Abstract: This essay analyzes how readers of the religious periodical The Children’s Prize (1863–1931), which targeted a mixed-gender reader-ship of younger readers, were encouraged to think about their place within their natural environment. It argues that the depiction of children’s interactions with animals in the periodical’s first thirty years of publication challenges assertions about the difference between how boys and girls treated living creatures. Instead of presenting girls as preservers and boys as destroyers, the periodical constructs both genders as equally capable of animal cruelty, drawing attention to the latent power held by young children.
Abstract: This paper focuses on the Calcutta Review , an Anglo-Indian periodical, to examine its rhetorical exchanges in the 1840s and 1850s with the older journal the Asiatic Researches and its contemporary the North British Review over the value and utility of Indian literatures. I argue that the Calcutta Review ’s construction of Indian literature as a cultural category was defined by Christian evangelicalism, as it contests the authority of Orientalism through an approach that I term “literary evangelicalism.” I conclude by highlighting how these rhetorical exchanges fostered the rise of an imperial Anglophone periodical circuit in the long nineteenth century.
By analyzing the treatment of both amateur and professional women's photography across feature types in The Woman at Home, including ads, nonfiction profiles, and competitions, this paper explores how discourse on photography reflects the relationship between wom-en's work, pastimes, and the domestic. This essay argues that photography can be read as distinct from other forms of women's work that have been explored more thoroughly within The Woman at Home because of its inextricable links to the materiality of the periodical. Professional and amateur women photographers are not only thematic material for the magazine's text; they also contribute to the magazine's representation of domestic femininity by manufacturing images reproduced within its pages.
The American Waverley Magazine (1850-1909) and Scottish Waverley Journal, subsequently The Waverley (1856-58), provide two intriguing examples of how editors Moses Dow and Eleanor Duckworth harnessed Walter Scott's global popularity to establish successful publications of their own. While scholars have tended to overlook their Scottish connections, feminist leanings, and transatlantic ties, this essay explores how Waverley Magazine and Waverley Journal established a foundation of work by women that engaged other female writers and engendered later publications. Feminizing Scott's legacy, these publications drew upon the periodical's heterogeneous form to foster literary alliances among women under the banner of Waverley.
In 1874, the popular Sunday weekly Reynolds's Newspaper accused the first two working-class MPs of class betrayal. The news-paper attributed this alleged treachery to a form of cultural corruption known as flunkeyism. Through an examination of the controversy, this article will explore the term's evolution from anti-aristocratic insult to an influential conceptualisation of class betrayal. In demonstrating flun-keyism's political impact in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the article calls for a reevaluation of popular radical language formerly dismissed as anachronistic to late nineteenth-century politics.
This paper traces the textual afterlife of Frederic William Burton's 1840 watercolour A Blind Girl at A Holy Well to consider how periodicals and writers deployed the painting's sentimental depiction of blindness as part of mid-century debates about Irish culture and nationhood. While the publications all agreed that the painting was emotionally moving and nationally significant, the character of those emotions and the definition of that nation differed according to each periodical's political and religious aims, suggesting a flexible link in Victorian print culture between blindness and Irishness.
This paper examines visual and textual representations of China in The Illustrated London News's (ILN) inaugural issue of 1842, a pivotal year that witnessed the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing, formally ending the First Opium War. By repurposing images of China that used familiar elements of chinoiserie, the ILN leveraged shared British beliefs about China to buttress its claims of veracity amid shifting geopolitical realities. The ILN's textual accounts describing battles and violence that juxtapose tranquil picturesque landscapes may appear incongruous; however, this dissonance serves a cohesive narrative purpose in reassuring reader-viewers that China poses no threat to superior British military power.
From the mid-nineteenth century, British seaside tourism became increasingly popular among the elite as well as the lower classes. Older resorts such as Brighton bloomed, and new resorts such as Llandudno were built, often in previously inaccessible and far-flung areas such as Wales. Seaside tourism, and leisure in general, was not perceived as a fully innocent pastime, however, and magazines such as Punch arduously played into the controversy. Although most of its attention was directed towards England, Punch also satirized the growing Welsh seaside tourist industry. This article explores how Punch represented Welsh resorts in two diagonally opposed ways: as loci of both decadence and primitiveness.
The Bookseller, published from 1858, was the model for a new kind of trade journal. Dedicated to the needs of retailers of books, the new journal quickly inspired other retail trades to follow suit. This article examines the structure and contents of Joseph Whitaker's journal to reveal the strategies he used to position his publication at the heart of a business sector as it slowly transformed into a highly competitive mass market trade in books. The Bookseller laid the foundations for the communication and information system that remains at the heart of the global publishing industry to this day.
This essay compares the 1897 serialised version of The War of the Worlds in Pearson's Magazine to Wells's 1898 and 1924 revisions of the text for book publication. I argue that the serialised narrator is fallible, embodied in his responses, relatively nonscientific in his language, and thus far more an everyman than the later texts' unreliable, clinical, and intellectually dishonest narrator. By highlighting the importance of layperson experiences, Pearson's serialization offers working-and middle-class readers more empowering affects with which to approach science and raises questions for scholars about how authors shaped their texts for periodicals' and books' differing audiences.
This paper investigates the sociocultural implications of a relatively understudied print medium in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Bengali literary culture, the children's periodical. Through a study of Pramadacharan Sen's Sakha, Sivanath Sastri's Mukul, and Upendrakishor Raychaudhuri's Sandes, this paper explores how the emergence of these vernacular periodicals was interlinked with the construction of a literary selfhood among the Bengali middle classes and their understanding of childhood and children's literature from the 1870s onwards. Using Robert Darnton's circulation model of print culture in a colonial context, it also traces the material basis of these children's periodicals, the technologies of their production, and their diffusion, transformation, and commercial survival within a larger colonial print market until the 1920s.
