 154–155, 157–159, 161–164 anonymous publications, 6, 31, 40–43, 45n15, 58 anti-feminism, 55 anti-modern politics, 51–52 anti-slavery activists, 55 appliances, 123, 124 Archer, Isabel, 168, 175, 177, 178 archiving, 10–11n7 Ardis, Ann, 1–12, 30–41, 53, 151, 183, 218, 225, 226 aristocracy, 84–85 Armstrong, Tim, 51–52 237
238 Index Arnold, Matthew, 6, 22, 84–96, 149, 152–158 “Civilization in the U.S.”, 91 Ireland and, 152–153 Stead and, 152–158 “Up to Easter”, 152 “A Word More About America”, 91 art books, 67 art history, 196n3 Art Nouveau, 186, 187 arts, 31, 35, 37, 50, 72, 98–113, 200 artistic movements, 186, 187, see also specific movements artists, 8, 192, see also specific artists fine arts, 195 patronage of, 90–91 tutorials in the, 100 see also specific media; specific movements Arts and Crafts movement, 186, 187, 193 Ashley, Laura, 72 associations, establishment of, 41 Athenaeum, 33, 100 Atkinson, Diane, 67 Atlantic Monthly, 3, 189 audiences, 3, 33 diversity of, 3 multiplicity of, 17, 20, 23 segmentation of, 17, 20, 26 see also publics; readership Australia, 9 authorship, 3, 30–41, 42, 45n15, 50, 111n7 anonymous publications, 6, 31, 40–43, 45n15, 58 commerce and, 98–113 commodification of, 41 fin-de-siècle, 109 models of, 98–99, 101, 103, 108 modernism and, 99 patronage and, 83–84 professionalization of, 41 prosthetic, 30–47 pseudonymous publications, 6, 31, 41, 42, 43, 45n14 Romantic ideal of, 98–99 semi-pseudonymous publications, 31, 42
signed publications, 6, 31, 41, 42 see also literary celebrity; writing auto-didacticism, 100–101, 103, 106 autographs, facsimile, 110 avant-garde, 32, 35, 37, 41–42, 54, 56, 184, 196n9 Ayer’s Vigour, 193, 194 badges, 67 Baldick, Chris, 1, 93 “A Ballade of Baldness”, 193 Banks, Elizabeth, 170, 171 banner headlines, 1 banners, 67 Bantling, Mr., 176, 178 Batten, Jean, 115 Baym, Nina, 179n2 Beardsley, Aubrey, 162, 192 Beddoe, Deirdre, 115 Beetham, Margaret, 33, 44n4 Beinecke Library, 224 Benjamin, Anna, 170 Bennett, Arnold, 42 bibliographic codes, 8, 32, 34, 35, 225 bibliographic histories, little magazines and, 183 bibliographic scholarship, 4 Billington-Greig, Teresa, 52–53 Bingham, Adrian, 54–55, 115 Birkenhead, Lord, 108, 128 birth control, 59, 60, 119, 123 Bisland, Elizabeth, 171 “Black Atlantic,” the, 9 Black Cat, 191 Black studies, see African Americans Blackwell, 227 Blake, George, 105 Blast, 32, 44n8, 218, 225 Blatchford, Robert, 32–33 blind ads, 44n5 Bloom, Ursula, 129 Bloomsbury, 3, 72 Bly, Nellie, 167, 170–175, 179n7 board games, 67, 167, 172 Boer War, 170 Bohemian, 182 book culture, little magazines and, 187 booklet, 187
Index book publishing, 1, 3, 67 book history, 10n5, 183, 196n3 book production, 5, 187, 196n6 distribution, 56 journalism books, 159 marketing, 56 production economies of, 8 see also art books book reviews, 70 border-crossings, 3–4, 9 Bornstein, George, 32, 77, 226 Material Modernism, 225 Boston, 9, 182 Bourdieu, Pierre, 185 bourgeoisie, 15, 20 philanthropy and, 84–85 ressentiment and, 85–86 see also middle class Bovary, Emma, 137 Bowerman, Elsie E., 127–128 Bowles, J.M, 192 Boxer Rebellion, 170 Bradley, His Book, 190, 193 Bradley, Will, 186, 187, 193 Bradley, His Book, 190 Brake, Laurel, 3, 4, 7, 10n6, 17, 33, 58, 112n9, 149–166, 164n4, 224 Braque, George, 162 Brice, Fanny, 207 British Library, 223 British press, 37, 88–89 British studies, 3, 5, 7 see also English studies; Great Britain Brittain, Vera, 62 brochures, 213n4 Brooks, Louise, 122 Brown, Bill, 66, 70, 71, 76 Browne, Thomas, 103 Buffett, Warren, 87 Building Society, 157 Bunker, Archie, 23 Bureau of Municipal Research, 207 Burgess, Gelett, Le Petit Journal des Refusées, 188 business models, 2 Caird, Mona, 54 Calavita, Marco, 24
239
Calhoun, Craig, 16, 25 “Campaigns of Curiosity”, 170 Campbell, Kate, 10n6 Canada, 9 canon formation, 185, 219 capital, ideas and, 6, 8 capitalism, 38, 90–91, 95n5, 141, 155 generosity and, 90–91 philanthropy and, 85–86 card games, 67 Caribbean, the, 9 Carnegie, Andrew, 4, 6, 85–94, 95n7, 95n8, 95n10, 95n11 Stead and, 150, 162, 163 Triumphant Democracy, 89–94 Carroll, Anne E., 36, 38, 229 Carter, Violet Bonham, 118 Castronovo, Russ, 37, 38 categories, 49, 52–55 Cather, Willa, 228 celebrity, 101, 110, 111n7, 152, 173 celebrity postcards, 67 Chalaby, Jean, 17–19, 20, 22–23, 24, 25 Chap-Book, 182, 190, 195, 196n8 chap-books, 187 Chapman, Mary, 77, 77n1 Chew, Ada Nield, 61 Chicago Advance, “Cubist Poetry”, 204–205 Chicago Herald, 199 Chicago World’s Fair, 186 China, 230, 231 Christmas market, 159–160, 164 Churchill, Suzanne, 5–6, 33, 217–235 Churchill, Winston, 108 cinema, see film circulation, 3, 4, 25, 49–50, 52–55, 58, 152, 153, 156, 164 of ideas, 54–57 mass circulation papers, 27n9 transatlantic, 59–64 see also transatlanticism; transnationality citizenship, 89–90, 91, 126–127, 154 see also suffrage Claire Marie publicity brochure, 213n4 Clarion, 32–33, 35
240
Index
class, 1, 15, 20–21, 23–25, 68, 84–85, 94, 94n2, 138, 140, 144–145n4, 154–155 classrooms, 224 cleanliness, 124 clipping services, 202 close textual readings, 225 Cohn, Jan, 138 Colindale, 223 collaborative work, 227, 232 collage, 36, 37 collectibles, 6, 18, 19, 44n9, 67, 68, 71 Collier, Patrick, 1–12, 10n6, 30–31, 43–44n2, 52, 98–113, 112n9, 218, 219 Colyer, Evelyn, 121 commerce, 19, 66–67 art and, 98–113 commercialism, 110 commercial marketplace, 8, 20, 43, 67, 68–79, see also literary marketplace commercial media, 121–123 see also commodity culture Commercial Gazette, 173 commodity culture, 6, 17, 19, 20, 66–67, 68, 70–73, 137–138 feminine modernity and, 116–117 feminism and, 69 modernism and, 151 suffrage and, 69, 71, 72–73 women and, 69, 71, 72–73, 116, 119–131 Common Cause, 22, 66 community-building, 21–22, 24 Comstock, Anthony, 59 Conboy, Martin, 19–20, 22–23, 25, 27n8 conceptual shifts, 3, 5, 6 Conrad, Joseph, 109 Conservative Party, 127 consumer culture, see commodity culture consumption, 72, 73, 74, 77 see also commerce; commodity culture contextual codes, 32 cooking, 73, 74 see also housekeeping
Cooper, Joyce “Mermaid”, 115 co-op movement, 191 copyright law, 10–11n7 correspondents, see journalists cosmetics, 137, 138 see also Lipstick Girl Cosmopolitan, 134 cosmopolitanism, 4, 5 “coterie consumption”, 72 counter-publics, little magazines and, 185 counter-public sphere, 17, 23, 41, 67, 154, 155, 158 craft, industry and, 193 Crane, Walter, 186 Craven, Elsie, 121 Creelman, James, 170 crime, 7 Crisis, 5, 6, 31, 33, 36–37, 38, 40–42, 43–44n2, 219, 229, 232 “Along the Color Line”, 39–40, 43 founded by W.E.B. Du Bois, 228 Harlem Renaissance and, 228 Criterion, 44n8 criticism, 149, 150, 225 see also literary criticism; reviews Cubism, 205, 207, 208 Current Opinion, 63 Curtis, Cyrus, 5, 135, 137, 138, 142 Curtis Publishing Company, 138, 141 dailies, 1, 16, 64, 154 Daily Capital, 173 Daily Express, “Marriage Failures”, 123 daily life, practices of, 68, 69–70, 71, 72 feminism and, 73–74 modernity and, 68 see also domesticity Daily Mail, 126 Daily Mirror, 38 Daily Paper, 155, 162, 164n4 Daily Telegraph, 54, 126, 164n4 Daily Trade Record , 207 Damon-Moore, Helen, 144–145n4 dance, 121 Dark, Sidney, 100, 105–106 DaRosa, Marc, 109 Dart, 37–38
Index Davidson College, 222 Davis, Richard Harding, 170 Decadent movement, 186, 187, 190, 195, 196n3 decorative arts, history of, 196n3 deep time, 174–175 see also temporality “Defiant” kitchen table, 123 Delany, Paul, 84, 94n2 Delap, Lucy, 3, 4, 5, 26, 34, 44n11, 45n13, 48–65 Delineator, 63 democracy, 2, 6, 19, 24, 30, 37, 41, 95n5, 126 democratization, 25, 26, 30–31 generosity and, 90–93 patronage and, 90–91 philanthropy and, 85, 89–90 radical democracy, 30, 37 women and, 51–52 see also citizenship; suffrage department store, 68 design, 1, 5, 36, 39, 44n8, 120, 123, 152, 182, 188, 225 see also layout Detroit Free press, “Rev. of Tender Buttons”, 199 Dial, 40, 42, 44n8, 226 dialogics, 38, 39 dialogism, 36–43 Dibblee, G. Binney, 16 DiCenzo, Maria, 3, 4, 5, 26, 34, 44n11, 48–65, 77n1, 129 Diepeveen, Leonard, 4, 7, 199–214 digital archives, 217, 218, 220, 221, 224 digital media, 6, 10–11n7, 220 digitization, 10–11n7 Dilettante, the, 182 Dimock, Wai Chee, 44n11, 174 discursive positionality, 35 dis-incorporation, 45n14 Dixon, Ella Hepworth, The Story of a Modern Woman, 144 domains, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76 domesticity, 66–79, 115–116, 118–123, 124, 128–129 see also housekeeping; private sphere
241
Doyle, James, 196n3 Doyle, Laura, 9 dressing, 69, 72 DuBois, W.E.B., 31, 42, 227, 228 Eastman, Crystal, 60 Eaton, Edith, 170 Echo, 164n3 Eckert, Charles, 119 Eckley, Grace, 164n4 ecology of print media, 3 economic experimentalism, 72 editorials, 58, 70 editors, 8, 187 education, 31, 39, 43–44n2, 100, 104, 111n1, 154 see also autodidacticism; literacy Edwardian era, 6, 8, 22, 34, 55, 62, 69 Egoist, 35, 57, 59, 218 Elf, 191 Elias, Julius, 118 Eliot, T.S., 84, 108, 110, 161, 162, 227 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, 223 The Waste Land, 226 elite culture, 94n2 elite modernism, see high modernism elite press, 20, 21, 94 emblems, 71 employment, 70 “End of the Book”, 193 Enfant Terrible, 182 English Review, 34 English studies professionalization of, 3–4 see also American studies; British studies English Woman’s Journal, 22 ephemera, 64 escapism, 21, 23 Europe, Americanization of, 4 Evans, Brad, 78n8 Evening News, 38 Evening Post, 138 Evening Sun, 140 response to Tender Buttons, 208, 211 everyday life, feminism and, 69–75 see also domesticity exile, tropes of, 4
242 Index Ex Libris, 187 experimentation, 7, 37, 50, 55, 58, 72 Eyles, Leonora, 117, 118, 123 facsimile autographs, 110 fantasy, visual, 119–131 fashion, 56, 58, 70, 121 Faxon, Frederich Winthrop, 183, 184, 196n2 Felski, Rita, 49 feminine modernity, 115, 116–117, 119 advertisements and, 121–123 commodity culture and, 116–117 visual fantasy and, 119–131 feminine subjectivities, 116 femininity, 72, 73, 115–116, 119, 121, 136–137, 139–140 see also feminine modernity; gender; womanhood feminism, 4, 22, 37, 43, 44n9, 48–65 advertising culture and, 66–79 aesthetics and, 49 American, 54–64, 134 anti-feminism, 55 British, 54–64, 134 commercial marketplace and, 67, 77 commodity culture and, 69 critique of modernism, 50–52 Edwardian, 6, 8 everyday life and, 69–75 femininity and, 73 feminist activism, 51–52, 73 feminist collectibles, 6, 19, 44n9, 67, 68, 71 feminist collectives, 67 feminist communities, 50, 55, 56 feminist consumption, 70 feminist identities, 67 feminist mass rally at Cooper Union, 60 feminist media, 52–55 feminist objects, 72 feminist periodicals, 49, 50, 69 feminist press, 48–65 feminist print media, 54–64 feminist studies, 51, 68 feminist theory, 51 feminist things, 66–79
first-wave, 17 the marketplace and, 66–79 media and, 52–55 modernist studies and, 50–51 modernity and, 70 new feminism, 60 objects and, 66–79 periodical culture and, 55–57 public debates in the media, 52–55 public sphere and, 66–67, 68 revisionist work on, 64n5 sacrifice and, 77 transatlanticism and, 54–64, 134 transnationality and, 59–63 variant feminisms, 119–131 visual culture and, 119–131 see also women’s movements; women’s rights feminist media history, 54 feudalism, 85–86, 95n5 fiction, 70, 103–106, 159, 161, 164n6, 179n4 early all-fiction magazines, 191 journalistic fiction, 161–162, 164n6 little magazines and, 191 middlebrow fiction, 7, 116 pulps, 64 serial fiction, 109–110, 111, 117–118 sexuality in, 139 short fiction, 70 suffrage fiction, 51 in women’s magazines, 117–118 see also literature Fidler, Roger, 8 film, 30, 31, 119, 121–123, 135 fin de siècle, 53, 95n5 fin-de-siècle studies, 53 literary movements, 185 modernism, 185 transatlanticism, 85–86 Finegan, Margaret, 69 fine printing, 185, 186, 190–195 Fire!!!, 6, 219, 224, 228, 229 first-wave feminism, 17 “Flapper Election”, 127 “Flapper Vote Folly” slogan, 126, 128 “Flat Prose”, 207
Index Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary, 137 Flint, Kate, 22 Fly Leaf, 187, 189 Fogg, Phileas, 171–172 folk culture, 20 Ford, Ford Maddox, 225 see also Hueffer, Ford Maddox foreign correspondents, 170, 179n6 Forerunner, The, 60–63 Fortnightly Review, 34 Foster, Edward, 196n3 Foucault, Michel, 42 Foyle, Kitty, 134–145 franchise, see suffrage Frankfurt school, 24 Fraser, Nancy, 23, 27n10, 40–41, 43 freak magazines, 183 Frederick J. Hoffman Papers, 196n2 Freedman, Jonathan, 196n3 free speech, 45n14 Freewoman, 35, 37, 39, 43–44n2, 56, 57–59, 60, 63, 66 see also New Freewoman Frye, Northrop, 179n4 Futurism, 207, 208 “Futurist Literature”, 208 Garbo, Greta, 122 gardening, 74, 78n7 Garvey, Ellen Gruber, 32, 44n5 Gates, Bill, 87 Gellhorn, Martha, 167 gender, 136–137, 140, 144–145n4 gender politics, 6, 27n15, 49 New Journalism and, 154 readership and, 154 see also femininity; masculinity generosity American, 86–94 capitalism and, 90–91 democracy and, 90–93 genres, 33, 50, 51, 55 generic expectations, 34 generic hybridity, 7 generic identity, 35 little magazines as a genre, 191 modeling of, 33–34 permeability of, 58
243
taxonomy of, 33–34 see also specific genres geographical space, 38–40, 55 “Gertrude Stein as Literary Cubist”, 205 Giddens, Anthony, 174 gift-giving, 6, 85, 91 see also philanthropy Gilded Age, 186 Giles, Judy, 116, 118, 123 Giles, Paul, 94n1 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 4, 44n11 Forerunner, 5, 60–63 transatlantic reception of, 61–62 Woman and Economics, 61 Gilman Circle, 61–62 Gilmanites, 61 Gilroy, Paul, 9 “girl reporters”, 167–181 Gissing, George, 162 New Grub Street, 143–144, 158 Gladstone, William, 88 globalization, 94n1 “glocal color”, 169 glocalization, 179n5 Golding, Alan, 40 Good Housekeeping, 5, 63, 117, 117–118, 123 Goodwood, Caspar, 177, 178 Google, 221 gossip, 7, 101, 110, 152 gossip columns, 101, 110 Grand, Sarah, 134, 135, 136, 144 “The Undefinable: A Fantasia”, 134 graphic design, see design Grasset, Eugène, 192 Graves, Robert, 115, 131n1 Great Britain, 1, 2, 3, 189 Conservative Party, 127 Edwardian era, 6, 8, 69 “Flapper Election”, 127 General Election of May 1929, 127 jealousy of the U.S., 86–87, 92–93 Labour Party, 129 New Journalism in, 15–29 newspaper publishing in, 30 United States and, 4–5, 86–87 see also transatlanticism
244 Index Green, Barbara, 4, 6, 17, 44n9, 66–79, 95n3, 221, 224–226 greenery-yallery periodicals, 183 Grieve, Mary, 117 Griffin, Robert, 42–43, 45n15 Gross, Robert A., 94n3 Guillory, John, 203 Habermas, Jürgen, 15–16, 20, 24, 26, 27n14, 40–41, 68 Hackney, Fiona, 4, 5, 25, 27n15, 114–133 half-tone printing, 1 Hall, Stuart, 120 Hamilton, Cicely, 52 Hamilton, Susan, 54 Hampton, Mark, 6–7, 15–29, 43–44n2, 100, 153–154, 155 ha’penny dailies, 154 Harcourt, Brace, 141 Hardy, Thomas, 99, 105, 108–109 “Message to our Readers”, 109–110 Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 109–110, 111 Harlem Renaissance, 6, 219, 227, 228, 232, 233 see also African Americans Harper’s, 187, 192 Harper’s Weekly, 63 Harte, Walter Blackburn, 189, 190, 196n3 Hastings, Beatrice, 42, 43, 45n14 Hatteras, Owen, 42 Haverford, Pennsylvania, 138 Haverford College, 140 Haymarket riot, 89 headlines, banner, 1 Heap, Jane, 154 Hearst, William Randolph, 117, 150, 162–163 Hemenway, Robert, 229 Hepp, John Henry IV, 145n7 Hermione, 208 Heterodoxy, 60 heteroglossia, 4 high culture, 115
high modernism, 4, 5, 35, 55, 86, 94, 94n2, 149, 184 as canonical, 212 era of, 195 market economy and, 83–84 Hilliard, Christopher, 24 Hinds, Lewis, 102 “Hiroshima”, 230 Hirshey, John, “Hiroshima” issue of the New Yorker, 230 His Book, 187 history, 3 Hodge, Alan, 115, 131n1 Hoffman, Frederick, 183, 184, 190, 191 Hoggart, Richard, 111n8 hokku, 230 Home Chat, 114, 115, 119, 121, 122, 122, 125, 127 “The Ballot-Box and Babies”, 127 “Miss 21 and Her Vote”, 128 “That Vote of Ann’s”, 122, 126, 129, 131 “The Wheels Go Round”, 127 Homer, The Odyssey, 100 housekeeping, 69, 72, 74, 115, 123, 124 see also domesticity housewives, 115, 116, 123, 124, 127, 128–129 Howells, William Dean, 144 Hubbard, Elbert, 191, 193 Hueffer, Ford Maddox, 34 see also Ford, Ford Maddox “human interest” stories, 7, 22, 33 humanism, 57, 61 humanities labs, 222, 223, 228 Huyssen, Andreas, 137, 151 hybridity, 7 Ibsen, 189 “illuminated advertisements”, 193 illustrated press, 64 illustration, technologies of, 7, 41 image, text and, 121–123 immigration, 89–90, 91 imperialism, 83–97, 95n7, 150 Indian subcontinent, 9
Index 245 individual collection cards, 73 individualism, 57, 59 information literacy skills, 6, 221 interdisciplinarity, 3–4, 5, 9, 53, 70 internal dialogics, 38 International Copyright Act of 1891, 189 Internet, 220, 221, 224 inter-public relations, 41 interview, genre of the, 111n7 intra-public relations, 41 Ireland, 152, 207 Irish print culture, 8–9 Irish studies, 8–9 nationalist press in, 8 Irish studies, 8–9 Jackson, Holbrook, 35 Jackson, Kate, 20, 21, 22–23 Jacobs, Deborah, 50–51, 53 Jacobs, W.W., 106 Jaffe, Aaron, 110 James, Henry, 2, 4, 72, 95n5, 109, 144, 162, 179n3 Portrait of a Lady, 4–5, 44n11, 167, 168–169, 171, 175–179, 179n2, 179n4 Jameson, Fredric, 85–86 Japan images of, 6, 219 influence on American modernism, 228 modernization of, 231 in the New Yorker, 230–231 Poetry magazine and, 231 japonisme, 188, 196n9 jewelry, 67 “jigsaw” newspaper page, 1 John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 222 John O’London’s Weekly, 5, 7, 42, 43–44n2, 98–113, 111n1, 111n3, 111n4, 111n5, 111n6 “The Book World”, 101 gossip columns in, 101 “Guide for Newspaper Readers”, 100 “The Making of a Novelist”, 103 “Message to our Readers”, 109–110 “Nibbles From...”, 101
“Questions and Answers” feature, 100 “Tit-Bits”, 101 “What I Hear”, 101 Jones, Aled, 37–38 journalism, 3–4, 7–8, 9, 48, 144 amateur, 186 as an art form, 156–158 British, 112n9 depoliticization of, 25 discourse of, 17–20 educational ideal of, 31, 39, 43–44n2, 100, 104, 111n1, 154 history of, 112n9 journalism books, 159 journalistic discourse, 17–19 journalistic fiction, 161–162, 164n6 literature and, 101–106, 112n9, 149, 157–158, 159 modernism and, 149–166 New Journalism, 15–29, 26n2, 33, 41, 54, 67, 149, 150, 152–153, 158–159, 162 personal journalism, 152, 158, 161, 162 political commitments of, 2–3 political economy of, 19 professionalization of, 25, 27n14 as pseudo-democratic manipulation, 16, 17 versus publicity, 19 see also press; specific formats; specific publications journalists American, 167–181, 179n3, 179n6 foreign correspondents, 170, 179n6 newspaperwomen, 167–181, 179n3 women, 117, 167–181, 179n3, 179n6 journals, see specific types of journals Joyce, James, 58, 84, 110, 161, 162 Judy, 59 Justice, 35 juxtaposition, 38, 39 Kaplan, Wendy, 193 Kauffman, Reginald Wright, 39 Keynes, John Maynard, 72 Kipling, Rudyard, 106, 191
246
Index
Kitty Foyle film, 135 novel, 134–145 labor, 59, 60, 74 Labour Leader, 35 Labour Party, 129 Ladies’ Home Journal, 117, 137, 138, 141, 144–145n4 Laird, Holly, 42 Lally, Gwen, 115 Lane, John, 32, 191 Lane, Margaret, 114, 116, 119 language, 153 Larsen, Nella, 227 Latham, Sean, 5, 10–11n7, 32, 35, 42, 44n9, 78n10, 217, 219, 220, 222, 224, 226 L.A. Times, 39 layout, 1, 34, 36, 123, 152, 188 see also design leaflets, 77 Leavis, Q.D., 111n1 Leavisite Cambridge, 3 Lee, Benjamin, 94n1 Leja, Michael, 11n8 lens, 49 Levenson, Michael, 157 liberation, 123 “The Liberator Relief Fund”, 157 librarians, 221 lifestyle, 72 Li Hung Chang, 171 “limited effects” research, 23–24 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 54 Lipstick Girl, 121–123, 122, 124, 125, 129 literacy, 6 information literacy skills, 6, 221 literacy rates, 1, 7 see also education; reading literary, the, 3, 4, 10n6, 149 literary agents, 3 literary celebrity, 101, 110, 111n7 literary criticism, 201, 202, 212, 226 literary culture, 37, 83–84, 187, 195, 226 literary experimentation, 56, 58 literary history, 226 literary magazines, 4, 34 see also fiction; literature
literary marketplace, 9, 43, 83–84, 108–109 see also commerce literary movements, 185 see also specific movements literary patronage, see patronage literary production, 41, 50 literary public sphere, 48–49 see also public sphere literary reputation, 4 literary scholarship, 200 literary studies, 3, 53, 203 literary value, 4 literary weeklies, 4 literature, 72, 152 journalism and, 101–106, 112n9, 149, 157–158, 159 materiality of, 3 modernist, see modernism print culture and, 195 as a socially constituted category, 3 lithography, 1 little magazines, 4, 5, 9, 10–11n7, 54, 58, 64, 151, 163, 182–198, 226, 228 advertising and, 187, 192, 193, 195 aesthetics and, 188, 188 aims of, 185 American, 182–198, 183 American writers and, 184 as art, 183, 188, 190–195 Bauble, 191 bibelots (alternative term for), 182, 184 Bilioustine (parody of Philistine), 191 Book Booster, 191 British, 189, 190, 191 British literature and, 183 brownie magazines, 182 chap-books, 182 cheap print and, 190–195 Chop-Book (parody of Chap-Book), 191 circulation of, 191 cultural context of, 185, 190 cultural debates and, 185 Decadents and, 183 defining, 184 early all-fiction magazines and, 191 as ephemeral publications, 182
Index 247 little magazines – continued European aesthetic and, 190 European literature and, 183 features of books and, 188 financing of, 196n10 fine art and, 186–190, 195 fine printing and, 188 first to feature new covers with each issue, 192 as a genre, 191 greenery-yallery periodicals, 183 history of modern literature and, 184 illustrations and, 188 mainstream magazines and, 187, 189 mass culture and, 190, 193 mass-market magazines and, 185, 190 modernist, 184 parodies of, 191 popularity and, 183, 191, 192, 195 poster art and, 188, 192 price of, 191 publishers of, 192 readership of, 192 subscriptions to, 192 toy magazines, 183 typefaces of, 188 used by radical and progressive causes, 191 Little Review, 33, 40, 42 Lloyd George, David, 128 Lloyd George, Megan, 128 London, Bette, 42 London, England, 69 London, Jack, 170 “London Letter”, 56 London School of Journalism, 101, 106 looking, reading and, 119–131 Lorimer, George Horace, 138 Los Angeles Times, 208 “Futurist Essays”, 208–209 Lotus, 187, 189, 190 Louisville Courier-Journal, 201 lowbrow audiences, 139 lowbrow culture, 2 lower-middle class press, 24
low modernism, 35 Lutes, Jean Marie, 4, 5, 44n11, 167–181, 220 lynching, 37, 170 Lyon, Janet, 37 Macaulay, Rose, 118 MacDonald, Ishbel, 128–129 MacDonald, Ramsay, 128 machines, 173–174 MacLeod, Kirsten, 5, 182–198 Macmillan, Maurice, 110 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 211 magazine assignments, 225 magazine dialogics, 37–43 magazine revolution, 185, 190–195, 196n4 magazines, 6, 31, 187, 221 American, 30–47 “branding” of, 33 British, 6, 30–47, 182 collaboration and, 222 design of, 5 early all-fiction magazines, 191 editors, 8 electronic collections of, 224 family house, 185 freak magazines, 183 French, 182 functions of, 217 as generating interest, 218 genteel, 191 incorporating into courses, 225 magazettes, 183 magazine dialogics, 30–41 magazine revolution, 185, 190–195, 196n4 mass-market, 185, 190, 191 modernism and, 151–152, 219, 224, 225 mushroom magazines, 182 the Net Generation and, 220 opportunities for research and collaboration, 222–223 public sphere and, 37–43 reading of, 119 searchable versions of, 224 service magazines, 117–119 shipping practices and, 228 teaching with, 220, 222, 223–226
248
Index
magazines – continued transatlantic crossings and, 228 twentieth-century, 6, 152 twentieth-century pulp, 191 visual culture and, 119–131 women’s, 226 see also little magazines; women’s magazines mainstream press, 18–23, 27n10, 40, 86, 88–89, 94 Manchester Guardian, 76 manifestoes, 77 Mansfield Katherine, 225 manuscript age, 187 Marble, Alice, 115 Marchand, Roland, 123 Marek, Jayne, 42 marketing, 19, 41, 56, 66, 94n2 see also advertising marketplace, see commerce markets, 1, 2, 4, 6, 25, 38, 72 New Journalism and, 24–25 race and, 9 segmentation of, 26 see also commerce; literary marketplace market segmentation, 20 Marquis, Don, 140, 208, 210 marriage, 116, 118, 119, 121, 129 Marsden, Dora, 5, 31, 51, 57–58 masculinity, 136–137, 140 see also gender Masefield, John, 101 mass circulation papers, 27n9 mass culture, 2, 94n2, 140, 141, 151–152, 203 mass electorate, 25 Masses, 163 mass market, 154–156 mass-market magazines, 140, 141 mass-market technologies, 195 mass media, 54 Mass-Observation, 23, 27n11 mass periodicals, 7, 26 mass readership, 7–8, 23, 24, 155 mass society, 30, 37, 45n14 material culture studies, 66, 77 material historical research, 2, 3, 7–8, 10–11n7, 10n3, 49
Matthiessen, F.O., 179n2 M.C.A., 42 McCalls, dress patterns in, 228 McClellan, George B., 176 McClellan, Mary Marcy, 176 McClure’s, 187 McKible, Adam, 45n12, 222 McMillan, Margaret, 62 McQuillard, Louis, 105 meaning through consumption, 72, 73, 77, 78n6 mechanical reproduction, 2–3, 108–109 media, 8 debates about feminism in the, 52–55 feminism and, 52–55 feminist, 52–55 media content, 23 media distribution, 63 media history, 5, 7 “mediamorphosis”, 8, 30, 43n1 media transformation, 8, 30, 43n1 permeability of, 56 public opinion and, 23–24 see also new media Mencken, H.L., 42 Mercer, John, 69 Mercure de France, 34 Messenger, 45n12 methodological issues, 31, 32–34, 54, 94n1, 204 microfilm, 223 middlebrow audiences, 139 middlebrow fiction, 7, 116 middlebrow publishing, 5 middlebrow society journals, 58 middle class, 68, 154 see also bourgeoisie Mill, John Stuart, 164n5 Miller, Daniel, 71, 78n6, 78n7 Millgate, Michael, 109 Milne, James, 98–99 mimesis, 200 Minneapolis Bellman, 7 miscellanies, 152 Miss Blue Stocking, 182 mixed-media formats, 1, 36 M’lle New York, 182, 196n8
Index 249 Modern Art, 192 modernism, 3, 5, 7, 11n8, 70, 131n1, 137, 212, 232 American, 228, 231 Anglo-American, 227 anti-modernity of, 52 authorship and, 99 commodification and, 151 confluences of, 219 contexts of, 225 cosmopolitanism of, 4 as a critical paradigm, 49 diversity of, 219 economic histories of, 83–84 experimental seminar on, 217 feminist critiques of, 50–52 feminist press and, 49, 58–59, 61 Harlem Renaissance and, 233 heyday of, 218 high modernism, 4–5, 35, 55, 83–84, 86, 94, 94n2, 149, 184, 195, 201, 212 influence of Japan on, 228, 231 international borrowings of, 219 journalism and, 149–150, 149–166, 161–162 little magazines and, see little magazines low modernism, 35 magazines and, 30, 32, 35–37, 43, 151–152, 219, 221 market economy and, 83–84 mass culture and, 151–152 masterpieces of, 226, 227 materiality of, 32 modernist aesthetics, 42, 43 modernist artifacts, 221 modernist journals, 44n9, 151, 158, 184, 217, 221, 222, 224, 225 Modernist Journals Project (MJP), 44n9, 151, 184, 217, 221, 222, 224, 225 modernist lens, 49, 50–52 modernist literary exchange, 184 Modernist Magazine Project, 151 modernist magazines, 151–152, 158 modernist press, 149, 150, 154, 164
modernist studies, 2, 5, 7, 10–11n7, 10n3, 35, 42, 49, 50–51, 154, 183, 217, 233 Modernist Studies Association, 8 versus modernity, 49 New Journalism and, 158–159 new modernism, 151, 164n1, 184, 185 non-canonical, 184 poetic experimentation and, 231 public response to, 201 public sphere and, 201 “recharting” of, 50 responses to, 200 scandalous texts as national events, 201 self-justifications for, 200 teaching with periodicals, 217, 218 as transatlantic literary and artistic phenomenon, 185 see also modernity Modernism: An Anthology, 227 “Modernism and Magazines” (course), 221, 226, 227 “Modernism Beyond the Little Magazines” roundtable, 8 Modernism/Modernity, 66 modernisms, 7 modernity, 7, 8, 56, 70, 72, 115–117, 119–131, 131n1, 151, 173–174, 176 anti-modern politics, 51–52 emerging modernities, 48–65 everyday life and, 68 feminism and, 70 journalism and, 167–181 market conditions and, 144 metropolitan modernity, 4 versus modernism, 49 print technologies and, 108–109 shopping and, 75 visual culture and, 30 womanhood and, 134–145 women and, 50–51, 63, 114–131, see also feminine modernity writing technologies and, 108 see also feminine modernity; modernism modernization, 131n1 see also modernity
250 Index modern shopping culture, 68, 71, 75 Modern Woman, 6, 115, 117, 118, 122–123, 124 “How The Women’s Votes Will Change Politics”, 127–128 Monroe, Harriet, 154 montage, 120 monthly periodicals, 3, 34 Moore, Marianne, 42 Moretti, Franco, 33–34 Morley, Christopher, 5, 144n3 Kitty Foyle, 134–145 Morning, Alice, 42 Morris, William, 193 Morrisson, Mark, 2–3, 34, 35, 51, 77n1, 151, 158–164, 185, 226 Mosher, Thomas, 193 Moss, David, 183 Mother, 117 motherhood, 115, 116 motion, 177 Mott, Frank Luther, 196n4 movies, see film multidisciplinarity, 152 multimedia, 50 Muses, 134 mushroom magazines, 182 Muskegon, Michigan, 182 My Home, 117 N.A.A.C.P., see National Association for the Advancement of Colored People narrowcasting, 17 National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, 58 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 43, 229 national identity, 6 nationalist press, 8, 9 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, 22 Nation’s, 45n12 Nativity Mirror, 39 naturalism, 189 Nava, Mica, 131n1 “Net Generation”, 217, 220
New Age, 5, 31, 33, 35–43, 43–44n2, 44n8, 44n9, 44n10, 163, 225–226 “Books and Persons”, 42 “Current Cant”, 38–39 New Age cigarettes, 19 new feminism, 60 New Freewoman, 31, 37, 39, 40, 41, 57, 58–59 see also Freewoman new historicism, 53 New Journalism, 26n2, 33, 41, 54, 67, 149, 150, 152–154, 162 gender and, 154 historians of, 15–29 markets and, 24–25 modernism and, 158–159 readership and, 154 new media, 6, 30, 49, 50 see also media new modernism, 151, 164n1, 184, 185 new modernist studies, 184, 185 Newnes, George, 21, 117, 158 “new patronage”, 83–86 newspaper publicity, 176, 177 newspaper publishing, 1, 6, 23, 30, 48 dailies, 1 democratization and, 30–31 educational ideal of, 100 organization of the newspaper industry, 3 production economies of, 8 Victorian, 43–44n2 see also newspapers newspapers, 53 mass readership of, 155 nineteenth-century, 202 time and, 174–175 see also newspaper publishing newspaperwomen, 167–181, 179n3 newsstands, 182, 192 newsys, 67 New Women, 134, 135, 136, 144, 164, 167–181 “New Woman” writers, 134, 135 New York City Press “New Books”, 205 New Yorker, 6, 142, 219, 224, 231 “Hiroshima”, 231 New York Evening Sun, see Evening Sun
Index 251 New York Interviewer, 168 New York Journal, 162 New York Public Library, 196n2 New York Sun, 199 “When the White Hunter”, 210 New York Times, 201 New Zealand, 22 niche papers, 21 Nineteenth Century, “Wild Women” exchange, 54 nineteenth-century studies, 3, 152 non-advertising content, versus advertising copy, 32, 44n5 non-consumption, acts of, 73 non-elite readers, 23–24 non-elite writers, 24–25 non-profit foundations, 84 Norquay, Glenda, 51 North American Review, 86–87, 89, 90, 164n5 Northern Echo, 150 Northern Star, 20 novelty press, emergence of, 186 objects, 73, 78n6 auratic singularity of, 71 domains and, 70, 71, 73, 76, 78n6 domestic, 68 everyday, 73 feminism and, 66–79 feminist things, 66–79 misuse of, 70, 76–77 organization of, 70 re-auratization of, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76 relationships to, 76 suffragist, 66–67, 68–79 theories of, 66 value of, 70 see also things Odhams press, 118 Odle, E.V., 105 “Officer, She’s Writing Again”, 204 Ohmann, Richard, 196n4 Omega Workshop, 72 “one-man magazines”, 191 opinion formation, 23–24 Orage, A.R., 5, 31, 35–36, 44n10 organizations, 51 O’Shea, Alan, 131n1
Others, 226 “Our Own Polo Guide: The Game Explained a la [sic] Gertrude Stein”, 206 Page, 191 Pall Mall Gazette, 87, 152–153, 155, 164n3, 164n4 pamphlets, 58, 64, 67, 170, 187 Panama, U.S. invasion of, 167 Pankhurst, Christabel, 60 Pankhurst, Emmleline, 60 paper production, 7 Papyrus, 187 Park, Sowon, 51 Pasteur, Louis, 170 Paston, George, A Writer of Books, 144 patronage, 3, 8, 94n2, 95n4 American, 90–91 aristocracy and, 84–85 authorship and, 83–84 democracy and, 90–91 economics of, 3 imperialism and, 83–97 “new patronage”, 83–86 systems of, 8 see also philanthropy peace activists, 55 Peacocke, Elizabeth, 126 Pearson, 117 pedagogy, 6, 32–33, 34, 44n3, 63–64, 215–235 Penfield, Edward, 192 Penguin Specials, 159 penny suffrage papers, 58 penny weeklies, 121–123 periodical culture studies, 77 periodical press, see periodical publishing periodical publishing, 1, 48, 185 American, 135 distribution, 56 educational ideal of, 31, 39, 43–44n2 marketing, 56 periodical communities, 40, 45n13 production economies of, 8
252
Index
periodicals, 10n6, 16, 53 American, 118–119, 190 artistically designed, 182 belletristic, 182 bound, 223 British, 118–119, 134–145 circulation of, 3 in the classroom, 5–6, 217–235 college and university libraries and, 223 commodity culture and, 72–73 design of, 7, 182 as entities in their own rights, 3 explosion of, 196n4 fin-de-siècle, 134–145, 221 genres and, 32–37 greenery-yallery periodicals, 183 hierarchy of, 3 literary, 182 mainstream, see mainstream press mass periodicals, 7, 26 materiality of, 77, 78n10 modernist, 217–235, 218, 219 monthly periodicals, 3, 34 as objects in themselves, 77 periodical culture, 31, 55–57, 67, 70, 76 “Periodical Culture” (course), 226 periodical culture studies, 77 periodical pedagogy, 217–235 photocopying of, 224 reprints of, 224 scans of, 224 teaching about, 32–33, 34, 217 as a teaching resource, 217 theory of the periodical as a publishing genre, 32–37 as things, 66 twentieth-century, 4, 31, 134–145, 221 visuality of, 1–2 weekly periodicals, 3 see also little magazines; periodical publishing; specific formats periodization, 49, 52–55, 56–57 personal journalism, 152, 158, 161, 162 Pethick Lawrence, Emmeline, 74 Le Petit Journal des Refusées, 188
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 9, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141–143, 145n7 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition (1876), 186 philanthropy, 21, 95n4 American, 86–94 bourgeoisie and, 84–85 capitalism and, 85–86 definition of, 94–95n3 democracy and, 85, 89–90 scientific philanthropy, 84, 87 as a “third sector”, 84–85 transatlantic exchange and, 83–94 transatlantic print culture and, 83–97 in the U.S., 84–85 in the Victorian era, 85 see also gift-giving; patronage; patronage Philistine, 191 Phillippine insurrection, 170 Phillippines, U.S. invasion of, 170 Philly, 142 photo-engravings, half-tone, 189 Picasso, Pablo, 162 Piker, Josh, 94 Pittsburgh Dispatch, 170–171, 179n7, 199, 204, 208, 211 Pittsburgh Post, 208 Poetry, 219, 230, 231 politics, 2–3, 19, 21, 21–22, 26, 34, 36–38, 56, 72 anti-modern, 51–52 anti-modern politics, 51–52 gender politics, 6, 27n15, 49 political events, 67 political interest, 1 political periodicals, 51 political power, 7, 8–9, 25 politics of representation, 36 women and, 126–127, 127–128 popular culture, 20 popular dailies, 64 popularization, 6–7 popular press, 20, 21, 24 as an agent of hegemony, 19–20, 23, 25 British, 54–55 depoliticization of, 25 feminist discourses in, 54–55
Index 253 population growth, 1 postcards, 67 poster art, 72, 192 American craze for, 192 little magazines and, 188, 192 magazine sales and, 195 sought after by collectors, 192 suffrage poster art, 72 women’s fashion and, 192 Pound, Ezra, 42, 58, 84, 217, 230 Power, Cecil, 42 pragmatism, 200 Premier School of Journalism, 101 press, 145n7, 153–154 advocacy press, 22, 27n15, 226 African American press, 36–38, 43 alternative press, 19, 21–22, 23, 26, 88–89 British press, 16, 37, 88–89 depoliticization of, 19 elite press, 20, 21, 94 illustrated press, 64 Irish nationalist press, 8 lower-middle class press, 24 mainstream press, 18–19 nationalist press, 8, 9 nineteenth-century, 20 novelty press, 186 radical press, 20, 22 suffrage press, 20, 22, 58, 66–67, 70–73 print culture, 3, 8, 10n5, 31, 33, 44n11, 68, 110 funding of, 83–97 history of, 11n8 literature and, 195 mass market, 219 modern, 208 modernist, 226 in new modernist studies, 185 philanthropy and, 83–97 production economies of, 83–97 revolution in, 31, 33, 41 transatlantic, 48–65, 83–97, 227 transnational, 83–97 transnational nature of, 55–57 turn of the century, 185 twentieth-century, 8, 11n8 white avant-garde, 219
print culture studies, 6 printed text, “revolution” of the, 2 printers, 186, 187 printing amateur, 186 artistic, 193 half-tone printing, 1 lithography, 1 print technologies, 1–3, 108–109 utilitarian aims of, 186 print media, 3, 7, 8, 10n5, 36, 49, 54 private presses, 187 private sphere, 68, 72, 115, 124 see also domesticity professionalization, 3–4, 25, 27n14, 40 profit motive, 2 progress, 52, 123 promotional spectacle, 66, 67 propaganda, 69 prosperity, 89–90, 90–91 prosthetic authorship, 30–47, 45n14 pseudonymous publications, 6, 31, 41, 42, 43, 45n14 publicity, 176, 177 versus journalism, 19 modern interest in, 202 newspaper publicity, 176, 177 publicity brochures, 213n4 Public Ledger, 138 public opinion, 19, 23–24 publics, 15 multiplicity of, 23 subaltern publics, 41 see also audiences public sphere, 3, 6, 15–29, 26n1, 27n15, 45n14, 69, 72, 175–176 alternative, 27n5, 155, 158 definition of the, 40–41 feminism and the, 66–67, 68 literary, 48–49, 48–49 magazine dialogics and the, 37–43 staging the, 30–41 structural transformation of the, 15–16, 17, 20, 23, 24 theory of the, 40–41 women and the, 51–52, 68, 114, 115–116, 119 publishers, 187
254 Index publishing, 63–64 amateur, 186 economics of, 8, 9, 83–97 publishing houses, 187 see also specific publishers publishing industry, 144 see also specific kind of publishing puffing, 44n5 Pulitzer, Joseph, 162, 171 pulps, 64 Puma, Edward Li, 94n1 Qian, Zhaoming, 231 Quest, 191 race, 9, 36–38, 40, 43 radical democracy, 30, 37 radical press, 20, 22 railways, 174 Rainey, Lawrence, 84, 94n2, 151 rationality, 6, 17, 19, 68 Raymond, Ernest, 103–105, 108 Raymond, Joad, 15 Rayner, Olive Pratt, 42 readership, 1, 7, 17, 23, 56, 153, 154 American, 4, 58–59 diversity of, 31 elite, 155 female, 70, 154 gender and, 154 male, 154 mass readership, 7–8, 23, 24, 155 models of, 104–105 New Journalism and, 154 non-elite readers, 23–24, 23–24 readers as writers, 106 working-class, 23 see also audiences reading looking and, 119–131 magazine reading, 119 of magazines, 119 models of, 99, 100–101 reading ability, 1 reading circles, 56 reading communities, 56 reading practices, 64 visual culture and, 119–131 see also literacy
realism, 189 re-auratization, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76 reception, 4, 33, 34, 64 repackaging, 33 reporters, see journalists “Researching Modernist Little Magazines” (graduate seminar), 226–227 research seminars, 227 ressentiment, 85–86, 89, 91, 92–93, 95n6 “A Resume”, 189–190 Reverberator, 176 reviewers, 3 Review of Reviews, 56, 150, 155, 159, 163–164, 164n4 reviews, 7, 34, 70 Revolution, 61 Rhodes, Cecil, 163 robber barons, 95n5 Rodman, Henrietta, 60 Rogers, Ginger, 135 Roget’s Thesaurus, 211 Roland, Madame, 170 Rolfe, Frederick, Nicholas Crabbe, 144 Romeike (clipping service), 202, 212n1 Rood, Henry E., 164n5 Rosciszewski, Jan de Junosza, 36 Rose, Jonathan, 24, 100, 111n6 Rothermere press, 126 Rothman, Steven, 144n3 Rubric, 187 Ruddick, Nicholas, 42, 173 “rules of scarcity”, 4 Russell, Dora, 62 Russo-Japanese War, 170 sacrifice, 77 St. Joseph News-press, 201 St. Paul Pioneer press, 205, 209 “Amazing Gertrude Stein”, 206 Salmon, 110, 111n7 San Antonio, Texas, 201 San Antonio Light, 200, 202 sandwich boards, 67
Index 255 Sanger, Margaret, 59–60 Woman Rebel, 5, 54, 56, 60, 65 Saturday Evening Post, 137, 138–139, 141, 144–145n4, 222 Savoy, 161, 163 Sawaya, Francesca, 4, 6, 83–97 Schiaparelli, Elsa, 115 Scholes, Robert, 5, 10–11n7, 32, 35, 44n9, 151, 184, 196n2, 217, 220, 222, 224 scientific philanthropy, 84, 87 Scotland, 9 Scott, Bonnie Kime, 64n3 Scott, John W. Robertson, 164n4 Scott-James, R.A., 16, 21, 34, 48 Scribners, 218, 226 Scroll, 187 Sealander, 94n3 searchable DVD, 224 search engines, 218 segmented markets, 26 self-denial, 73, 74 self-help ethic, 102, 103, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111n8 self-improvement, 111n8 see also self-help ethic semi-pseudonymous publications, 31, 42 serial miscellanies, 152 serials, 152 service magazines, 117–119 Seton Hall University, 220 sexuality, 123, 131, 139 sexual politics, 59 Shafts, 61 Sharp, Evelyn, 68, 70, 74–76 “shop girls”, 75 shopping, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 118 short fiction, 70 signed publications, 6, 31, 41, 42 single tax movement, 191 slavery, 89–90 slicks, 226 small press, 19, 22, 23, 26, 27n9 Smart Set, 42 Smith, Eleanor, 128 Smith, Goldwin, 86–87 social inequality, 95n4
socialism, 3, 35, 37, 61, 191 socialist weeklies, 35 social movements, 49 see also activism social order, 6 social reform, 50, 51 see also activism Society for Constructive Birth Control, 123 Society of Authors, 41 South Africa, 9 Southern Horrors, 170 Spanish-American War, 170 spectacle, 6, 66, 67 speed, 108, 173–174 Spencer, Herbert, 87, 89 Spicer, Dorothy, 114 sports, 7 Stackpole, Henrietta, 4–5, 167, 168–169, 171, 175–179, 179n3 Stead, W.T., 4, 7, 17, 19, 27n5, 88, 149–166, 164n3, 164n5, 164n6, 164n7, 164n8 2 + 2 = 4, 150, 157, 160 “After Two Years”, 164n4 The Americanization of the World, 163 Annuals, 149–151, 154–159, 161–162 Arnold and, 152–158 background of, 150 concept of journalism, 154–156 Daily Paper, 155, 162, 164n4 Despairing Democracy, 150 faith of, 157, 161 fiction and, 159, 161–162 journalism and, 158, 161, 163 journalist fiction, 164n6 mass media and, 154–156 modernism and, 158–164 Morrisson and, 158–164 Mr. Carnegie’s Conundrum, 150, 155–157, 162 New Journalism and, 153, 154, 158–159, 162 From the Old World to the New, 159–160 optimism of, 155–157, 163 personal journalism of, 152, 158, 161
256 Index Stead, W.T. – continued readership of, 154–155 Satan’s Invisible World Displayed, 150, 159, 162–163 Saturday Evening Post, 161 Stearns, Peter, 95n6 Stein, Gertrude, 199, 201, 204, 207 aesthetic theory and, 208 aphasia and, 209 attacked as insincere, 208 clipping archive of, 199, 212 clipping services and, 202 compositional process, 209, 211 Cubism and, 204, 207, 208, 209 dismissive responses to, 204, 212 Futurism and, 207, 208 interarts theory, 208 madness and, 209 parodies of, 211 publicity and, 208 responses to, 200 Tender Buttons, 7, 199–214 theories and, 212 writing of, 204 Stern, G.B., 115 Stetz, Margaret D., 4, 5, 7, 8, 134–145, 191 Stone, Herbert, 186 Stopes, 123 Strafford, Wynnewood VI, 141–143 Strand, 21 style, 19, 21 subaltern publics, 41 subscription databases, 221 subsidies, 27n9 suffrage, 57–58, 63, 70, 114, 116, 122, 126, 126–129 business of, 75 consumption and, 77 domesticity and, 66–79 sacrifice and, 77 suffrage activities, 72 suffrage collectibles, 70–72, 74, 77 suffrage culture, 66–79 suffrage discourse, 68–79 suffrage literature, 51, 72 suffrage objects, 71–72 suffrage periodicals, 4, 58, 66–67, 70–73, 76, 77, 115 suffrage poster art, 72
suffrage press, 20, 22, 115 suffrage shops, 68, 69, 72, 74–77 “suffrage things”, 70 see also suffragists Suffragette, 66 suffragettes, see suffragists suffragists, 2–3, 4, 17, 44n9, 55, 60, 61, 68 advertising and, 67 British, 60 commercial activities of, 68–79 commodity culture and, 69, 71 everyday life and, 71, 72, 73 fundraising by, 73 imprisonment of, 73 objects and, 73 sacrifice by, 73 self-denial by, 73 Sui Sin Far, 170 Sunday press, 20 “sun Dial”, 209 Supreme Court, 207 surrealism, 211 Symbolism, 186, 187, 195, 196n3 Symonds, Emily Morse, A Writer of Books, 144 tabloidization, 19–20 tabloid journalism, 27n5 Tambour, 224 Tarbell, Ida, 170 taste, shaping of, 40 teacups, 71 tea-sets, 19, 67, 71 technology, 1–3, 8, 173–175 illustration technology, 7, 41 mass-market technologies and strategies, 195 paper production, 7 print technologies, 1, 108–109 writing technologies, 106–108 temperance activists, 55 temporality, 38–40, 44n11, 55, 174–175, 176, 177, 178–179 Tennyson, Alfred, 211 text recognition software, 224 texts close textual readings, 225 images and, 121–123 modernist, 199, 218, 226
Index 257 textual editing theory, 32 theory, 3, 200 “thick” histories, 4, 7 things, 6, 30, 66, 70, 77, 119 see also objects thing theory, 6, 66, 70, 77 third space, 69 Thompson, Susan Otis, 186 Time magazine, 213n2 Times Literary Supplement, 3, 100 Times of London, 38 Titanic, the, 150 Tit-Bits, 21, 35, 39, 44n10, 158 T.K.L., 42 Toklas, Alice B., 212n1 Toledo, Ohio, 201 Toledo Blade, 7, 200, 202 Tomlinson, H.M., 105–106 Tom T., 36 Tonson, Jacob (Arnold Bennett), 42 Toronto Christian Guardian, 38 Toronto Empire and Mail, 208 Touchette, Ralph, 176, 177 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 192 T.P. and Cassell’s Weekley, 111n3 T.P.’s Journal of Great Deeds, 38 T.P.’s Weekly, 35, 39, 44n10, 99, 111n3, 111n6 “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, 201, 201–202 transatlanticism, 3, 4–5, 94n1 feminism and, 54–64, 55–57, 59–60, 61–63, 134 fin de siècle, 85–86 periodical culture and, 55–57 transatlantic exchange, 6, 83–94 transatlantic print culture, 83–97 transnationality, 7 feminism and, 59–63 feminist print culture and, 54–64 print culture and, 83–97 transnational exchange, 54–57, see also transatlanticism see also transatlanticism transportation, 174–175, 177 Tribune, 171 Tusan, Michelle, 20–23, 115 Twain, Mark, 95n5 Twentieth Century Authors, 136
twentieth-century studies, 3, 9, 30–41, 53, 152, 218 typeface, 188 typography, 188 Tzara, Tristan, “How to Make a Dadaist Poem”, 213n4 Ulricchio, William, 6 Ulrich, Carolyn, 183, 184, 190, 191 United Kingdom, see Great Britain United States, 1, 2, 3, 193, 199–214 American identity, 230 American studies, 3, 5 culture in the, 196n3 Gilded Age in the, 186 Great Britain and the, 4–5, 86–87 jealousy of Great Britain, 86–87, 92–93 literature of the, 189, 190, 231 nationalist press in the, 9 patronage in the, 90–91 periodicals in the, 190 philanthropy and the, 84–85, 86–94 post-Civil War, 186 the press in the, 37 the publishing industry in the, 144 rise of the, 186 see also transatlanticism University of Delaware, 224 University of Delaware symposium on transatlantic print culture, 8 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 196n2 U.S. Atrocities, 170 Verne, Jules, 171–172, 174 Around the World in Eighty Days, 171 Victorian era, 85, 149 Victorian periodicals, 35 Victorian press, 17 Victorian print culture, 2, 3 Victorian print culture studies, 3 Victorian studies, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 34, 41, 44n4, 53, 152 Villanova University, 220 visual arts, 11n8, 39 visual communication, 119
258
Index
visual culture, 1–2, 8, 30, 35, 37, 66–67 feminism and, 119–131 magazines and, 119–131 reading and, 119–131 visual fantasy, feminine modernity and, 119–131 visual texts, 1–2 Vogel, Todd, 9 The Vote, 66, 73 Votes for Women, 19, 22, 56, 66, 68, 69–70, 74–76, 77, 129 “The World We Live In”, 70 Votes for Women commodities, 73 Votes for Women shops, 69, 74–75 voting rights, 70 see also suffrage wages, 70 Wales, 9 Walton, Izaak, 103 Warborough, Martin Leach, 42 Warner, Michael, 9, 31, 45n14 Waugh, Alec, 101 Wausau, Wisconsin, 182 weekly periodicals, 3, 154 free weeklies, 154 literary, 4 literary weeklies, 4 penny weeklies, 121–123 socialist weeklies, 35 Wells, H.G., 99, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110 Wells, Ida B., 170 Wertheimer, John, 227, 228, 232 West, Rebecca, 51, 52, 118, 154, 161, 225 Western College Magazine, “Bubble and Squeak”, 182 Westminster Gazette, 21 Westminster Review, 54 Wexler, Joyce, 98–99, 103 Whim, 182 White, Cynthia, 115, 117 Whitten, Wilfred, 99–100, 102–103 Wicke, Jennifer, 72 Wife and Home, 117 Wild, Jonathan, 99–100, 111n1, 111n4, 111n5 Wilde, Oscar, 72, 186
Wilkinson, Ellen, 119 Williams, Raymound, 10n5 Winkiel, Laura, 9 Wollaeger, 10n6 Wollaeger, Mark, 225 Woman, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119–131, 124, 125, 130 Woman and Home, 117 womanhood modernity and, 134–145 modern representations of, 116, 118, 119–131 traditional representations of, 73 Woman Rebel, 56, 59–60 Woman’s Illustrated, 118 Woman’s Journal, 56, 61 Woman’s Own, 118 Woman’s Signal, 163 Woman’s Weekly, 6, 117, 119, 120 “Chats on Careers”, 120–121 women, 23 birth control and, 59, 60, 119, 123 citizenship and, 126–127 consumer culture and, 116, 119–131 as consumers, 70 democracy and, 51–52 in government, 114, 128, 129 independence of, 127 journalism and, 167–181 as journalists, 117, 167–181 middle-class, 68 modernity and, 50–51, 63, 114–131, 167–181 motherhood and, 115, 116 New Women, 134, 135, 136, 144, 164, 167–181 politics and, 126–127 in the private sphere, 115 in the public sphere, 114, 115–116, 119, 128–129 public sphere and, 51–52, 68 as readers, 70 sexuality and, 121, 131 in sports, 116, 121 in the workforce, 114–115, 116, 119, 120–121, 129 see also feminine modernity; femininity; feminism; gender; suffrage; womanhood; women’s issues; women’s rights
Index women’s advocacy press, 22, 27n10, 27n15 The Women’s Guild of Empire, 127 Women’s Institutes, 61 women’s issues, 27n10, 127–128 women’s magazines, 4, 5, 22, 27n15 American, 5, 117, 118–119 British, 6, 114–133 feminine modernity and, 116–117 fiction in, 117–118 resources of the, 55 service magazines, 117–119 women’s movements, 52–55 see also feminism; suffrage women’s press, 117 women’s rights, 53, 59, 123, 126 see also suffrage Women’s Social and Political Union, 68, 69, 71, 75 “Self-Denial Weeks”, 73, 74 women writers, 154, 167–181 Woolf, Virgiina, 118, 154, 161, 227 modernism of, 72 “Solid Objects”, 71 worker control, 59
259
worker’s rights, 59, 60 Workers Education Association, 61 working-class press, 20, 23, 24 World, 162, 171–172, 176 World’s Fair, 186 World Wide Web, 221, 222 writing, 119 free-lance, 101–106 “local color”, 189, 196n9 models of, 99, 101, 103 speed and, 108 writing technologies, 106–108 see also journalism WSPU, see Women’s Social and Political Union WSPU’s Woman’s press, 69 Yahoo, 221 Yale University, 199 Yellow Book, 32, 161, 163, 191 Young, Rose, 60 youth culture, 228, 229 youth market, 186 Zimmeck, Meta, 120 Zola, Emile, 170
