Walter Pater’s second book was a novel. Issued first in 1885, Marius the Epicurean was his only e... more Walter Pater’s second book was a novel. Issued first in 1885, Marius the Epicurean was his only experiment in this genre to be completed and published in his lifetime. Three years later, chapters of Gaston de Latour, his second novel, appeared serially in five parts as magazine instalments. Conceived of as a sequel to Marius, they seemed a canny bid by Pater and his publisher to reinforce his reputation as a novelist and to augment that of the critic. Gaston was a historical novel, similar in kind to Marius, and the linking of the two projects as parts of a series suggests a commercial eye, with the setting of the second in sixteenth-century France replacing that of the first in Antonine Rome. It is a strategy that twenty-first-century publishers and authors still deploy. During Pater’s lifetime, the commercial success of Marius, which went into a second edition within weeks in 1885, and the truncated publication of Gaston in 1888, are the sum of his public association with the nove...
The year is 1889, and Walter Pater, at the age of 50, publishes his first and only book of ‘liter... more The year is 1889, and Walter Pater, at the age of 50, publishes his first and only book of ‘literary’ criticism. Culled from writings of twenty years, Appreciations is Pater’s first critical book since Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) and represents a project deferred. Resonant with debates of the recent past, it re-contextualises and reviews them in the present. Appearing just after Matthew Arnold’s death and the publication of Essays in Criticism: Second Series in 1888, and in the midst of debate about English as a degree subject, Appreciations is a responsive collection, addressing itself to English Literature and the romantic tradition. Other indicators of its historicity may be read in its presentation of gender as connected with scholarship, authorship and readers, and with its own writing practice and critical discourse. Looking backward, Appreciations undermines Arnold’s effort to establish English on the bedrock of C/classicism; looking forward, it is libera...
In The Artist, a 6d monthly published between 1880 and 1902, may be seen a profile of a late Vict... more In The Artist, a 6d monthly published between 1880 and 1902, may be seen a profile of a late Victorian periodical which addresses a telling succession of dominant reader groups, in which gender and diverse categories of ‘artist’ are primary variables. The profile has emerged from the identification of one ‘centre’ at a specific period (1888?–1894),2 under a particular editor, in which the journal seeks to integrate and establish a visible gay discourse, a gay tradition, and a gay interpretative community of readers before 1895 and the Wilde trials. Although The Artist is distinctive among nineteenth-century sites of homosexual discourse, editor-led as it is, it is not unique. Early numbers of The Studio, for example, under the editorship of Gleeson White,3 are similarly oriented, but author-led (and dispersed) gay periodical discourse such as that by John Addington Symonds and Walter Pater4 is far more common in the thirty years 1865–95. Scrutiny of the publishing history of their w...
Matthew Arnold’s concept of ‘Essays in Criticism’ in 1865 coincided with an upsurge of journalism... more Matthew Arnold’s concept of ‘Essays in Criticism’ in 1865 coincided with an upsurge of journalism, including the appearance of two innovative forms of the Fourth Estate that were significantly to influence their successors: the Pall Mall Gazette, a review-like daily, and the Fortnightly Review, a news-oriented review in its initial fortnightly phase, 1865–66.2 Like these serial publications, Arnold’s ‘essays’ and ‘criticism’ were generically hybrid, with their implicit displacement of journalism’s ‘articles’ and polemics, and their gestures toward literature and Art. At this time and for the rest of the century, journalism and literature (in the wider sense in which it was used in the period, to include writing in the arts and social sciences) often overlapped, in a symbiotic relationship that in 1864–65 Arnold began to prise apart, with his invocation and revival of a literary tradition that includes Pope’s ‘Essay on Criticism’. Although Arnold’s subsequent practice is regular publ...
As I have been arguing, the book form in the Victorian period was only one of the dominant forms ... more As I have been arguing, the book form in the Victorian period was only one of the dominant forms in which literature appeared. Books were heavily dependent in all manner of ways on periodicals: economically, for advertisements, for trailers, and for first whetting and then reinforcing the appetite of the reading audience for reading itself; for specific genres (for example, the serial novel); and for work by authors which had its origins in periodical publication, and only latterly was published in book form.1 The career of Walter Pater exemplifies the complicated interdependency between these forms of publishing in the nineteenth century. From the onset of his career he regularly and characteristically moved from fragmentary periodical publication to books, which normally represented the collection (and selection) of periodical pieces. In this chapter I argue that in the case of Pater’s earliest published work, in the Westminster Review and the Fortnightly, the character of the two...
Previous scholarly work on Sala has been sporadic and sparse: a full biography by Ralph Straus in... more Previous scholarly work on Sala has been sporadic and sparse: a full biography by Ralph Straus in 1942, P. D. Edwards’s treatment (1997) of the careers of Sala and Edmund Yates as ‘Dickens’s young men’, and Cathy Waters’s examination of his writing as part of a larger study of Household Words in 2008. So it is good to have Peter Blake’s new book on G. A. Sala (1828-95), a prodigal journalist, a pioneer of ‘new journalism’ and a renowned ‘special correspondent’ as we know, but also a robust Bo...
In this revisionary study, Will Tattersdill argues against the reductive 'two cultures' m... more In this revisionary study, Will Tattersdill argues against the reductive 'two cultures' model of intellectual discourse by exploring the cultural interactions between literature and science embodied in late nineteenth-century periodical literature, tracing the emergence of the new genre that would become known as 'science fiction'. He examines a range of fictional and non-fictional fin-de-siècle writing around distinct scientific themes: Martian communication, future prediction, X-rays, and polar exploration. Every chapter explores a major work of H. G. Wells, but also presents a wealth of exciting new material drawn from a variety of late Victorian periodicals. Arguing that the publications in which they appeared, as well as the stories themselves, played a crucial part in the development of science fiction, Tattersdill uses the form of the general interest magazine as a way of understanding the relationship between the arts and the sciences, and the creation of a n...
Despite the implication in the prospectus of the Nineteenth Century which appeared in Athenaeum o... more Despite the implication in the prospectus of the Nineteenth Century which appeared in Athenaeum on 10 February 1877, the transfer of editor, distributor and writers from the Contemporary Review to the Nineteenth Century was not legitimised, gradual or peaceful, but cataclysmic and concentrated, an eruption of the press in which the constituent elements were momentarily hyper-visible and palpable. The ‘story’ in the contemporary press, in pamphlets by the principals, and in twentieth-century criticism by A.W. Brown, Patricia Srebmik and Priscilla Metcalf has all the characteristics of a ‘good’ news story — intrigue, complexity and suspense, and longevity as far as news goes. To view the formation of the Nineteenth Century and our constructions of it as phenomena of cultural production, I want to look at some aspects of this transfer of cultural power which relate to our own methods for the study of modern printed texts — the issues of literary authority and the interaction of gender and contents.
A recent moment to remember in media history: the coincidence of the centenary of the death of W.... more A recent moment to remember in media history: the coincidence of the centenary of the death of W.T. Stead, a shaper of the newspaper revolution at the end of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth, with events at the British Library in London that are revolutionizing our access to print journalism. These events comprise the closure in 2013 of Colindale, the newspaper library building in North London where newspapers were housed, conserved, and read; the removal of most of them to a silo in Yorkshire for storage, improved preservation, and robot retrieval when necessary; and the opening of a newspaper and media reading room in the main British Library building at St Pancras, in the heart of London, where digital and microfilm surrogates of historical newspapers are consulted where they exist, and print versions where they do not. This is not simply a relocation of resources, but a strategic move that reflects the historicizing of print journalism, and its new place in m...
Historical newspapers are of interest to many humanities scholars, valued as sources of informati... more Historical newspapers are of interest to many humanities scholars, valued as sources of information and language closely tied to a particular time, social context and place. Following library and commercial microfilming and, more recently, digitisation projects, newspapers have been an accessible and valued source for researchers. The ability to use keyword searches through more data than ever before via digitised newspapers has transformed the work of researchers (as discussed by others including Putnam, 2016; Bingham, 2010). Digitised historic newspapers are also of interest to many researchers who seek large bodies of relatively easily computationally-transcribed text on which they can try new methods and tools. Intensive digitisation over the past two decades has seen smaller-scale or repository-focused projects flourish in the Anglophone and European world (Holley, 2009; King, 2005; Neudecker et al., 2014). However, just as earlier scholarship was potentially over-reliant on Th...
Walter Pater’s second book was a novel. Issued first in 1885, Marius the Epicurean was his only e... more Walter Pater’s second book was a novel. Issued first in 1885, Marius the Epicurean was his only experiment in this genre to be completed and published in his lifetime. Three years later, chapters of Gaston de Latour, his second novel, appeared serially in five parts as magazine instalments. Conceived of as a sequel to Marius, they seemed a canny bid by Pater and his publisher to reinforce his reputation as a novelist and to augment that of the critic. Gaston was a historical novel, similar in kind to Marius, and the linking of the two projects as parts of a series suggests a commercial eye, with the setting of the second in sixteenth-century France replacing that of the first in Antonine Rome. It is a strategy that twenty-first-century publishers and authors still deploy. During Pater’s lifetime, the commercial success of Marius, which went into a second edition within weeks in 1885, and the truncated publication of Gaston in 1888, are the sum of his public association with the nove...
The year is 1889, and Walter Pater, at the age of 50, publishes his first and only book of ‘liter... more The year is 1889, and Walter Pater, at the age of 50, publishes his first and only book of ‘literary’ criticism. Culled from writings of twenty years, Appreciations is Pater’s first critical book since Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) and represents a project deferred. Resonant with debates of the recent past, it re-contextualises and reviews them in the present. Appearing just after Matthew Arnold’s death and the publication of Essays in Criticism: Second Series in 1888, and in the midst of debate about English as a degree subject, Appreciations is a responsive collection, addressing itself to English Literature and the romantic tradition. Other indicators of its historicity may be read in its presentation of gender as connected with scholarship, authorship and readers, and with its own writing practice and critical discourse. Looking backward, Appreciations undermines Arnold’s effort to establish English on the bedrock of C/classicism; looking forward, it is libera...
In The Artist, a 6d monthly published between 1880 and 1902, may be seen a profile of a late Vict... more In The Artist, a 6d monthly published between 1880 and 1902, may be seen a profile of a late Victorian periodical which addresses a telling succession of dominant reader groups, in which gender and diverse categories of ‘artist’ are primary variables. The profile has emerged from the identification of one ‘centre’ at a specific period (1888?–1894),2 under a particular editor, in which the journal seeks to integrate and establish a visible gay discourse, a gay tradition, and a gay interpretative community of readers before 1895 and the Wilde trials. Although The Artist is distinctive among nineteenth-century sites of homosexual discourse, editor-led as it is, it is not unique. Early numbers of The Studio, for example, under the editorship of Gleeson White,3 are similarly oriented, but author-led (and dispersed) gay periodical discourse such as that by John Addington Symonds and Walter Pater4 is far more common in the thirty years 1865–95. Scrutiny of the publishing history of their w...
Matthew Arnold’s concept of ‘Essays in Criticism’ in 1865 coincided with an upsurge of journalism... more Matthew Arnold’s concept of ‘Essays in Criticism’ in 1865 coincided with an upsurge of journalism, including the appearance of two innovative forms of the Fourth Estate that were significantly to influence their successors: the Pall Mall Gazette, a review-like daily, and the Fortnightly Review, a news-oriented review in its initial fortnightly phase, 1865–66.2 Like these serial publications, Arnold’s ‘essays’ and ‘criticism’ were generically hybrid, with their implicit displacement of journalism’s ‘articles’ and polemics, and their gestures toward literature and Art. At this time and for the rest of the century, journalism and literature (in the wider sense in which it was used in the period, to include writing in the arts and social sciences) often overlapped, in a symbiotic relationship that in 1864–65 Arnold began to prise apart, with his invocation and revival of a literary tradition that includes Pope’s ‘Essay on Criticism’. Although Arnold’s subsequent practice is regular publ...
As I have been arguing, the book form in the Victorian period was only one of the dominant forms ... more As I have been arguing, the book form in the Victorian period was only one of the dominant forms in which literature appeared. Books were heavily dependent in all manner of ways on periodicals: economically, for advertisements, for trailers, and for first whetting and then reinforcing the appetite of the reading audience for reading itself; for specific genres (for example, the serial novel); and for work by authors which had its origins in periodical publication, and only latterly was published in book form.1 The career of Walter Pater exemplifies the complicated interdependency between these forms of publishing in the nineteenth century. From the onset of his career he regularly and characteristically moved from fragmentary periodical publication to books, which normally represented the collection (and selection) of periodical pieces. In this chapter I argue that in the case of Pater’s earliest published work, in the Westminster Review and the Fortnightly, the character of the two...
Previous scholarly work on Sala has been sporadic and sparse: a full biography by Ralph Straus in... more Previous scholarly work on Sala has been sporadic and sparse: a full biography by Ralph Straus in 1942, P. D. Edwards’s treatment (1997) of the careers of Sala and Edmund Yates as ‘Dickens’s young men’, and Cathy Waters’s examination of his writing as part of a larger study of Household Words in 2008. So it is good to have Peter Blake’s new book on G. A. Sala (1828-95), a prodigal journalist, a pioneer of ‘new journalism’ and a renowned ‘special correspondent’ as we know, but also a robust Bo...
In this revisionary study, Will Tattersdill argues against the reductive 'two cultures' m... more In this revisionary study, Will Tattersdill argues against the reductive 'two cultures' model of intellectual discourse by exploring the cultural interactions between literature and science embodied in late nineteenth-century periodical literature, tracing the emergence of the new genre that would become known as 'science fiction'. He examines a range of fictional and non-fictional fin-de-siècle writing around distinct scientific themes: Martian communication, future prediction, X-rays, and polar exploration. Every chapter explores a major work of H. G. Wells, but also presents a wealth of exciting new material drawn from a variety of late Victorian periodicals. Arguing that the publications in which they appeared, as well as the stories themselves, played a crucial part in the development of science fiction, Tattersdill uses the form of the general interest magazine as a way of understanding the relationship between the arts and the sciences, and the creation of a n...
Despite the implication in the prospectus of the Nineteenth Century which appeared in Athenaeum o... more Despite the implication in the prospectus of the Nineteenth Century which appeared in Athenaeum on 10 February 1877, the transfer of editor, distributor and writers from the Contemporary Review to the Nineteenth Century was not legitimised, gradual or peaceful, but cataclysmic and concentrated, an eruption of the press in which the constituent elements were momentarily hyper-visible and palpable. The ‘story’ in the contemporary press, in pamphlets by the principals, and in twentieth-century criticism by A.W. Brown, Patricia Srebmik and Priscilla Metcalf has all the characteristics of a ‘good’ news story — intrigue, complexity and suspense, and longevity as far as news goes. To view the formation of the Nineteenth Century and our constructions of it as phenomena of cultural production, I want to look at some aspects of this transfer of cultural power which relate to our own methods for the study of modern printed texts — the issues of literary authority and the interaction of gender and contents.
A recent moment to remember in media history: the coincidence of the centenary of the death of W.... more A recent moment to remember in media history: the coincidence of the centenary of the death of W.T. Stead, a shaper of the newspaper revolution at the end of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth, with events at the British Library in London that are revolutionizing our access to print journalism. These events comprise the closure in 2013 of Colindale, the newspaper library building in North London where newspapers were housed, conserved, and read; the removal of most of them to a silo in Yorkshire for storage, improved preservation, and robot retrieval when necessary; and the opening of a newspaper and media reading room in the main British Library building at St Pancras, in the heart of London, where digital and microfilm surrogates of historical newspapers are consulted where they exist, and print versions where they do not. This is not simply a relocation of resources, but a strategic move that reflects the historicizing of print journalism, and its new place in m...
Historical newspapers are of interest to many humanities scholars, valued as sources of informati... more Historical newspapers are of interest to many humanities scholars, valued as sources of information and language closely tied to a particular time, social context and place. Following library and commercial microfilming and, more recently, digitisation projects, newspapers have been an accessible and valued source for researchers. The ability to use keyword searches through more data than ever before via digitised newspapers has transformed the work of researchers (as discussed by others including Putnam, 2016; Bingham, 2010). Digitised historic newspapers are also of interest to many researchers who seek large bodies of relatively easily computationally-transcribed text on which they can try new methods and tools. Intensive digitisation over the past two decades has seen smaller-scale or repository-focused projects flourish in the Anglophone and European world (Holley, 2009; King, 2005; Neudecker et al., 2014). However, just as earlier scholarship was potentially over-reliant on Th...
My intent here is to explore the range and ingenuity of Arthur Symons's participation in prin... more My intent here is to explore the range and ingenuity of Arthur Symons's participation in print culture, and to probe how he managed his bread and butter work as a journalist, critic, and book maker. My focus is his article 'The Painting of the Nineteenth Century', in its differing functions and forms over a four-year period (1903-1906), as a periodical book review and a chapter on painting that appeared in Studies in Seven Arts, a book comprised of articles from the press. What initially drew me to this article was its evidence of Symons's sustained support for Simeon Solomon, a queer British artist from a London-based family of Jewish painters, in the decade that followed the Wilde trials, and among the inhibitions they fostered. Nearly a generation younger than Solomon, Symons (1865-1945) was born just as Solomon (1840-1905) began his career. Solomon appears in both the 1903 and 1906 versions of Symons's review, and in between a newspaper review of an exhibitio...
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