Abstract
Less than a month after finishing writing the final parts to The Small House at Allington, Trollope began his next serial, Rachel Ray, to be published in the religious monthly Good Words beginning July 1863. Although Trollope completed the commissioned novel and the serialization was advertised, Rachel Ray was never serialized in the magazine, but published in two volumes by Chapman and Hall in October 1863. The editor of Good Words, a Scottish Queen’s Chaplain, Dr Norman MacLeod, refused Trollopé s novel on the grounds that it would be offensive to his readers. Intensive criticism of Good Words and Trollope from the Evangelical extreme led to the rejection of Rachel Ray. This rejection provides not only an interesting case of serial and book publishing history, but also an example of the difficulty for a purportedly religious magazine such as Good Words to serialize a popular secular novelist such as Trollope.
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Notes
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), A.M. Sheridan Smith, trans. (1972; reprinted London: Routledge, 1991), 9.
Donald Thomas, A Long Time Burning: The History of Literary Censorship in England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 239.
George Moore, Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals (London: Vizetelly and Co., 1885), 20. This pamphlet is a slightly revised form of an article which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette.
Robert M. Polhemus, The Changing World of Anthony Trollope (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 99.
Anthony Trollope, Rachel Ray (1863), ed. P.D. Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, World’s Classics, 1990), 21. All subsequent references are from this edition and are noted parenthetically in the text.
Anthony Trollope, Clergymen of the Church of England (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866), 63. The articles which make up this volume first appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1865.
Jane Nardin, ‘Comic Convention in Trollope’s Rachel Ray’, Papers on Language and Literature 22:1 (Winter 1986), 45. Her argument is that the novel is subversive because it undermines the comic plot through the unsatisfactory negotiation of power relations.
See Augusta Webster, Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1870), 35–62. My thanks to Gill Gregory for suggesting Webster’s poem to me.
See Lynda Nead, Myths Of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (1988; reprinted Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 131.
Prospectus, Good Words 1 (January 1860), inside front cover.
[Norman MacLeod,] ‘Note by the Editor’, Good Words 1 (December 1860), 796.
Patricia Thomas Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan: Victorian Publisher (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986), 39. There is no full-length study of Good Words and there are few scholarly articles dedicated to Good Words. Srebrnik’s study provides an excellent account of the founding of the magazine, and the relationship between editor and publisher.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), John Cumming, trans. (1972; reprinted London: Verso, 1992), 157.
W.J. Couper, ‘A Bibliography of Edinburgh Periodical Literature’, Scottish Notes and Queries 3, second series (May 1902), 164.
[Norman MacLeod,] ‘Note by the Editor’, Edinburgh Christian Magazine 3 (March 1852), 380.
[Norman MacLeod,] ‘Note by the Editor’, Edinburgh Christian Magazine 7 (March 1856), 380.
Revd Donald MacLeod, Memoir of Norman MacLeod. D.D. (2 vols.; London: Dalby, Isbister & Co., 1876), hereafter cited as Memoir. See MacLeod’s journal entry in the spring of 1863, Memoir 2, 185.
Quoted in Alexander Strahan, ‘Norman MacLeod’, Contemporary Review 20 (July 1872), 295.
Josef Altholz, The Religious Press in Britain, 1760–1900 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 39.
Sally Mitchell, Dinah Mulock Craik (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983), 59, states that after 1860 (and after John Halifax, Gentleman) Mulock was generally regarded as a women’s novelist and was reviewed less seriously than before. Mulock’s Mistress and Maid was serialized in Good Words in 1862.
Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church 1 (2 vols.; London: Adam & Charles Black, 1966), 440–1.
Elisabeth Jay, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 7.
[H.L. Mansel,] ‘Sensation Novels’, Quarterly Review 113 (April 1863), 481–514.
Herbert Graham, ‘Periodical Literature and Its Influences’, The Rose, the Shamrock, and the Thistle 3 (June 1863), 137.
Review of Rachel Ray, Illustrated London News 43 (14 November 1863), 502.
H.K., ‘A Word of Remonstrance with some Novelists’, Good Words 4 (July 1863), 525.
Review of Rachel Ray,Saturday Review 16 (24 October 1863), 556.
Merle Mowbray Bevington, The Saturday Review 1855–1868: Representative Educated Opinion in Victorian England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 154.
Quoted in Diana and Geoffrey Hindley, Advertising in Victorian England 1837–1901 (London: Wayland, 1972), 35.
Review of Oswald Cray, Athenaeum 1864 II (24 December 1864), 859.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, Randal Johnson, ed. (Oxford: Polity Press, 1993), 95–6.
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© 2000 Mark W. Turner
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Turner, M.W. (2000). Uncovering Periodical Identities: Good Words and the Rejection of Rachel Ray. In: Trollope and the Magazines. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288546_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288546_3
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