First-Person Anonymous

Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–1870

Alexis Easley

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351936408
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Littérature
• Sous-sujet: Critique littéraire pour la littérature comparée

First-Person Anonymous revises previous histories of Victorian women's writing by examining the importance of both anonymous periodical journalism and signed book authorship in women's literary careers. Alexis Easley demonstrates how women writers capitalized on the publishing conventions associated with signed and unsigned print media in order to create their own spaces of agency and meaning within a male-dominated publishing industry. She highlights the importance of journalism in the fashioning of women's complex identities, thus providing a counterpoint to conventional critical accounts of the period that reduce periodical journalism to a monolithically oppressive domain of power relations. Instead, she demonstrates how anonymous publication enabled women to participate in important social and political debates without compromising their middle-class respectability. Through extensive analysis of literary and journalistic texts, Easley demonstrates how the narrative strategies and political concerns associated with women's journalism carried over into their signed books of poetry and prose. Women faced a variety of obstacles and opportunities as they negotiated the demands of signed and unsigned print media. In investigating women's engagement with these media, Easley focuses specifically on the work of Christian Johnstone (1781-1857), Harriet Martineau (1802-76), Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65), George Eliot (1819-80), and Christina Rossetti (1830-94). She provides new insight into the careers of these authors and recovers a large, anonymous body of periodical writing through which their better known careers emerged into public visibility. Since her work touches on two issues central to the study of literary history - the construction of the author and changes in media technology - it will appeal to an audience of scholars and general readers in the fields of Victorian literature, media studies, periodicals research, gender studies, and nineteenth-century

1
Beginnings: The 1830s

Victorian women’s authorial careers during the 1830s took shape against a backdrop of shifting definitions of popular authorship. It was during this decade that literary critics attempted to theorize a new role for the post-Romantic author and to reconfigure class and gender stereotypes associated with popular authorship. With the deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Byron in the 1820s and the deaths of Goethe, Coleridge, and Scott in the following decade, the age of great writers seemed to end prematurely. As Carlyle writes in 1831,

The old ideal of Manhood has grown obsolete, and the new is still invisible to us, and we grope after it in darkness, one clutching this phantom, another that; Werterism, Byronism, even Brummelism, each has its day .... The Thinker must, in all senses, wander homeless, too often aimless, looking up to a Heaven which is dead for him, round to an Earth which is deaf (‘Characteristics’ 26).

Carlyle’s central metaphor in this passage—the ‘homelessness’ of the author—reflects an overall sense of cultural dislocation in critical discourse of the 1830s.¹ Located outside the boundaries of domestic space and outside conventional definitions of masculinity, the author lacks a moral center that would direct his aimless wandering. This sense of dislocation and ambiguity led critics to redefine the identity of the popular author in terms of both gender and class, a process of redefinition that had important implications for the direction and aims of women’s literary careers in the 1830s.

Carlyle, like many critics of his day, felt that the homelessness of the contemporary author was caused in part by the mechanization of literary production.² The invention of steam presses and machine-made paper had led to an increase in reading materials of all kinds: pamphlets, novels, newspapers, magazines, journals, and self-help books.³ Likewise, the reduction of the advertisement tax in 1833, the stamp duty in 1836, and the paper tax in 1837 expanded the availability of cheap periodicals.⁴ The expansion of the periodical press created a demand for a new kind of middle-class author who made an independent living writing miscellaneous reviews and essays (Heyck 24-46). Though most critics acknowledged that the expansion of the periodical press had provided new opportunities for middle-class writers, they also felt that it had resulted in an overall decline in the quality of literature. As William Maginn put it in 1831, ‘quantity, and not quality, is the thing nearest to the author’s heart’ (‘Novels’ 9). Suddenly literature had become an industry, and the author, by extension, had become a producer of commodities.

Carlyle’s project—along with many other critics of the 1830s—was to reestablish a sense of ethical responsibility in the literary marketplace, thereby reinstilling moral values in the process of literary production. This project seemed especially urgent for middle-class critics of the 1830s because of the increasing radicalism of popular print culture. The expansion of the radical press, led by William Cobbett in the first decades of the century,⁵ was seen by many as an example of the kind of journalism that, left unchecked, could undermine class hierarchies. Thackeray’s 1838 review of several working-class publications confirmed the worst fears of many:

Suffice it to say, that ribaldry so infamous, obscenity so impudently blackguard and brazen, can hardly be conceived, and certainly never was printed until our day ... . Thanks to the enlightened spirit of the age, no man scarcely is so ill-educated as not to be able to read them; and blessings on cheap literature! no man is too poor to buy them (‘Half-a-Crown’ 290).

Thackeray argues that the radical promoters and publishers of this cheap literature are to blame for its pernicious effects. In his estimation, the notion of the author as a popular educator was ridiculous because most working-class people desired ribald entertainment, not moral improvement, in their reading materials.

Despite Thackeray’s objections, the image of the author as a popular educator was gaining increasing currency among those in the print trade. As Richard Altick points out, the call for a more improving literature emerged in the early decades of the century in response to utilitarian and evangelical critiques of imaginative literature (English 132).⁶ These groups attempted to expand the availability of cheap reading material, though for different purposes: ‘the religious parties to point the way to the kingdom of God, the utilitarians to insure the greater glory of the workshop of the world’ (132). In other words, rather than serving as an end in itself, literature would have a clear moral or economic purpose that would lead to social improvement. Organizations such as the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge published scores of cheap magazines and books claiming to improve the morals and practical knowledge of working-class readers.⁷ In reviews of these publications, critics attempted to formulate their own definitions of morally beneficial literature, often emphasizing its role in promoting social stability. As one critic for the Penny Magazine put it, an education founded in improving reading materials would allow workers ‘to understand that a good and just government cannot consult the interests of one particular class or calling, in preference to another ... and that if each were to insist upon having everything its own way, there would be nothing by the wildest confusion, or the merest tyranny’ (‘What Is Education?’ 110).

The discourse over the role of the post-Romantic author corresponds with an overall cultural preoccupation with defining the authorial subject during the 1830s. Biographies, obituaries, portraits, and encyclopedias of famous authors emerged as major literary forms during this period. The discourse on the author encompasses a large number of cultural texts. Examples include Thomas Moore’s Life of Byron (1830), John Croker’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1831), James Boaden’s Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald (1833), William Roberts’ Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More (1834), Henry Chorley’s Memorials of Mrs. Hemans (1836), and John Gibson Lockhart’s Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837-38). The most significant literary medium concerned with constructing the author in the 1830s was the periodical press. Periodicals such as Blackwood’s Magazine and Fraser’s Magazine published literary portraits and biographical criticism.⁸ This cultural fascination with the author was also represented in legal discourse, which further defined copyright protections and other rights associated with professional authorship.⁹

These critical and legal speculations often concentrated on the gender and class identity of the popular author. In these accounts, the upper-class male writer is often presented as the antithesis of the ideal public educator:

These littérateurs, amateur authors; dilettanti virtuosi, writing gentlemen, men of nice taste and fastidious criticism, carpers at syllables, affected connoisseurs of style, hunters after polished phrases and elegant periods; these are not the class to educate the million (Roebuck, ‘Useful Knowledge’ 379).

Here the upper-class dilettante is depicted as one who pays more attention to style than social good. The popular author, in contrast, must have

Bold and masculine understandings—men possessed of a thorough knowledge of the mental and physical wants of the people—men imbued with a high spirit, of undaunted courage, seeking not reputation by their productions, but wishing to instruct ... promoting virtue and happiness among the people—these are the men alone fit to be popular instructors, alone capable of diffusing useful knowledge (379).

What is remarkable about this definition of authorship is the way that it configures the authorial role according to both class and gender. The modern author is able to communicate across class boundaries by virtue of his masculinity—defined as his breadth of knowledge, courage, and disinterestedness. Presumably it is the effeminacy of the aristocratic author, defined as limited personal experience and vain self-interest, that makes him incapable of communicating effectively with the lower classes.

Though women writers are not directly mentioned in this passage, they are by implication excluded from the category of those capable of ‘diffusing useful knowledge’ by virtue of their gender since ‘masculine understanding’ of class relations would be considered outside their realm of experience. Indeed, the tendency to masculinize definitions of authorship was a dominant feature of critical discourse during the 1830s. As Mary Jean Corbett and Mary Poovey have demonstrated, the project of defining the male author was premised on separate spheres ideology and the construction of idealized definitions of middle-class femininity.¹⁰ The creation of the Victorian professional man of letters, they argue, was dependent upon the construction of a domestic woman who would preside over the private sphere, exerting moral influence that would serve as a corrective to the degraded values of the literary marketplace. Conversely, the female author became a social anomaly whose work lowered the overall moral and aesthetic quality of contemporary literature. By distinguishing between what they considered to be serious masculine literary production and more ephemeral feminine texts, critics attempted to define a new canon of English letters.

Though by most accounts women novelists were in the majority during the late eighteenth century,¹¹ they were represented as a minority in the canon of literary authors as constructed by critics of the 1830s. The periodical press of this period was notable for its attacks on women authors as well as for its canonization of male authors, especially Walter Scott. This emphasis on constructing a masculine canon of literature carried over into English authors and great Englishmen anthologies and portrait collections published during this period. For example, in Arthur Malkin’s Gallery of Portraits (1833-37), William Jerdan’s National Portrait Gallery (1830-34), and Henry Chorley’s The Authors of England (1838), portraits of men outnumber those of women.¹²

While it is undoubtedly true that women were often excluded in the process of canon formation in the 1830s, it is important to realize that the critical project of masculinizing literary authority by no means went uncontested. The discussions surrounding the passage of the Reform Bill (1832) brought the issue of women’s enfranchisement to the attention of parliament and the general public (Fulford 32-40). Likewise, the participation of women in anti-Catholic, abolitionist, and Chartist movements suggested ways that women might assume an expanded public role.¹³ Women’s involvement in social movements corresponded with an increase in the number of political, scientific, and philosophical texts written by women during the first decades of the nineteenth century. The works of Mary Somerville, Harriet Martineau, and Jane Marcet, though very different in their audiences and aims, together had the effect of calling into question the notion of separate realms of literary authority for male and female writers.¹⁴

The most influential critic to participate in debates over the gender and identity of the author during the 1830s was Thomas Carlyle. Most scholars credit Carlyle with formulating distinctly masculine stereotypes of authorship in his early essays. Carol Christ, for example, claims that Carlyle constructs the profession of letters as a ‘world of heroic masculinity’ and defines the Victorian sage as ‘exclusively male’ (20). Indeed, in his biographical criticism of Goethe and others, Carlyle often seems to exclude women from his definition of heroic authorship.¹⁵ However, in his early essays Carlyle’s constructions of authorial gender are far from stable. At the same time he was constructing the male author-hero in his biographical criticism, he was making the contradictory claim that the most productive forms of authorship were dissociated from egotism and individualized identity.¹⁶ That is, he advocated low-profile forms of public activism that would enable writers to transcend the limits of individual identity and thereby express truth. This diffusion of authorial identity also had a way of destabilizing—at least partly—critical constructions of authorial sex and gender.

In his essay, ‘Characteristics’ (1831), Carlyle defines the ideal author as one who operates outside social constructions of identity and marketplace definitions of value. For Carlyle, the artist does not desire public displa...