It is well known that most Victorian novels were published initially in serial form – whether within periodicals or as independent numbers. What seems less clearly understood is that, over the six decades of Victoria’s reign, the dominant mode of serialization shifted unmistakably from the monthly to the weekly instalment.1 The aesthetic implications are significant: the shift from ‘fat’ monthly to ‘lean’ weekly parts, in Coolidge’s terms, clearly influenced the form of Victorian fiction in the long term, favouring frequent ‘incidents’, ‘climax and curtain’ part-endings, and the mechanics of enigma and suspense. Yet the change is best explained as the gradual development of a fully capitalist mode of production in the British fiction industry. In economic terms, therefore, the shift is from expensive, low-circulation formats produced for middle-class readers by book publishers, towards cheap, high-circulation formats produced for a mass audience by newspaper proprietors. The biggest single step in the process was undoubtedly the abolition in 1855 of the newspaper stamp, the most onerous of the detested ‘taxes on knowledge’. These had been imposed from early in the eighteenth century less to collect revenue than to control dissent, by limiting popular access to the print medium (Collet). By the last quarter of the nineteenth century the most important outlets for serial fiction were no longer monthly literary magazines but weekly miscellaneous newspapers. This remains true whether we measure by the breadth of the audience reached or by the level of remuneration received by the author, and even, arguably, by the literary value attached to the fiction itself, either then or now. Yet our best current literary charts of this territory, most notably the Wellesley Index, tend still to mark the literary monthlies as the broad highways. The present volume in the Victorian Fiction Research Guide series is thus intended as a contribution to the upgrading of the status of the Victorian weekly press from that of mere literary byway. While they were far from being the only journals involved, metropolitan pictorial newspapers like The Illustrated London News and The Graphic undoubtedly played a key role at more than one stage in the growth of the importance of the weekly serial. In the inevitably brief comments that follow, I will try to sketch in turn the history of the two journals, their characteristics both common and distinct, and the nature of the indexes provided here.
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With the 1832 Reform Bill, the movement to repeal the taxes on knowledge gained strength. However, the result was a series of unsatisfactory Parliamentary compromises offering little encouragement to proprietors wishing to start up cheap journals aimed at a working-class audience. While reducing the tax on each newspaper from fourpence to a penny, the 1836 Newspaper Stamp Act increased the severity of the requirements concerning the security bonds to be posted against the issuing of criminal libel. It thus did little to reduce the fiscal burdens on small-scale publishers, so that the main stimulus was to Liberal weekly journals aimed at the middle-class. Many of these were well-established Sunday papers like the Sunday Times (1822- ), which featured a lively combination of radical political comment, crime coverage, and sports intelligence. Almost throughout the 1840s, the Sunday Times also carried full-length melodramatic serial novels, with Harrison Ainsworth and G.P.R. James among the featured authors (Law, ‘Nothing but a Newspaper’).
But by far the most successful of the metropolitan weeklies was a Saturday journal starting up in May 1842, whose most distinctive feature was that it was the first British newspaper to give priority to pictures. From the beginning the engravings of The Illustrated London News were lavish in both quantity and quality. Under the canny proprietorship of Herbert Ingram, the paper was markedly less radical and more miscellaneous than the Sunday Times. Although consistently calling for reforms to alleviate the wretchedness of the lower orders, it was always happy to celebrate the latest royal and civic occasion in grand style. It rejected the broad humour of the smoking-room and cultivated a ‘respectable’ family audience, directing some of its features specifically towards women and young people. Less than a year after The Illustrated London News started up, it also began to carry fiction. The serials offered during the paper’s first decade were generally rather shorter and less melodramatic than those in the Sunday Times. The first offering, Henry Cockton’s England and France, a fashionable Regency comedy with scenes of the Napoleonic Wars, was in fact unrepresentative. More typical were romances of contemporary English middle-class life: the proprietors seem to have encouraged titles like Augustus Mayhew’s Story of the Present Day, or subtitles like ‘A Story of Life in the Middle Station’ (for Camilla Toulmin’s Gold).2 The journal noted that
The literary feature of introducing a series of nouvellettes from the pens of the first writers of our time, has met with a very general and gratifying approval. It seems to have harmonized with the family character of this newspaper, and to have fertilized the dry realities of the actual world with a pleasant stream of fiction to please the palate, and prompt the imagination of the young. (Preface to Vol. 4, The Illustrated London News, Supplement, 6 July 1844)
The novels were thus intended to complement rather than compete with the news. Indeed, the intermittency and irregularity with which the serials often appeared at this stage show that works of the imagination served only a secondary and supplementary role, and were thus liable to curtailment and postponement when space was at a premium due to a royal visit or a civic funeral. It is thus not surprising that by the early 1850s, the metropolitan weekly papers had all dropped the idea of carrying serial fiction (though The Illustrated London News was one of the last to do so, and indeed continued throughout to carry complete tales in its Christmas issues). One reason was undoubtedly that the weekly serial was becoming increasingly associated with the lower depths of the proletarian market. By this time ‘penny bloods’ were appearing en masse from the notorious ‘Salisbury Square’ publishers, in penny weekly parts, in penny weekly miscellanies, and even in unstamped penny Sunday newspapers, all of which assumed the form of miniaturized, plagiarized, parodic versions of their bourgeois equivalents (James, chs. 3-4). The middle-class journals were obviously anxious to distance themselves from such proletarian insubordination, just as they wanted to draw a line between their own activities as reformers and those of the red republicans. But perhaps more important was that these were stirring times, and the attraction of narrative fiction paled by comparison with the drama of public events both domestic and international. These, of course, included the second presentation of the People’s Charter and the revolutions in Europe of 1848, the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the build-up to the Crimean campaign of 1854.
Yet, as soon as the taxes upon knowledge were removed, fiction began to appear in the weekly newspapers once more, this time in greater quantity and with greater regularity. The key early developments were now not in London but in the provinces, where various forms of syndication were developed to distribute fiction material to many of the newly founded local and regional weekly journals. The initial developments were in Scotland where prolific journalists like David Pae developed informal mechanisms to broadcast their own melodramatic serials. Subsequently northern agencies, such as Tillotsons of Bolton, Lancashire, were set up to syndicate sensational novels by the likes of Mary Braddon on a more formal basis to ‘coteries’ of journals with complementary circulations. By the mid-1870s the provincial agencies were selling new fiction to more than a dozen papers simultaneously and were thus able to offer popular authors far more for their serial rights than the London magazines. Dickens had already demonstrated conclusively in the 1860s with his twopenny literary miscellany All the Year Round that weekly serialization was not incompatible with high literary standards, and thus helped to break the association between the weekly instalment and a proletarian readership (Dallas). But it was not until after 1880, when the economic argument was overwhelming, that metropolitan weekly newspapers returned to the fiction market in any numbers. These included both ‘class’ and ‘mass’ journals, that is, papers aimed at either the distinct professional classes or the undifferentiated masses (Bourne, chs. 23-4). Among the more expensive and respectable ‘class’ weeklies featuring instalment novels in the 1880s were Society journals like The World or papers for women like The Queen. The mass penny weeklies which began to include serial fiction around the same time included new populist Tory Sunday papers like The People, old radical journals like The Weekly Dispatch, and fragmentary entertainment miscellanies led by George Newnes’s Tit-Bits.
One of the pioneers in this movement in the metropolitan press was a new ‘class’ pictorial paper which was started up in December 1869 by William Luson Thomas, an engraver who had had considerable experience working on The Illustrated London News. As we shall see in more detail shortly, The Graphic was both strikingly similar in format to its by now world-famous rival, and yet at the same time slightly more inclined to miscellaneity in its contents, and rather more ‘modern’ in editorial tone and pictorial style. Priced at sixpence, then a penny more than The Illustrated London News, The Graphic clearly needed to offer something extra. Thus the engravings tended to be on a grander scale and the supplements more lavish, with a special double number at Christmas from the beginning, and soon a similar offering at the Summer holiday season. In lieu of a manifesto, the first special Christmas number carried a short celebratory lyric of exquisite (and hopefully intentional) awfulness, entitled ‘The Graphic’. The final stanza ran:
We mean to give you pictures in perfection,
Whether they’re done with pencil or with pen:
Our art’s equivalent to vivisection,
And tells the truth of women and of men.
So, if you want enjoyment that’s delightful,
To cheer these dreary days of toil and traffic,
Art that is pure, and Wit that’s never spiteful,
And perfect Poetry – why, read the GRAPHIC.(The Graphic, Christmas Number [25 Dec] 1869)
In 1873, after acquiring sensational novellas from Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade at Christmas time in the two previous years, The Graphic also commenced an unbroken series of full-length serial novels, beginning with rather more sedate offerings from Margaret Oliphant and Anthony Trollope. The success of The Graphic was so marked that it was not long before The Illustrated London News was forced to pay its young rival the tribute of imitation. It thus also began to offer colourful double Christmas and Summer numbers, and started up its own programme of serial novels in 1883. Five years after Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, The Illustrated London News produced a special issue on 14 May 1892 to celebrate its own fiftieth anniversary, though it had been forestalled slightly by The Graphic, which had celebrated its ‘Coming of Age’ in a similar way on 6 December 1890. But by then the rivalry between the two journals was almost entirely amicable, and in its anniversary issue The Graphic paid handsome tribute to The Illustrated London News as the pioneer of quality pictorial journalism (‘The “Illustrated London News”’, The Graphic, 6 Dec 1890, 639).
So from the early 1880s until nearly the end of the century, these two rival illustrated papers were among the most prestigious metropolitan outlets for serial fiction. As the Key Data suggest, both seem to have reached the broadest possible middle-class audience, selling as many as a quarter of a million copies for ordinary issues and up to double that total for Christmas numbers. By the 1890s, at least six of the back pages of each issue were filled with advertisements encouraging conspicuous consumption among those comfortably able to afford a sixpenny illustrated paper, with many of the same announcements appearing in both The Illustrated London News and The Graphic. Some were of the classified variety with a particular focus on new publications and musical instruments for sale or hire, but most were of the large illustrated display type, selling nationally available brand goods aiming at both women (like Pear’s soap or Fry’s cocoa), and at men (as with Elliman’s embrocation or Ogden’s cigarettes),3 as well as promoting many of the larger London stores, like Maples of Tottenham Court Road for furniture, or the clothing specialist Peter Robinson of Regent Street. The ample revenue from subscribers and advertisers seems to have allowed both papers to offer top rates to writers in vogue – often more than a thousand pounds for serial rights to a full-length novel.4
Both papers were, of course, available to a far wider audience than the residents of London and the ‘Home Counties’. Copies were sent by train to booksellers throughout the country, and by ship to agents in America and the British colonies. In addition, postal subscriptions were available not only all over the United Kingdom, but throughout the world, at three separate rates, and with a discount if the edition printed on thin paper was selected. The heavy reliance on pictorial matter meant that language was not always a barrier. As early as 1857, The Illustrated London News had even claimed Emperor Komei of Japan as a subscriber, a decade before the Meiji Restoration and the opening of the country to the West!5 Back in 1851, though, a special French edition of the same paper had been published, and a North American edition appeared under the title The Illustrated News of the World in the early 1890s. And by this time, methods of syndication were in operation which ensured that the serial stories carried in both papers also appeared widely elsewhere. A great deal of the fiction material in both papers in the 1880s and 1890s was sold to them by A.P. Watt, the first successful professional literary agent, who claimed many of the most popular authors as his clients, and who wielded great power in the periodical market at this time. The papers frequently negotiated to purchase the widest serial rights to the novels they carried, and Watt was frequently employed to sell the material on to other journals. These included not only those in the United States, where the illustrated papers Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper provided common outlets, and in a number of British Colonies (in Australia the Sydney Mail carried many of the serials from The Graphic, for example), but also within the United Kingdom itself. By a mechanism that I have called ‘belt-and-braces’ syndication, second serial rights to many of the stories were sold on to a number of provincial weekly papers.6
Yet both the fiction and newspaper markets were changing quickly in the last decade of the nineteenth century, so that neither paper remained a major venue for serial fiction long into the twentieth. In 1895 a change of policy on the part of Mudie’s, the largest circulating library, precipitated the sudden demise of the expansive ‘triple-decker’ format, and new fiction quickly became available in cheaper and more compact volumes. Even before then, the demand for superior novels in serial form was probably already on the wane, and the field was soon left wide open to lesser writers. At the same time, demand for illustrated news material was increasing, as Imperial adventurism led to military drama and technical developments in half-tone printing allowed photographs to be reproduced cheaply on newsprint. Popular morning papers like Alfred Harmsworth’s Daily Mirror were quick to take advantage.7 The owners of The Illustrated London News obviously felt this pressure more keenly than those of Graphic, who had moved to start up their own illustrated penny journal The Daily Graphic as early as 1890. As the index shows, The Illustrated London News largely ceased to publish serial novels in the second half of 1897, though it continued to carry short stories by the likes of Max Pemberton or M.E. Francis in the main issues of the paper until around 1906, and in the Christmas numbers for rather longer. Shorter serials by writers such as Stanley Weyman and H.B. Marriott Watson continued to appear in The Graphic also until around 1906, when they were replaced for a few years by complete tales, and for a slightly longer span in the Christmas issues. Before the outbreak of the Great War, however, fiction had entirely ceased to feature in both papers.
* * *
In order to appeal to a wide audience, neither of the prestigious pictorial weeklies took a strong political line, though close inspection shows that The Illustrated London News remained mildly Liberal in opinion, while The Graphic took on a faintly Tory colouring. Regular columns during the 1890s included: in the case of The Illustrated London News, ‘Our Notebook’ by James Payn, ‘Science Jottings’ by Dr Andrew Wilson, ‘The Playhouses’ by Clement Scott, with a weekly article by Andrew Lang under various titles, and book reviews by the likes of George Saintsbury; and, in the case of The Graphic, ‘An Artistic Causerie’ by M.H. Spielmann, ‘The Bystander’ by J. Ashby-Sterry, ‘The Theatres’ by W. Moy Thomas, ‘Books Worth Reading’ by T.P. O’Connor’, and ‘The Week at Westminster’ by H.W. Lucy. But, at a time when the image of the ‘New Woman’ was rapidly becoming the height of journalistic fashion, perhaps the best place to see the subtle shades of ideological difference between the two papers was in the columns specifically written by and for women.8 Florence Fenwick-Miller’s weekly ‘Ladies Column’ in The Illustrated London News and its equivalent in The Graphic, Lady Violet Greville’s ‘Place aux Dames’, form a fascinating contrast. In brief, Fenwick-Miller in The Illustrated London News takes a progressive line on the suffrage and marriage questions, celebrating a victory for women’s rights in the Jackson/Clitheroe judgement (which denied the authority of the husband to hold his wife against her will, 4 April 1891, 452), yet remains an enthusiastic advocate of the latest feminine fashions from Paris. On the death of Emily Faithful, Fenwick-Miller praises her work as a publisher while criticizing the manliness of her costume (15 June 1895, 750). Greville in The Graphic opposes electoral or marriage reform, but is in favour of paid work, active athleticism, and rational dress for women – she sees the enfranchisement of women in Australia as the ‘thin end of the wedge’ (25 Nov 1893, 659), but demands that ‘where women do equally good work with men their wages should be the same’ (15 Sept 1894, 306).
In the columns devoted to fiction, however, neither paper was prepared to give space to novelists like Sarah Grand or Mona Caird who were aggressive in decrying the wrongs of women or in claiming their rights. Indeed, there were some decidedly reactionary contributions concerning ‘the woman question’ by female authors, notably, of course, Eliza Lynn Linton who was an occasional contributor of both tales and articles to The Illustrated London News. The most extreme example I have found is a short novel which appeared in serial in the same paper in late 1895 – the ironically titled A Woman with a Future, by Cecily Sidgwick, under the alias Mrs Andrew Dean. There are, however, a number of more progressive approaches to contemporary social questions to be found in the work of male writers. These are generally the authors influenced by French naturalism who have gone down in literary history as the heroes of early Modernism – homegrown products like Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, or H.G. Wells, as well as American imports like W.D. Howells or Henry James. But such narratives dealing with contemporary themes were undoubtedly in the minority. In the terms of the debate then raging over the future of the novel, in which the extreme positions were represented by Howells’s advocacy of realism and Lang’s defence of the romance,9 both pictorial papers came down decidedly on the side of the romancers. In this sense, the most typical and frequent serials to appear in both papers in the last decades of the century were historical adventures from the venerable pen of Walter Besant and exotic adventures from the coming man Henry Rider Haggard. Both these types of romance, of course, provided ample scope for the illustrator.
Here, The Illustrated London News relied frequently on a small number of experienced illustrators, notably G.A. Forestier for costume dramas and R. Caton Woodville on exotic themes, while Walter Paget tended to be reserved for the more realist subjects. The Graphic employed a noticeably wider range of artists to embellish its fiction offerings, though among the more regular contributors were Sydney P. Hall (often scenic pieces for the novels of Frances Eleanor Trollope), and Seymour Lucas (particularly for the stirring scenes in Haggard). Obviously metropolitan and colonial settings tended to predominate, though a minority of stories developed provincial themes. Here, though, the industrial north and midlands were markedly absent and remote settings were the norm, notably the highlands and islands of Scotland, as in the novels of William Black and S.R. Crockett, or the moorland wastes of the southwest, as treated by R.D. Blackmore, Sabine Baring-Gould, or Hardy. In general, The Graphic’s directors seem to have been rather more conscious of appealing to a family audience and thus more prone to Grundyism. The Illustrated London News was noticeably more forward to exploit the erotic potential of depicting bare-breasted native maidens to accompany exotic tales such as Haggard’s Nada or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Uma, both in 1892. The pressures of respectability also seem to have weighed more heavily on the literary contributors to The Graphic: there had been a public row with Wilkie Collins over ‘impropriety’ in The Law and Lady back in 1875 (Peters, 371), while at the beginning of the 1890s Hardy was privately persuaded to bowdlerize drastically both ‘A Group of Noble Dames’ and Tess (Feltes, ch. 5; Gatrell, ch. 4). On the other hand, The Illustrated London News seems to have allowed its serialists rather less freedom in terms of length and number of instalments. In order to package its fiction material neatly into the bound semi-annual volumes, it insisted from the beginning on stories in 26 parts, each of 6,000 words (Besant, 192), and shifted smartly to 13 parts in 1894 when the triple-decker was about to crash. A relevant factor here is that The Illustrated London News moved rather more quickly to exploit the wider serial rights in its fiction, by selling its stories on to other papers. The freedom of the later Victorian serial novelist was thus constrained just as much by commodification for economic motives as by censorship on moral grounds (Law, Serializing Fiction, 191-7).
In short, in the late nineteenth century, the two premier illustrated weeklies had many common characteristics, and where they did differ significantly in stance or style, the determinants were often complex and contradictory. As I have argued elsewhere, the weekly papers of the later Victorian era generally ‘tended to be not only miscellaneous in their contents but also inconsistent in their ideological makeup’ (Law, ‘New Woman Novels in Newspaper’, 18).
* * *
It is surprising, then, that a complete listing of the fiction appearing in these two journals has not been carried out before. In both cases, of course, indexes were regularly compiled, printed, and supplied to subscribers, along with a title page and preface, to be bound in at the front of each six-monthly volume. However, these are inadequate for present scholarly purposes. In the first place they are not cumulative; in the second they are not comprehensive, tending in fact to focus on the illustrations and downplay the fiction (see Sinnema, 178n3); and, finally they are often simply not there. In preparing the indexes offered here, in each case, I have had to consult four theoretically complete runs of the Victorian issues of the journals concerned. This was in order to get a sight of all the special Christmas and Summer holiday issues, which seem to have been frequently omitted from the bound volumes. Yet, even so, there are a number of semi-annual indexes that I have not been able to locate. It is thus possible that some do not exist.
Though a complete cumulative index to all the material in both papers would be of considerable value to social historians, such an undertaking is well beyond the scope of the present work. Here I have attempted to limit the index purely to prose fiction, whether illustrated or not. But it has sometimes been difficult to distinguish this material clearly from, most frequently, stories in pictures with a running textual commentary, but also occasionally from accounts of travel, natural history, and social commentary, when these take a fanciful form. In such cases I have opted to err on the side of inclusivity.
No ‘office books’ (ledgers identifying authorship of articles submitted) appear to have survived in the case of either paper, but fortunately most of the fiction material in both is explicitly signed. It has been possible to attribute confidently all pieces accompanied by the designation ‘By the Author(s) of ’, many of the pieces signed with a pseudonym (including initials), but only a few of the entirely anonymous pieces. This has been done using the British Library Catalogue in the first case, the Wellesley Index, Halkett and Laing’s Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature, or Nesbitt and Hadfield’s Australian Literary Pseudonyms in the second, and internal evidence in the papers concerned (announcements, indexes, other articles, etc) in all three.
In the course of working through the more than 180 heavy volumes concerned, I have made a number of interesting literary ‘finds’. These include:
* Mary Cholmondeley’s first published story, ‘All’s Fair in Love or War’, appearing in The Graphic Summer Number for 1882 under the pseudonym of “Lee Ruff”, an attribution recently confirmed by Peterson.
* Mary Braddon’s ‘His Good Fairy’ in The Illustrated London News Summer Number for 1894, one of quite a number of her later short stories which do not appear in Wolff.10
* A number of short tales by Grant Allen in both papers which did not appear in existing bibliographies.11
Lengthy lists of short stories by a number of largely forgotten minor writers also appear in these indexes, many of which seem never to have been reprinted. Notable cases include those by John Saunders and Katharine Macquoid in The Illustrated London News, and by F.W. Robinson and T.W. Speight in The Graphic. At the same time the careers as serial novelists of neglected authors such as Frances Eleanor Trollope and William Black are brought into much clearer focus with these listings. I thus hope that they will prove of use to students of literary as well as publishing history.
Acknowledgements
I would like to record my thanks: to the Waseda University Central and School of Politics and Economics Libraries for permission to take and reproduce photographs of pages from their respective files of The Graphic and The Illustrated London News; to Brian Edgar and Jennifer Carnell for meticulously carrying out double-checks on my behalf at Exeter and Colindale; to Clair and George Hughes, Barbara Onslow, and Pierre Coustillas for reading through the manuscript and offering suggestions and corrections; and to Barbara Garlick and Peter Edwards of the Victorian Fiction Research Unit for their advice, encouragement, and careful editorial oversight.
Works Cited or Consulted
Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900. Chicago, IL.: U of Chicago P, 1957.
Anderson, Patricia J. The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790-1860. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991.
Besant, Walter. Autobiography. London: Hutchinson, 1902.
Bourne, H.R. Fox. English Newspapers: Chapters in the History of Journalism. 2 vols. London: Chatto and Windus, 1887.
The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature: Volume 4, 1800-1900. Third edition. Ed. Joanne Shattock. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
Carnell, Jennifer. The Literary Lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Hastings: Sensation Press, 2000.
Collet, Collet Dobson. History of the Taxes on Knowledge. 2 vols. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899.
Coolidge, Archibald Cary. Charles Dickens as Serial Novelist. Ames: Iowa State UP, 1967.
Dallas, E.S. Review of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. In The Times (17 Oct 1861) 6.
Deacon’s Newspaper Handbook (London, Annual, 1877-94).
Der Verlag Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1837-1912. Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1912.
Feltes, N.N. Modes of Production of Victorian Novels. Chicago, IL.: U of Chicago P, 1986.
Gatrell, Simon. Hardy, the Creator: A Textual Biography. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988.
The Graphic, 42:1097 (6 Dec 1890), Special 21st Anniversary Number.
The Graphic, 125:3131 (14 Dec 1929), Special Diamond Jubilee Number.
Hibbert, Christopher. The Illustrated London News’ Social History of Victorian Britain. London: Angus & Robertson, 1975.
The Illustrated London News, 100:2769 (14 May 1892), Special 50th Anniversary Number.
The Illustrated London News, 250:6667 (13 May 1967), Special 125th Anniversary Number.
Jackson, Mason. The Pictorial Press: Its Origin and Progress. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1885.
James, Louis. Fiction for the Working Man 1830-1850. London: Oxford UP, 1963.
Law, Graham. Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press. Basingtoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2000.
Law, Graham. ‘New Woman Novels in Newspapers,’ Media History 7:1 (June 2001) 17-35.
Law, Graham. ‘“Nothing but a Newspaper”: Serializing Fiction in the Press in the 1840s.’ In Victorian Encounters: Publishers, Editors and Readers, ed. Laurel Brake and Julie Codell, forthcoming [2002].
Loeb, Lori Anne. Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.
McKendry, Virginia. ‘ The Illustrated London News and the “Invention of Tradition”,’ Victorian Periodicals Review 27 (1994) 1-24.
Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory (London, Annual, 1846- ).
Onslow, Barbara. Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Basingtoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 2000.
Peters, Catherine. The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins. London: Secker & Warburg, 1991.
Peterson, Linda. ‘The Role of the Periodical Press in the (Re)making of Mary Cholmondeley as New Woman Writer,’ Media History 7:1 (June 2001) 36-47.
Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914. Stanford, CA.: Stanford UP, 1990.
Shorter, Clement K. An Autobiography. Edited by J. M. Bulloch. London: Privately printed, 1927.
Sinnema, Peter W. Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the ‘IllustratedLondon News’. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998.
Spilka, Mark. ‘Henry James and Walter Besant: “The Art of Fiction” Controversy,’ Novel 6:2 (Winter 1973) 101-19.
Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1989.
Vries, Leonard de. History as Hot News, 1842-1865: The World of the Early Victorians as Seen through the Eyes of “The Illustrated London News”. London: John Murray, 1995.
Vries, Leonard de. History as Hot News, 1865-1897: The Late Nineteenth Century World as Seen through the Eyes of “The Illustrated London News” and “The Graphic”. London: John Murray, 1973.
The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals. 5 vols. Ed. Walter E. Houghton. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1966-89.
Wolff, Robert Lee. Nineteenth-Century Fiction: A Bibliographical Catalogue. Vol. 1. New York: Garland, 1981.
Abbreviations
A(s)O = the author(s) of
CN = separately paginated special Christmas Number
SN = separately paginated special Summer Number
SS = other separately paginated Special Supplement
Notes
* The Chronological Indexes provide the varying signatures actually occurring; these are standardized to the most commonly used form in the Author Indexes.
* Square brackets are used to indicate editorial interpolations.
* Serials consisting of six parts or more are indicated in bold-face type; stories published complete or in two to five parts only are indicated within single inverted commas. (It should be noted that many of the longer stories published complete in the special holiday numbers subsequently appeared in a single volume under the same title.)
* In the Author Indexes the date(s) of publication and the number of instalments (where appropriate) follow the volume number(s). Page numbers are only provided in the Chronological Indexes, where the volume number is followed by the separate issue numbers and the period covered. (This procedure seems particularly suitable for serials in the weekly press.)
* Within the listings of the pages numbers on which each story is found, semicolons are used to denote separate issues, while commas are used to denote non-consecutive pages within a single issue.
* Pages completely given over to illustration of a story are included only if numbered consecutively with pages containing text of that story.
- For an extended defence of this argument, as for detailed exemplification of many of the points made more generally in this Introduction, see Law, Serializing Fiction. [↩]
- For more extended though not entirely compatible descriptions of the fiction material in the first decade of The Illustrated London News, see Sinnema, ch. 5, and Law, ‘Nothing But a Newspaper’. [↩]
- Though advertisement columns were undoubtedly ‘gendered spaces’ at this time, advertisers could be self-conscious enough to play games with readers’ gender expectations on occasion, as during the ‘New Woman’ boom of the mid-1890s (see Law, ‘New Woman Novels in Newspapers,’ 23-30). Generally on Victorian advertising, see Loeb, and also Richards. [↩]
- Details are only occasionally available, but The Graphic paid Oliphant £1300 for Innocent as early as 1873, though Hardy received only £620 for British and Colonial serial rights to Tess, while The Illustrated London News probably paid the aging Wilkie Collins £1000 for Blind Love in 1889 (see Law, Serializing Fiction, 163, 240). [↩]
- See the editorial comments accompanying the unsigned story ‘The Folding Screen: A Japanese Tale’, The Illustrated London News, 3 Jan 1857, 678-9. [↩]
- See Law, Serializing Fiction, 105-9. For example, in 1885 Robert Buchanan’s Master of the Mine appeared not only in The Illustrated London News but also simultaneously in the (Aberdeen) Weekly Free Press, the (Edinburgh) Scottish Reformer and the Leeds Express, while in 1891 Walter Besant’s St. Katherine’s by the Tower featured in the Birmingham Weekly Post and the Liverpool Weekly Courier as well as The Graphic. A similar pattern of publication emerges with Hardy’s Tess later the same year. [↩]
- The Mirror reproduced its first images from photographs in January 1904. [↩]
- Generally on Victorian women journalists, see Onslow, who also discusses the work of Florence Fenwick-Miller on more than one occasion. [↩]
- Generally on this debate and its significance, see Spilka, 101-2; the most distinguished participants were, of course, Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. [↩]
- These have now been incorporated in the updated listing by Carnell, 389-94, and recently reprinted by the Sensation Press, as The Fatal Marriage and Other Stories (2000). [↩]
- These have now been included in Peter Morton’s admirably comprehensive Internet bibliography, available at www.flinders.edu.au/topics/Morton/Victorians/Grant_Allen_bibliography.htm, which is scheduled to appear in its final form as a Victorian Fiction Research Guide. [↩]