Women, Work and the Victorian Periodical

Living by the Press

Marianne Van Remoortel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137435996
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Covering a wide range of magazine work, including editing, illustration, poetry, needlework instruction and typesetting, this book provides fresh insights into the participation of women in the nineteenth-century magazine industry.

1

Women, Work and the Victorian Press

Research into women’s work for the press raises tantalizing questions of attribution and identity. The vast majority of periodical texts were published anonymously or under pseudonyms. On the basis of preliminary findings for twenty-one of the forty-five journals covered by the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, Walter E. Houghton estimated the number of unsigned or pseudonymous contributions for the period 1824–1900 at roughly 70 per cent.¹ As several critics have pointed out since, women were even more likely to disappear into anonymity than men. Alexis Easley gives the example of Fraser’s Magazine, which famously portrayed its contributors as an exclusively male coterie of ‘Fraserians’, thus ‘mask[ing] the contributions of several women to the magazine’.² The Irish-born fiction writer Selina Bunsbury was one of Fraser’s most prolific authors, contributing some fifty stories in the 1830s and 1840s, yet in contemporary accounts and histories of the magazine, including the recent entry in the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, she is rarely acknowledged as such.³ Similarly, Marysa Demoor has revealed among the anonymous reviewers of the Athenaeum a surprising number of women, including Mathilde Blind, Augusta Webster and Geraldine Jewsbury. Basing her conclusions on careful examination of the ‘marked file’, the annotated editor’s copy kept in the City University Library in London, Demoor demonstrates that women played a far more active and important role in late-nineteenth-century literary criticism than the masculine or ungendered voice commonly adopted by reviewers of both sexes would suggest.⁴

The Wellesley Index, moreover, focuses on a narrow set of influential monthlies and quarterlies at the more expensive end of the Victorian periodical market. In doing so, it privileges a type of publication that only a small, elite segment of the population would have been able to access as contributors, let alone at editorial or management level. Women in particular more often lacked the resources – money, education, status, networks – needed to build prominent careers in the press industry. Carol T. Christ has calculated that about 13 per cent of the 11,560 authors in the Wellesley Index are women, many of whom have but a single article or letter to the editor to their name.⁵ The low numbers for high-profile journals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the Fortnightly Review and Westminster Review, however, cannot be extrapolated to the periodical market as a whole. Barbara Onslow has rightly observed that women ‘certainly contributed to less prestigious papers – particularly the vast religious, women’s and cheap “family” press’.⁶ At present, there is no comprehensive bibliographic tool like the Wellesley Index to help scholars edge their way through this large body of texts. Chances are that, if such a project were undertaken, the percentage of female contributors would turn out to be considerably higher than the Wellesley’s meagre 13 per cent.

Finding the female contributors is one thing, but getting to know more about them is quite another. Even when magazine contributions are signed with (what appears to be) a woman’s real name, they rarely tell us anything about who this person actually was, what kind of life she led and why she worked for the periodical press. As Onslow observes:

Scanning runs of journals, one’s eye is caught by once popular, almost forgotten names like Mrs T K Hervey and Miss Pardoe, and others less familiar and less frequent. Who was Maria Norris whose ‘A Few Words on Geology’ earned her a by-line in The Ladies’ Cabinet in 1852? Or Mrs White who surfaced in ladies’ papers about the same time? We may never know the extent of women’s work in these areas.⁷

Anne Lohrli’s rigorous sleuthing through the office account book of Dickens’s Household Words, kept by sub-editor William Henry Wills, shows the great social, geographical and age diversity of the more than 380 people writing for the journal. The number included ‘some ninety women contributors’ – prominent novelists and poets whose lives are well documented such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Eliza Lynn Linton, Frances Trollope and Adelaide Anne Procter as well as writers ‘so obscure that their names appear in no biographical compilation’.⁸ Virtually nothing is known about Eliza Griffiths, Mrs MacIntosh and Miss Martin, who each contributed some nine to twelve poems and stories to Household Words; or Miss Norris, whom the Office Book identifies as the author of two pieces published in May and June 1850 respectively. In the words of Deborah A. Thomas, these women belonged to the ‘legion of aspiring authoresses who dabbled in the backwaters of Victorian journalism’, often eluding any attempt at ‘more specific identification’.⁹

New tools and methods

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, rapidly developing digital research methods offer a plethora of new opportunities for periodical studies. Large-scale periodical databases like ProQuest’s British Periodicals and Gale’s 19th Century UK Periodicals and 19th Century British Library Newspapers collections (cross-searchable on the Gale NewsVault platform), mass digitization initiatives such as Google Books, Archive.org and HathiTrust Digital Library as well as smaller scholarly projects such as the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (NCSE) and Dickens Journals Online provide unprecedented access to search across millions of digitized facsimile pages in a matter of seconds. As Linda Hughes has pointed out,

the search techniques of digitized periodicals are […] driving different methods from that of consecutive reading of a single or multiple issues of a famous periodical (especially since browsing is more comfortably undertaken in hard copy than online at present). Data-mining and keyword searches, the powerful tools of digitization, make it possible to ask new questions, especially about the recurrence of phrases (hence rhetoric) or crimes (hence cultural anxieties) across classes and multiple titles.¹⁰

Digitization also facilitates experimentation with computer-aided tests for authorship attribution, suggesting alternative ways out of the impasses of anonymity and pseudonymity now that ‘the more obvious literary and archival sources have […] been largely wrung dry’.¹¹ Ellen Jordan, Hugh Craig and Alexis Antonia, for instance, have recently conducted a pilot study in the use of the so-called ‘Burrows method’ for attributing authorship of nineteenth-century periodical texts. Through comparative analysis of two carefully selected sets of articles – a base set known to be written by the literary critic and journalist Anne Mozley and a counter-set by female authors with a similar educational background – they were able to identify Mozley’s stylistic signature in two unsigned reviews in the Christian Remembrancer: an 1853 review of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and a review of Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857. Dickens Journals Online director John Drew and computational stylist Hugh Craig have tentatively identified Dickens as the author of an anonymous article in the weekly Dickens-edited magazine All the Year Round, for which no account ledger has survived.¹² The possibilities of stylometric analysis for the study of periodicals are obviously limited by the prerequisite of authored text: there is no Burrows method for attributing editorship or identifying the hand of a compositor.

The twenty-first century also saw the rise of popular online resources for genealogical research in Britain. Subscription-based websites such as Ancestry.com, FindMyPast.co.uk and TheGenealogist.co.uk, to name some of the most prominent, draw on the holdings of the National Archives to provide keyword-searchable transcriptions and high-resolution scanned images of a wide variety of historical records such as census returns, parish registers and trade directories. FamilySearch.org is a huge, free genealogy database maintained by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. FreeBMD (part of FreeUKGen) relies on the ongoing efforts of volunteers to transcribe millions of records from the Civil Registration Indexes. Many of the commercial sites are operated by large for-profit corporations capitalizing on the general public’s growing enthusiasm, fuelled by successful television programmes like Who Do You Think You Are?, for discovering their own roots. With the introduction of DNA ancestry testing kits, the genealogy industry has prided itself in taking family history to a whole new level. At the same time, these expensive tests bring up important ethical concerns regarding privacy and data security, much like the mass digitization of newspapers, magazines and historical records raises important questions about copyright and the commercialization of public domain content. Perhaps because most of their content is locked behind paywalls, and university libraries do not typically subscribe, genealogy websites are an underexploited resource for both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the periodical press.

Exploring the censuses

While the Victorian age saw the rapid growth of the press, it was also the first period in history in which information about all members of the British population was systematically and officially recorded and retained. Although national enumerations had been made every ten years since 1801, the census of 1841 was the first to obtain data about individuals.¹³ Pre-printed census schedules asking questions about name, address, age, sex and occupation were distributed to all households nationwide a few days before the census night and later collected by a small army of enumerators. Subsequent censuses required even more details regarding marital status, relation to head of household, place of birth, health and (from 1881 onwards) number of rooms occupied if less than five. If a householder was illiterate or otherwise unable to complete the schedule, the enumerator assisted in filling in the form. The enumerators then copied the household schedules into the Census Enumerators’ Books, adding single and double slashes between lines to distinguish between households within the same building and households in separate buildings. Because the original schedules were destroyed afterwards, these books are the main direct source of information for tracing the lives of individuals and compiling statistics on, for example, gender, work and social class.

Until recently, scrolling through miles of microfilm at the Family Records Centre in Islington or at local record offices was the only way to proceed for periodical scholars interested in exploring the censuses for research purposes. Now, as microfilm is being converted into digital format and the huge task of transcribing the pages is well underway, census returns are becoming an increasingly valuable (if still overwhelming and at times unruly) source for gathering data on employment in the printing and publishing industry. We can now get good estimates of factors such as gender distribution in particular occupations, patterns in women’s marital status and age distribution across different types of work. For Figures 1.1–1.3, I selected five occupations from different segments of the labour market – publisher, (sub-)editor, contributor, compositor and newsagent – taking into account that some occupations would be more easily traceable than others. Searching for female ‘proprietors’ in the Ancestry databases, for instance, retrieves thousands of census records of women owning houses or schools with no option to refine the search results, while more specific phrases like ‘magazine proprietor’ or ‘newspaper proprietor’ are bound to leave too much relevant material unfound. I then conducted keyword searches in the 1881 census, so far the most thoroughly transcribed of the six nineteenth-century censuses, experimenting with a variety of spellings and synonyms to maximize the search results.¹⁴ As Figure 1.1 below shows, the vast majority of the men and women in my sample worked off-stage, performing tasks for which they were never credited in print; yet while the men were more likely to take on health-threatening, physically demanding skilled jobs such as compositing and printing, the women found ample employment opportunities in retail newsagency, a booming trade at the distributive end of the spectrum which, unlike wholesale newsagency, remains largely unstudied.¹⁵

More research on these ‘uncredited’ activities in relation to more visible types of employment would contribute to a better understanding of how the periodical press affected the lives of women both socially and economically. Figure 1.2 compares the mari...