Studies and the Magazines

Abstract

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 journals, and what appeared in them at the time Pater was contributing, significantly affected the nature of the pieces that he wrote, and then recirculated in Studies of the History of the Renaissance (hereafter Studies) which appeared in 1873. Such distinctive periodical characteristics include differences of format (review versus article, quarterly versus monthly, anonymity versus signature), of politics (radical versus liberal) and of dominant discourses (philosophical, polemical, literary).