Abstract
Popular magazine discourse during the mid-Victorian period was designed around the concept of the family as a domestic group bound together by shared literary tastes. Whereas today the target audiences for magazines tend to be stratified along gender and generational lines, editors of Victorian family magazines attempted to obviate such divisions by assuming that once within the home, individuals became subsumed into the group identity of ‘the family’. This image of an ‘ideal’ unified family as a readership group was crucial not only to the development of the periodical press, but also to the form and dissemination of Victorian novels, many of which were first published serially in cheap family journals. In the 1860s an unprecedented range of new magazines appeared on the market featuring novels by authors who designed their fiction with the middle-class family audience in mind.
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Notes
Among the studies which discuss the subversive qualities of the sensation novel are: E. Showalter, ‘Family Secrets and Domestic Subversion: Rebellion in the Novels of the 1860s’ in A. Wohl (ed.), The Victorian Family: Structures and Stresses, and the chapter on Wilkie Collins in R. Barickman et al., Corrupt Relations: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins, and the Victorian Sexual System.
G. Jewsbury, Unsigned review of The Moonstone, Athenaeum, 25 July 1868, 106, Cited in N. Page (ed.), Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, 170–71.
L. Stephen, ‘The Decay of Murder’, The Cornhill, XX, 1869, 726.
H.L. Mansel, ‘Sensation Novels’, Quarterly Review, CXIII, 1863, 485.
See J.A. Sutherland, Introduction to W. Collins, Armadale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), for a discussion of the connections between the sensation novel and modern technology. See also N. Daly, ‘Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses’, ELH, 66, 1999, 461–87.
D.A. Miller, ‘Cage aux Folles: Sensation and Gender in W. Collins’s The Woman in White’, in J. Hawthorn (ed.) The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, 95.
See K.M. Hughes and M. Lund, The Victorian Serial, 10; and L. Brake, “The Trepidation of the Spheres”: The Serial and the Book in the Nineteenth Century’, in Serials and Their Readers, R. Myers and M. Harris (eds), 88.
M. Oliphant, ‘Sensation Novels’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, May 1862, 568 (emphasis in the original).
C.H. Butterworth, ‘Overfeeding’, Victoria Magazine, November-April 1870, 503.
J. Hannay, ‘Bohemians and Bohemianism’, Cornhill, XI, February 1865, 241.
Anon., ‘The Sensation Times: A Chronicle of Excitement’, Punch, 9 May 1863, 193.
A. Conan Doyle, Study in Scarlet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 20.
M.E. Braddon’s literary mentor was the author Bulwer-Lytton. Wood and Ouida benefited (in a limited way) from the patronage of W. Harrison Ainsworth, editor of both The New Monthly Magazine and Bentley’s Miscellany. Wilkie Collins benefited from his friendship with Dickens, collaborating with him on a number of literary projects.
Quoted in R.L. Wolff, Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon 324.
J. Rose, ‘Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to a History of Audiences’, Journal of the History of ldeas, 53, January–April 1992, 47–70.
Anon., review of A. Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset, Publisher’.s Circular, 29, 1 November 1866, 650.
W.J. McCormack, “‘Never Put Your Name to an Anonymous Letter”: Serial Reading in the Dublin University Magazine, 1861 to 1869’, Yearbook of English Studies, 26, 1996, 115.
See A. Lorhli, Introduction to Household Words: Table of Contents, List of Contributor and Their Contributions, for details of Dickens’s editorial policies in relation to Household Words.
See G. Storey, K. Tillotson and N. Burgis (eds), Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, VI, 50. Subsequent references to this edition of Dickens’s letters will be cited as Pilgrim, followed by volume and page references.
See D. Liddle, ‘Salesmen, Sportsmen, Mentors: Anonymity and Mid-Victorian Theories of Journalism’, Victorian Studies, 41, Autumn, 1997, 31–68; and O. Maurer Jr., ‘Anonymity vs. Signature in Victorian Reviewing’, Studies in English, 27, June 1948, 1–27.
B. Quinn Schmidt, ‘Novelists, Publishers, and Fiction in Middle-class Magazines, 1860–80’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 17, 1984, 145.
See Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers, 175–8. See also J. Meckier, “‘Dashing in Now”: Great Expectations and Charles Lever’s A Day’s Ride’, Dickens Studies Annual, 26, 1998, 227–60.
P.A.W. Collins, ‘The All The Year Round Letter Book’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 10, 1970, 27.
For details of Once A Week see S. Elwell, ‘Editors and Social Change: A Case Study of Once A Week (1859–80)’, in J.H. Wiener (ed.), Innovators and Preachers.
R.A. Gettmann, ‘The Serialization of Reade’s A Good Fight’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 1, June 1951, 26.
M.W. Turner, ‘Gendered Issues: Intertextuality and The Small House at Allington in Cornhill Magazine’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 1993, 229.
W.M. Thackeray, ‘A Letter from the Editor to a Friend and Contributor’, Prospectus announcing the publication of The Cornhill, 1 November 1859. Reprinted in G.N. Ray (ed.), The Letters and Private Papers of W.M. Thackeray, 160.
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© 2001 Deborah Wynne
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Wynne, D. (2001). Tantalizing Portions: Serialized Sensation Novels and Family Magazines. In: The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596726_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596726_1
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