victorian print culture, journalism and the novel

Victorian Print Culture, Journalism and the Novel

Matthew Rubery*Queen Mary, University of London

Abstract

A number of studies have challenged the divide between Victorian literature and journalism inrecent years by rethinking the relationship between enduring literary genres such as the noveland ephemeral forms of print including newspapers and magazines. This essay identifies thekey ways in which studies in print culture and book history have revised our understandingof the 19th-century literary marketplace by identifying a high degree of interaction betweenthe era’s literature and journalism. The essay begins with an introduction to print culture as afield of research that has challenged the narrow literary focus of Victorian studies by expand-ing its borders to include the eclectic assortment of journalistic writing representative of the19th century. It then considers how the development of digital archives has improved accessto the full range of reading materials once available to audiences. The essay concludes with anassessment of how attention to the entire spectrum of print consumed by the reading publichas inspired a critical revaluation of the relationship between journalism and the Victoriannovel.

Wilkie Collins spoke for many Victorian novelists when describing his era to be firstand foremost an ‘age of periodicals’ in an issue of Household Words published in 1858(222). Although literature and journalism have long been treated as distinct traditionsof unequal stature, a number of studies have attempted to move beyond this dividein recent years by rethinking the relationship between enduring literary genres such as thenovel and ephemeral forms of print including newspapers and magazines. Sincethe earliest attempts to navigate the voluminous archives of Victorian periodicals inthe 1950s, literary scholars have aspired to produce a complete map of the diverseforms of print consumed by readers during the 19th century. The accumulating bodyof scholarship – commonly associated with the fields of print culture or book history– has benefited from interdisciplinary methodologies derived from the humanities andsocial sciences alike to facilitate its investigations into the Victorian print media ecol-ogy. A central aim of these studies has been to direct attention to the periodical as acomplex cultural artifact in its own right rather than as a mere receptacle for literarycontents subsequently reproduced in autonomous formats. Considering the periodicaltext as a worthwhile object of inquiry has in turn profoundly influenced our under-standing of the relationship between journalism and literature. This essay will identifythe key ways in which attention to the flourishing print culture of the period has ledto a revised understanding of the 19th-century literary marketplace. The essay beginswith an introduction to print culture studies as a field of research that has emergedover the last several decades. It then considers how the development of digital tech-nologies has improved access to the full range of print available to audiences in the19th century, before concluding with an assessment of the impact these new resourcesare having on our conception of the Victorian novel.

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Print Culture

In 2001, Laurel Brake’s essay ‘On Print Culture: The State We’re In’ took measure of afield of research that had emerged following the diminution of numerous disciplinaryboundaries and the development of new forms of digital technology. Although the appro-priate name for this multidisciplinary field was matter for debate (Periodical studies?Media history? Textual culture?), the term ‘print culture’ encompassed a range of textualartifacts including newspapers, magazines, and other miscellaneous forms of print previ-ously thought of as distinct kinds of writing from literature. This comprehensivenesschallenged the narrow ‘literary’ focus of Victorian studies by expanding its borders toinclude the eclectic assortment of journalistic writing representative of the 19th century.The attention given to periodicals as worthwhile objects of study in their own rightsought to undo the retrospective construction of Victorian culture by 20th-century writ-ers with a distaste for commercial forms of art. Brake’s essay marked the culmination ofseveral decades of recovery work initiated by such collections as The Victorian PeriodicalPress: Samplings and Soundings (Shattock 1982), Investigating Victorian Journalism (Brake1990) and Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities (Brake 2000). If thesecollections succeeded in establishing why it was necessary to recognize the press as thediscursive context for the major works of Victorian literature, the debate continues overhow to define the exact nature of the relationship between the period’s journalism andits literature.

Since the emergence of print culture as a field of inquiry, Victorian studies have begunto take into account the sheer volume of newspapers, magazines, and journals producedduring this period to satisfy the demands of the first mass reading public. Seriousconsideration of this intertextual print environment involves three steps: first, analyzingperiodicals as complex texts in their own right rather than as mere background materialused to enhance our understanding of primary sources; second, recognizing the formalproperties of the original printed formats in which texts circulated among audiences withvery different reading habits and expectations from those of audiences today; and third,acknowledging that the hierarchical division of the literary sphere into high and lowgenres – and the elevation of the novel in particular into a fine art and the dominantliterary form of the 19th century – is a retrospective construction imposed on the periodby writers of a later era. After all, it was not the rise of the novel but rather the rise ofthe periodical press that impressed contemporary observers as different in their outlooksas Walter Bagehot, Eneas Sweetland Dallas, John Stuart Mill, George Saintsbury, andJames Fitzjames Stephen. As a reviewer for The Times, Dallas once referred to the rapidgrowth of the periodical press as ‘the great event of modern history’ (Dallas 100). Theirconviction that journalism and other forms of mass print would be a major part of theVictorian literary legacy makes it all the more striking that it has taken 150 years for suchpredictions to start coming true.

Lack of agreement over the methodology best suited to working with ephemeral formsof print had hampered the earliest attempts to document the Victorian era’s print culture.Scholars working with periodicals faced two methodological problems: defining theobject of study with sufficient precision and devising the appropriate analytical tools forits comprehension. The first problem of definition requires researchers to avoid treatingthe periodical text and the literary text as equivalent forms. Too many citations ofperiodicals lack understanding of what qualifies as a periodical text – the article, the issue,or the entire series – in the first place as well as of the stylistic conventions governingperiodical forms at a given historical moment. For instance, authorship is rarely a

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straightforward matter in the periodical text as it was a collaboration among proprietors,editors, writers, illustrators, and even advertisers. The polyvocal and open-ended natureof periodical writing thus challenges many of our preconceptions about what constitutes aliterary text. The second problem of procedure calls into question the validity of inter-pretive claims based on an inadequate understanding of a periodical press that can be asmultifarious in its meaning as literary texts themselves. Warnings of the potential chal-lenges in using periodical texts as primary sources for literary history have gone unheardby many scholars who mine the press for choice quotations without an appropriateunderstanding of the conventions underlying that period’s print culture.

The development of a number of theoretical approaches has enhanced our under-standing of print culture in the wake of the field’s pioneering empirical studies of thearchives. In 1989, Victorian Periodicals Review devoted a special issue to evaluating themost useful methodologies for working with periodicals. Although the theoretical eclec-ticism exhibited by this issue may not have culminated in a single paradigm to guidesubsequent research, it did establish a consensual understanding of the periodical as acomplex discursive entity in its own right. Contributions to this issue all movedbeyond the inadequate view of the periodical as a mirror held up to Victorian culturerather than as an active component in shaping that culture. The majority of approachesto the study of periodicals now employ some combination of empirical bibliographicresearch and theoretical conceptualization. Such studies include, on the one hand,detailed empirical investigations into the cultural politics of individual journals such asHousehold Words, Blackwood’s Magazine, or the Illustrated London News, and, on the otherhand, theoretical analyses of a broad cross-section of periodicals in order to evaluate theextent to which they shaped perceptions of particular analytical categories such asempire, gender, and science.1

Subsequent scholarship on print culture continues to be theoretically informed almostby necessity as the textual corpus of the Victorian press would be unnavigable withoutsuch tools. Some of the most influential critical vocabularies – many derived fromdisciplines beyond the humanities – used to analyze how discourses function withincultures include Benedict Anderson’s ‘Imagined Community’(33), Mikhail Bakhtin’s‘Dialogism’(279), Jay Bolter and Grusin’s ‘Remediation’(45), Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘LiteraryField’(113), and Jurgen Habermas’ ‘Public Sphere’(1). Such theoretically inflected vocabu-laries stand alongside the quantitative and historiographic methodologies favored by bookhistorians. The discipline of book history has always been closely aligned, if not overlap-ping, with print culture studies in its attention to the materiality of textual forms and thehistoricity of reading practices. The use of investigative procedures from numerousdisciplines have yielded valuable insights into the cultural dynamics of the press, even ifscholars working on print culture long ago resigned themselves to the fact that no singleexisting methodology is capable of explaining the field of print culture in its entirety.Even so, we now have greater access to the archives of the Victorian press than at anyprevious point in history following the development of new digital technologies.

New Digital Resources

The development of digital archives for the preservation of periodicals has had a dramaticimpact on our understanding of the Victorian literary marketplace. Scholars had longcomplained about the difficulties in working with ephemeral forms of print whoseobsolescence was a defining characteristic. As Margaret Beetham once lamented ofperiodicals: ‘Read today and rubbish tomorrow’ (19). Digital resources have restored

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periodicals to a central position amid the Victorian print ecology by making formerlyinaccessible archives available to readers from anywhere in the world. Gone are the dayswhen research on periodicals required a journey to the British Library’s newspaper repos-itory at Colindale to thumb through the pages of the original broadsheet in pursuit of anelusive fact. Microfilm and microfiche reprints were scarcely superior alternatives tonewsprint owing to difficulties in sustained reading and searching for specific information.

Digital technology has dramatically altered the situation by making millions of pages ofperiodicals available to researchers. The Gale digitization projects 19th Century BritishLibrary Newspapers and 19th Century UK Periodicals now provide online access to approxi-mately 2 million pages of print. Launched in 2007, these virtual libraries include completedigitized runs of numerous UK newspaper titles – from the Aberdeen Journal to theWestern Mail – published between 1800 and 1900. In addition, ProQuest’s British Periodi-cals collections provide searchable text for over 400 titles from the 17th through the early20th centuries. The difference lies not just in being able to access material from distantlocations. Rather, it lies in the conversion of a massive amount of printed material into asearchable resource that holds the potential to make connections across periodicals inways previously unimaginable to the lone scholar manually working page by pagethrough the broadsheets. Some of the most impassioned debates in the field have beenover the search tools appropriate for digital resources in light of growing awareness ofhow the tools themselves can shape subsequent research. The value of flexible searchtools is a guiding principle of the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition, for instance, whichoffers facsimile reproductions of six magazines to preserve the formal integrity of the page(including headings, images, advertisements, and imprints) often sacrificed by the tran-scribed texts found in repositories such as Project Gutenburg.

The growth in digital archives suggests that scholars are beginning to make headway inmapping the landscape of Victorian periodicals once described as a ‘vast wilderness’ owingto the sheer volume of uncatalogued material (Woolf, ‘Charting’ 23). Initial warningsacknowledged the futility of attempting to map such sprawling terrain estimated to be inexcess of 125,000 titles. A scholar could devote a lifetime to working through the period-icals without mastering more than a small proportion of the material; the most appropri-ate modern analogue for the Victorian press is undoubtedly the World Wide Web in itssheer size and heterogeneity. The earliest scholarly investigations of ephemeral texts suchas Richard Altick’s The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public,1800–1900 (1957) relied on countless hours spent among the archives. The initial effortsof Altick, Michael Woolf, and other archival pioneers led to the formation in 1968 ofthe Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, dedicated to retrieving the pearls fromamid the ‘Golden Stream’ in which literature, culture, and politics flowed seamlesslytogether among the pages of periodicals during the 19th century (Woolf, ‘Damning’126). The ongoing development of online databases to make the democratic range ofprint favored by Victorian readers accessible gives added resonance to Wolff’s response toAltick’s seminal study: ‘Are we not all common readers now?’ (Woolf, ‘Damning’ 129).2

Many of the earliest resources designed to facilitate periodical research are now alsoavailable in digital format. These include: The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers andPeriodicals, 1800–1900, a bibliographical record of thousands of serial publications, andThe Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900, which identifies the authors ofanonymous and pseudonymous contributors in 45 titles whose identities – much to thefrustration of modern audiences – had been camouflaged by editorial policies prohibitingsigned work. The Wellesley Index Poetry Project has recently corrected the absence ofpoetry from the original index as many of the century’s major poems from Elizabeth



Barrett Browning’s ‘The Cry of the Children’ (1843) to Thomas Hardy’s ‘The DarklingThrush’ (1900) first appeared in the pages of magazines (Hughes 92). Other resourceshave been bundled together into a single resource. C19: The Nineteenth Century Indexintegrates a number of formerly separate indices including Palmer’s Index to The Times,Periodicals Index Online, and Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature. The recently launchedDictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism builds on its predecessors by providing referenceinformation for individual periodical titles, biographies of journalists, and definitions ofkey terms relating to the profession. This resource should be invaluable for those of uswho have struggled to find information about marginal writers overlooked by establishedreference works such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

The boom in digital resources means that researchers have gone from too little accessto information to too much access to information in a remarkably short span of time.One risk is that scholars may find it easier than ever before to use periodical material asbackground to familiar works or to ‘cherry pick’ information without comprehending theconventions dictating its source. It is essential for scholars working with excerpted mate-rial to have some awareness of what is lost in translation across different media. Under-standing these conventions will be increasingly important as the availability of periodicalcontent provided by digital resources continues to recontextualize familiar titles and toresurrect forgotten works. The amount of reading material available through digitalarchives may surpass the reach of any individual reader, but this simply makes it moreimportant to ensure that scholars have some understanding of the genres, values, andconventions presiding over the field of print culture as a whole. Doing so will ensure thatstudies of print culture do far more than merely supplement traditional research projects.

Journalism and the Novel

Access to the entire spectrum of print consumed by the expanding reading public duringthe 19th century has led to a critical revaluation of the relationship between journalismand the Victorian novel. For many years scholarship had treated literature and journalismas separate traditions with little traffic between them. Literary historians contributed tothe schism by disregarding the original publication formats of Victorian literary texts,many of which first appeared in the pages of newspapers and magazines; journalism histo-rians reinforced the divide by insisting on the autonomy of journalism as a field ofdiscourse governed by a distinct set of rules. However, recent studies in print culturehave called into question the division of literature and journalism into separate spheres byidentifying a high degree of interaction between the two discourses, which had longshared authors, audiences, topics, themes, and stylistic conventions. These studies pointout that nearly every major Victorian novelist wrote for the press at some pointduring their careers. One study has proposed that Dickens’ entire body of worktechnically might be considered journalism in light of its ties to the press (Drew 2).Such research also rejects explanations of an author’s journalistic experience as an‘apprenticeship’ in preparation for the composition of serious literature, arguing insteadfor a kind of partnership between the two modes of writing that allowed authors toexperiment with different voices, personae, and intellectual interests (Easley 1). Finally,these studies note that novelists such as Mary Braddon, William Thackeray, andAnthony Trollope remained involved with journalism as editors of magazines even afterachieving literary success.

Journalism quickly became one of the most distinctive features of the Victorian eradespite first entering the English lexicon as a term in the 1830s. The British press at this



time was exceptionally varied, as were the kinds of opportunities available to professionalwriters. Victorian journalism encompassed a range of formats, from the quarterly reviewto the monthly magazine to the daily newspaper, all of which were seen as very differentto one another in terms of genres, styles, and values despite at times containing similarmaterial. Authors seeking to enter this increasingly professionalized marketplace werekeenly aware of the implicit hierarchy. At one end of the market were the quarterlyreviews, which offered serious discussion of a variety of subjects closely aligned with partypolitics. Journalism written for the quarterly and monthly periodicals oriented toward themiddle classes consisted primarily of belles lettres and critical evaluation referred to as the‘Higher Journalism’. At the other end of the market were the daily newspapers that flour-ished after the removal of taxes on the press at the mid-century. The penny papersappealed to the crowds through an emphasis on human interest stories and publiccampaigning adopted from the Sunday papers, which were the first periodicals to reachgenuinely mass readerships. This was the hack journalism or demotic ‘New Journalism’derided by Matthew Arnold and other literary authors threatened by its commercialsuccess (Wiener 47). A wide range of weekly publications positioned somewhere inbetween the quarterlies and the dailies in terms of substance and intent accommodatedpractitioners from both ends of the spectrum.

By no means have literature and journalism always been thought of as distinct entities.The separation of the two discourses into the conceptual categories with which we areaccustomed today transpired during the 19th century as audiences came to distinguish thecolumns of the daily newspaper from the plots of novels. The boundary between newsand novel, fact and fiction, and even truth and falsehood was not always clear during thepreceding century in which fiction resembled journalism and journalism resembledfiction.3 For instance, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) presented itself asa witness’ account of the bubonic plague of 1665 despite being written by Defoe himselfhalf a century later. Today Defoe’s narrative would be described as a ‘pseudo-factual’,‘documentary’, or ‘non-fiction’ novel anticipating the New Journalism of the 1960s and1970s.4 Defoe was simply among the first of a long line of novelists to draw on actualevents as the basis for fictional plots. The distinction between ‘journalism’ and the ‘novel’familiar to modern audiences gradually emerged during the 19th century as the press rosein stature and began to compete with the novel in terms of the realistic representation ofeveryday life. The difference grew increasingly apparent once journalism became synony-mous with the commercial newspapers thought by many to be incompatible with seriousliterature. The late 19th century has been taken ever since to be the era in which thetwo discourses parted ways. George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) memorably regis-tered their conceptual separation in its depiction of the threat to literature posed by thecommercial press. Yet such a schematic division is misleading as the novel and the presscontinued to interact ceaselessly throughout the nineteenth century.

One way in which the interdependence of literature and journalism is vividly apparentwas through serial publication. The border between the two discourses was a tenuousone at a time when many Victorian novels first appeared among the pages of the press.Serial publication in daily, weekly, or monthly parts was one of the most characteristicpublishing formats of the Victorian period. Readers first encountered Dickens’ OliverTwist (1837–39), Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854–55), Mary Braddon’s LadyAudley’s Secret (1862), George Eliot’s Romola (1862–63), and Joseph Conrad’s Heart ofDarkness (1899) in periodicals prior to their republication as the independent volumesfamiliar to modern audiences. G. W. M. Reynolds likewise published the century’s mostwidely read series The Mysteries of London and its sequel for more than a decade in weekly



penny numbers sold in tobacconists’ shops. Serial fiction reached the provincial press andeven markets overseas through newspaper syndication agencies such as Tillotsons’ FictionBureau (Hilliard 653; Law 41). Anthony Trollope – who both published novels in serialform and presided over their publication as the editor of Saint Pauls magazine – avowedthat ‘the monthly periodicals afford to the reading public the greatest part of the modernliterature which it demands’ (Trollope 2). Not only were the two often indivisible, asTrollope suggests, but modern audiences occasionally read different books from thoseread by the original audience as substantial differences existed between the serial and therevised volume in many cases; to take one notorious example, a censored version ofThomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) first appeared in the illustrated newspaperThe Graphic.

Serial publication in newspapers, magazines, or part-issues influenced the reception ofliterature in ways easily overlooked by the readers of modern trade editions. LindaHughes’ and Michael Lund’s The Victorian Serial (1991) was the first study to examine theactual dynamics of serial reading. Their work takes into account how the sheer length oftime involved in reading over a span of months or even years may have influencedunderstanding of those narratives. The publication format also affected reception in keyways. Modern editions of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–48) omitting the original serial’sparatextual elements including the pictorial wrapper, etchings, and vignettes illustrated byThackeray himself surrender vital clues to comprehending the narrative. The pages of theperiodical miscellany presented an additional intertextual context that could potentiallyinfluence the reception of serial narratives. For example, the original audience of HardTimes (1854) read Dickens’ fictional tale alongside relevant factual material on the Prestonstrike and inequitable marriage laws in the weekly magazine Household Words. Victorianserials in this way encouraged reading fiction ‘in a continuum with journalism’ ratherthan as isolated works of art cordoned off from contemporary debates (Butwin 167).Even fiction published apart from the press drew on public awareness of its unfoldingnarratives. Many novelists exploited topical causes celebres in thinly disguised retellings ofadultery, divorce, and other scandals familiar to audiences from the press (Leckie 62;Altick, Presence 2). The Victorian novelist Charles Reade was only the most brazen inchoosing the plots of his novels from a list of news items he considered to be of interestto the public: ‘An aristocratic divorce suit, the last great social scandal, a sensationalsuicide from Waterloo Bridge, a woman murdered in Seven Dials, or a baby found stran-gled in a bonnet-box at Piccadilly Circus’ (qtd. in Coleman 263). For Reade, the pressingquestions of the time neither began nor ended in the pages of novels.

The division between novelists and journalists would have made little sense to thoseVictorian authors whose prose bore some relationship to the press in terms of style,subject, or source. Laurel Brake has attributed this anachronistic understanding of theVictorian literary marketplace to the retrospective construction of the field by writers ofthe 20th century. In their efforts to promote the aesthetic integrity of their own work,modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf accordedliterature a privileged status in relation to other forms of writing. Hostility toward thecommercial success of the press would become a major theme in modernist literature.Journalism of the previous era came to be regarded in retrospect as ‘sub-literary’ oncethe scope of what qualified as literature was narrowed to accommodate increasinglyspecialized aesthetic criteria (Brake, Subjugated xii). Quickly forgotten from this debatewas how much of the initial deliberation among Matthew Arnold, Henry James, andother Victorian reviewers over the privileged status of literature itself took place in thepages of the periodicals. In other words, the very division between literature and



journalism arising at this time was dependent on the press for its initial articulation.Subsequent literary criticism may have focused its attention on a narrow range ofesteemed works, but the enormous circulations of Sunday papers such as Reynolds’sWeekly Newspaper suggest that the Victorian public had always been more Reynoldianthan Arnoldian in its preferences.

The ‘Great Divide’ between modernist literature and journalism no longer appears tobe as wide a gulf as was once thought (Huyssen viii). Although a rejection of massculture has long characterized our understanding of modernism, recent studies havereconsidered the extent to which modernist writers engaged with the press in other waysthan through hostile irony. To take one of the most influential 20th-century novels,James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) has been described as ‘the counter-newspaper’ for the kalei-doscopic manner in which it emulates the form of the broadsheet by bringing togetherdiscordant materials with no obvious connections (Kiberd 463). Joyce’s novel exemplifiesthe way in which 20th-century novelists sought to distance themselves from the veryprint culture responsible for much of their formal experimentation. The newspaperprovided a convenient foil against which to define the esthetic project of modernism interms of complexity, erudition, and political commitment – qualities conspicuously absentfrom the mass media. If the newspaper was a disposable commodity intended for massconsumption, the modernist novel was in contrast a rarefied work of art prized for itsdifficulty.

Yet the firmness of this opposition has been contested by recent studies identifying amore ambivalent relationship between the two media than has been previously recog-nized. Patrick Collier’s Modernism on Fleet Street (2006) characterizes the newspaper as a‘rhetorical enemy’ for modernist writers as the literary and journalistic spheres werealways more intertwined than these writers were willing to acknowledge (Collier 4). Therelationship between the novel and the newspaper looks very different when taking intoaccount crossover writers such as Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway,and Rebecca West whose backgrounds in journalism encouraged the use of reportorialmethods in their fiction.5 As we have seen, this interplay between the two media is acontinuation of rather than a departure from the dynamic visible in the 19th century,when Victorian novelists drew upon the press both as a means of formal innovation andas a countertext against which to define their own fictional discourse.

The persistence of the ‘Great Divide’ has been marked with a flourish by the recentpublication of three book-length studies proposing very different understandings of therelationship between Victorian literature and journalism. Doug Underwood’s Journalismand the Novel: Truth and Fiction, 1700–2000 (2008) provides the most comprehensivetreatment of the historical connections between journalism and the novel by enumeratingmore than 300 writers with allegiances to both camps. Still, in its attention to the lives ofjournalists, Underwood’s study belongs to a familiar tradition of biographical inquiryuntouched by the methodological advances associated with studies of print culture. Incontrast, Dallas Liddle’s The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature inMid-Victorian Britain (2009) focuses on the influence of the supposedly nonliterary genresused by journalists on literary writers during a single decade: the 1850s. Liddle’s bookcalls for renewed attention to the theories of generic interaction advocated by MikhailBakhtin in its consideration of how specific genres associated with the press influencedthe period’s literature. The application of Bakhtin’s ideas about genre can lead tocontentious stances such as when Liddle suggests that reading the Cornhill Magazine is animpossibility as it is little more than a title linking together a number of disparate articles(155). Finally, my own The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the



News (2009) contends that the Victorian novel is best understood alongside the simulta-neous development of the news as a commercial commodity read by up to a millionreaders per day. It illustrates how the novel’s formal devices in many cases have beenshaped in response to competing media.

These studies exhibit very different – even conflicting – approaches to the supposedlyephemeral forms of print consumed by the reading public. Nevertheless, all three studieshave in common an interest in the highly interactive and intertextual relationshipbetween journalism and literature, whose only difference at this time according to OscarWilde was that one was ‘unreadable’ and the other ‘not read’ (349). In their shared atten-tion to the vibrant print culture of the 19th century, they suggest a new direction inVictorian studies away from the treatment of literature and journalism as separate tradi-tions and toward recognition of the extent to which the story of literature and journalismis a shared one.

Short Biography

Matthew Rubery is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at Queen Mary, University ofLondon. He is the author of The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Inventionof the News (Oxford University Press, 2009). His work on 19th-century print culture hasappeared in English Literary History, Nineteenth-Century Literature, English Language Notes,the Henry James Review, and the Journal of Victorian Culture. He has also contributed tothe Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture and the Dictionary of Nineteenth-CenturyJournalism.

Notes

* Correspondence: School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, London E1 4NS, UK.Email: [email protected].

1 Recent studies of individual journals include: Clemm, Demoor, Finkelstein, King, and Sinnema. Studies devotedto a particular topic in relation to the press include: Cantor et al., Codell, Fraser et al., Hampton, Henson et al.,Mussell, Potter, and Tusan. More extensive reading lists are available in the discussions of periodical studies byBoardman, Latham, and Mitchell.2 It should be noted that access to a number of these electronic databases is currently restricted to subscribing insti-tutions beyond the reach of many independent scholars. The material available on these databases is also in somecases a small proportion of the original print resources, which may prove increasingly difficult to locate with theremoval of print holdings to storage facilities and the planned closure of libraries such as Colindale.3 The separation of news and novels into the conceptual categories of fact and fiction is addressed by Davis,McKeon, and Hunter.4 See Frus on the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s.5 Studies of the relationship between journalism and fiction in the United States during the 19th and early 20thcenturies include: Fisher Fishkin, Robertson, Roggenkamp, and Lutes. On the transatlantic print culture of the late19th and early 20th centuries, see Ardis and Collier.

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