Launching a Hybrid: The Belton Estate in the Fortnightly Review

Abstract

In May 1865, Trollopé s The Belton Estate launched the Fortnightly Review. In the first part of this chapter, I explore the cultural formation of the Fortnightly and consider the nature of the magazine’s liberalism in relation to the network of male writers which defined it. I believe that, for all its radical policies, there is an absence of the female voice in its contents because of what might be termed its Positivist political stance. The Belton Estate (serialized between May 1865 and January 1866) was the second Trollope novel to launch a periodical, but rather than defining the magazine in the way Framley Parsonage seemed to do in the Cornhill, it sits oddly in the Fortnightly under its first editor, G.H. Lewes. The tensions which I think The Belton Estate generates as a bid for women readers are directly related to its context in a hybrid periodical — not quite a traditional review, not quite a popular monthly. In the second part of the chapter, I discuss the question of signature in the context of anxiety over creating what has been called a star system of criticism. Although star journalism had not yet been fully introduced in the mid-1860s, it can be argued that the rise of individual personalities within a burgeoning mass culture had already begun. The Fortnightly was part of the foundation for a middle-class culture which, as the century moved on, became hooked on personality and celebrity. The anonymity debate, then, can be examined not simply for its effect on honesty in writing but also for its contribution to a culture of celebrity.