Introduction:Victorian Talk Martin Hewitt (bio) and Patrick Leary (bio) The conversational life of the Victorians has received little sustained scholarly investigation, despite its obvious importance. For that reason, we set out in 2020 with funds from the Margaret Belcher Visiting Fellowship in Victorian Studies at St Hugh's College Oxford to convene a colloquium on "Victorian talk" that would bring together scholars from different fields and perspectives to exchange ideas about this neglected subject. Because we felt that face-to-face talk was, given the subject matter, by far the best way to proceed, we postponed our plans until pandemic restrictions eased. At last, however, in April 2022, we were all able to meet in Oxford. It is from that lively mix of presentations and conversations that the essays in this Victorian Review forum are drawn. If the talk of the Victorians was evanescent, it was also ubiquitous. Family life, social life, working life, intellectual life, political life—all were lived within, and sustained by, a vast eddying sea of now-vanished talk. It permeated literary life, as well, and although historians and literary scholars have understandably focused on the burgeoning print culture of the period, one marked by the stupendous output of the world's first industrialized mass press and the flowering of Victorian fiction and poetry, much less attention has been paid to the manifold ways in which talk shaped and interacted with this torrent of print. The conversation of the workplace, the dinner table, the coffee house, the pub, and the clubroom was continually replenished by the steady tidal flow of the news of the day and the ready-made opinions on offer in magazine reviews and newspaper leaders. At the same time, as Walter Bagehot observed, the tone of periodical prose that emerged with the new century was that of "the talk of the manifold talker, glancing lightly from topic to topic" (256). The private circulation of gossip could, as in the case of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, importantly shape critical reactions that appeared in print. The discussion of fiction, as Clemence Schultze demonstrates here, could be a staple of the "community of readers" that made up a middle-class family like Charlotte Yonge's. If novels were much talked about, those same novels crucially relied upon varied representations of talk to engage their readers, representations that have been the subject of recent scholarly analysis by such scholars as Ivan Kreilkamp and Amy Wong. While the bibulous discursive communities of Blackwood's Noctes Ambrosianae, the Fraser's circle, and the Punch table were undoubtedly the subject of mythmaking, there is no question that talk was central to the editorial and reporting processes of much of the nineteenth-century press, from the choice of topics and themes to the gathering of news. Oral testimony in courtrooms or at Parliamentary committee hearings appeared in newspaper columns that in turn provided fodder for many a [End Page 189] verbal debate. Whether as gossip or argument, exhortation or denunciation, storytelling or witnessing, Victorian talk was always in motion, circulating restlessly from one setting to another, from private spheres to public ones, and from oral to print media and back again. Much of the significance of talk in the nineteenth century also derives from the cultural capital it embodied and circulated. Famous talkers were feted in Society, their company sought out and their facility in conversation and debate valued almost above all other accomplishments. Not even excellence in public speaking, which jurist A.V. Dicey considered "a very much less improving occupation than good talking," commanded the respect and admiration of impromptu eloquence in private settings. The political circuits associated especially with the early-century Whigs, at Brooks' or the Reform Club, or at Holland House, which nourished the talk of Sydney Smith, Samuel Rogers, and T.B. Macaulay, established an enduring and expanding model encompassing literary celebrity as well as political persuasion. Just as Lady Palmerston exercised enormous influence over Liberalism as a political hostess, so Thackeray and Carlyle eagerly participated in the salons of Jane Brookfield and Lady Ashburnham. For all its venom, the "many-sided yet concentrated malice" with which Abraham Hayward held forth at...
Reviewed by: The Diaries of Anthony Hewitson, Provincial Journalist, Volume 1, 1865–1887 by Andrew Hobbs Patrick Leary (bio) Andrew Hobbs, The Diaries of Anthony Hewitson, Provincial Journalist, Volume 1, 1865–1887 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2022), pp. viii + 672, $42.95/£35.95 hardcover, $31.00/£25.95 paperback, open-access e-book. A diary by a Victorian newspaper journalist is a rare thing. One might conclude that those whose job it was to gather the public news of the day were not typically much inclined to keep a record of their own personal doings. Memoirs there are in plenty, but as a guide to actual journalistic practice, they generally lack both detail and candor. A diary by a journalist based outside of London is even rarer. In fact, there is only one such document known to scholars, and until now one had to travel to the Lancashire Archives in Preston to see it. So it is not surprising that a historian as astute as Andrew Hobbs quickly grasped the significance of the unpublished manuscript diaries of Anthony Hewitson (1836–1912), a journalist based in Preston. Hewitson's diaries deeply inform Hobbs's landmark study of provincial journalism, A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855–1900 (2018). This edition of the 1865–87 diaries, soon to be followed by a second and concluding volume covering 1891 to 1912, is a gift to all students of Victorian journalism and, for that matter, of Victorian culture more generally. Starting his working life as an apprentice to a printer, Hewitson provides a particularly useful example of just how common, for much of the century, was the progression from compositor to reporter to subeditor to editor and even to proprietor. This kind of fluidity would become less frequent later, but Hewitson's case demonstrates how seamlessly many members of the "labour aristocracy" of the printing trade were able to move [End Page 308] among various other roles in the production of books, magazines, and newspapers. Printers, reporters, and editors all shared a similar class position, and the last two jobs were frequently held at the same time. A newspaper proprietor, however, had much clearer claims to solid middle-class status. After years of working as the chief reporter for Preston's largest newspaper, the Preston Guardian, Hewitson bought the town's third largest paper, the Preston Chronicle, in 1868. Yet even as proprietor, Hewitson spent much of his time working at the same sorts of things he had worked at in his earlier career while also spending his Saturdays selling copies of his paper, collecting tuppences from behind the counter of his own newspaper office. These are not the kind of diaries meant to be read for their literary merits. There are no passages of fine writing, no particularly striking descriptions of the people, places, or events that Hewitson encountered. He saved all that sort of thing for his columns and guidebooks and local histories. These are the working diaries of a busy provincial journalist, and their effect on the reader as well as their value to the historian lies in their cumulative impact, a steady accretion of quotidian detail that illuminates, as nothing else can, the working life of a Victorian journalist and editor. The rhythms of Hewitson's working life as reflected in these detailed diary entries are revelatory in many ways, not least of which is how thoroughly his work as a journalist was permeated by oral culture. Indeed, his ability to record speech accurately, via shorthand, was the early accomplishment that most fully enabled his move from printer to reporter. The diaries make clear how much his success depended upon the countless bits of gossip that he picked up as he roamed the town in his constant search for "pars" to fill the paper (38). "Running about after paragraphs," runs one entry in 1865, a remark that in one form or another crops up repeatedly through all of the diary's six hundred pages (25). One example must suffice. On June 7, 1872, Hewitson gets wind of a juicy bit of gossip about the seventy-four-year-old local vicar, who, it is whispered...
The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (1966–89), one of the twentieth century’s great feats of collaborative scholarship, would begin to strip away the veil of anonymity that had long concealed authorship in nineteenth-century periodicals. A cache of unpublished correspondence from the 1950s reveals that the origin and design of the index were rooted in the friendship between two pioneers of Victorian studies: Walter Houghton and Richard Altick. Key decisions made by Houghton in the early days of the project were crucially shaped by Altick’s advice, with consequences for the project and the field that are felt to this day.
This article pays tribute to Rosemary VanArsdel, a pioneering scholar in the field of Victorian periodical studies.
Reviewed by: Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street by Mary L. Shannon Patrick Leary (bio) Mary L. Shannon, Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. xvi + 261, $119.95/£65 cloth. Anybody who has worked on the journalism of early Victorian London has been struck by what an intimate world it was, with the offices of dozens upon dozens of newspapers and periodicals clustered together on and near the Strand and Fleet Street, their occupants constantly jostling one another in nearby theatres, pubs, clubs, and the streets themselves. Until now, however, no one has made this spatial intimacy the main focus of scholarly attention. In her deeply researched book, which has won RSVP’s Robert and Vineta Colby Prize, Mary Shannon takes us inside this crowded world and explores what difference that intimacy made in the literature that emerged from it. Shannon’s narrowing of her object of study to one street lends her book a powerful persuasiveness right from the beginning. Wellington Street, we soon learn, was home to an extraordinary number of publishing enterprises. Between 1843 and 1853, more than twenty newspapers, miscellanies, and periodicals, together with thirteen booksellers and publishers, had their offices on one of its three short sections. The most important page of the book is page 28: the map of Wellington Street showing the offices of Household Words, All the Year Round, Reynolds’ Miscellany, Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly, Punch, the Examiner, the Athenaeum, Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, and Lacy’s theatrical bookshop. Even this wonderfully informative map necessarily leaves out a few features discussed in the text, such as Hunt’s and Lewes’s Leader at 10 and then 17 Wellington Street south. [End Page 720] The peculiar geographical density of London journalism was such a long-standing and constant daily feature of its participants’ lives that they left few direct observations about it. They had never known it to be any other way. As a result, thick descriptions of this feature of the literary and publishing environment can be somewhat difficult to come by, and so it is to Shannon’s credit that she has unearthed some particularly evocative ones. A newspaper report of a fire in 1854 describes the masses of spectators owing to the “densely-populated character of the neighborhood” and recounts how the printers next door at the Morning Post heroically stayed at their machines, with Dickens, at the Household Words office, calling encouragement to the firemen (55). Here is John Hollingshead recalling the nearby Exeter Exchange as “full of little shops which sold nothing to nobody, with the printed words ‘To Let’ in every dusty window. … Here literary Bohemia of forty years ago and more ‘squatted’ … and succeeded in getting a few ‘backers’—printers who thought they might ‘strike’ a catchpenny reef of periodical wealth. … The writers, when they were not frying sprats in the back parlours, were ‘publishing’ these fly-sheets across the counters, and when the day’s work was over they often slept under those counters” (33). Given the rarity of such explicit commentary, there is of necessity a speculative cast to Shannon’s descriptions. Her text is sprinkled with “must haves” and “would have beens”—Dickens must have passed Reynolds and Mayhew on the street in the mornings, Reynolds would have looked out upon the windows of the Athenaeum, street noise must have intruded into the offices through the big bow windows of Household Words, and so on—speculations which are plausible, even if their significance is not obvious. But the counterweight to that vagueness is the enormous specificity of detail that Shannon brings to the task of showing how closely populated these networks of rivalries and allegiances were. Although Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew are the main foci of her analysis, she is at pains to trace many of the connections between and among other players in this drama, from prominent figures like Douglas Jerrold and John Forster to such lesser known names as William Tweedie, Angus B. Reach, Shirley Brooks, Montagu Williams, and T. H. Lacy. In this thickly peopled literary...
Reviewed by: Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street by Mary L. Shannon Patrick Leary (bio) Mary L. Shannon, Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. xvi + 261, $119.95/£65 cloth. Anybody who has worked on the journalism of early Victorian London has been struck by what an intimate world it was, with the offices of dozens upon dozens of newspapers and periodicals clustered together on and near the Strand and Fleet Street, their occupants constantly jostling one another in nearby theatres, pubs, clubs, and the streets themselves. Until now, however, no one has made this spatial intimacy the main focus of scholarly attention. In her deeply researched book, which has won RSVP’s Robert and Vineta Colby Prize, Mary Shannon takes us inside this crowded world and explores what difference that intimacy made in the literature that emerged from it. Shannon’s narrowing of her object of study to one street lends her book a powerful persuasiveness right from the beginning. Wellington Street, we soon learn, was home to an extraordinary number of publishing enterprises. Between 1843 and 1853, more than twenty newspapers, miscellanies, and periodicals, together with thirteen booksellers and publishers, had their offices on one of its three short sections. The most important page of the book is page 28: the map of Wellington Street showing the offices of Household Words, All the Year Round, Reynolds’ Miscellany, Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly, Punch, the Examiner, the Athenaeum, Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, and Lacy’s theatrical bookshop. Even this wonderfully informative map necessarily leaves out a few features discussed in the text, such as Hunt’s and Lewes’s Leader at 10 and then 17 Wellington Street south. [End Page 720] The peculiar geographical density of London journalism was such a long-standing and constant daily feature of its participants’ lives that they left few direct observations about it. They had never known it to be any other way. As a result, thick descriptions of this feature of the literary and publishing environment can be somewhat difficult to come by, and so it is to Shannon’s credit that she has unearthed some particularly evocative ones. A newspaper report of a fire in 1854 describes the masses of spectators owing to the “densely-populated character of the neighborhood” and recounts how the printers next door at the Morning Post heroically stayed at their machines, with Dickens, at the Household Words office, calling encouragement to the firemen (55). Here is John Hollingshead recalling the nearby Exeter Exchange as “full of little shops which sold nothing to nobody, with the printed words ‘To Let’ in every dusty window. … Here literary Bohemia of forty years ago and more ‘squatted’ … and succeeded in getting a few ‘backers’—printers who thought they might ‘strike’ a catchpenny reef of periodical wealth. … The writers, when they were not frying sprats in the back parlours, were ‘publishing’ these fly-sheets across the counters, and when the day’s work was over they often slept under those counters” (33). Given the rarity of such explicit commentary, there is of necessity a speculative cast to Shannon’s descriptions. Her text is sprinkled with “must haves” and “would have beens”—Dickens must have passed Reynolds and Mayhew on the street in the mornings, Reynolds would have looked out upon the windows of the Athenaeum, street noise must have intruded into the offices through the big bow windows of Household Words, and so on—speculations which are plausible, even if their significance is not obvious. But the counterweight to that vagueness is the enormous specificity of detail that Shannon brings to the task of showing how closely populated these networks of rivalries and allegiances were. Although Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew are the main foci of her analysis, she is at pains to trace many of the connections between and among other players in this drama, from prominent figures like Douglas Jerrold and John Forster to such lesser known names as William Tweedie, Angus B. Reach, Shirley Brooks, Montagu Williams, and T. H. Lacy. In this thickly peopled literary...
Response:Search and Serendipity Patrick Leary (bio) When the idea first came up for a roundtable on the anniversary of the publication of “Googling the Victorians,” my first thought was, “Has it really been ten years? Already?” So much has happened in the world of digital-assisted research since that essay appeared: the Internet Archive, British Newspaper Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books, Gale Cengage databases, ProQuest collections, advances in text mining, and the explosion of social media. And yet I still feel that we are only at the beginning of a new era of discovery. Along with our readier access to the astonishingly vast and various printed heritage of the nineteenth century is coming a heightened awareness of how constrained and inadequate our understanding of many dimensions of Victorian life and thought has been. As Paul Fyfe and Bob Nicholson make clear, unexpected encounters with odd bits dredged up from the unplumbed depths of the newspaper and periodical press still have the power to startle, puzzle, and intrigue us. That keen sense of strangeness is one measure of how much we have yet to learn about the Victorians. The ubiquity and ordinariness of the experiences recounted in “Googling the Victorians” reveal just how ingrained they have become among specialists and non-specialists alike. For many scholars, the availability of digitized facsimiles of nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines has been a convenience, not the focus of their work; they dip into such collections now and then to search for, say, a publication notice or an obituary, to gloss an allusion, or to fill out a footnote. Yet even these comparatively casual uses represent the beginning of an important shift in scholarly practice. Searching the newspaper collections for references to the people, ideas, publications, institutions, or events one is writing about is quickly becoming not merely an option but a necessity borne of the certain knowledge that if you do not take pains to make a careful search for these references and check your assertions against those references, someone else who is writing on the same subject—or, God forbid, someone who is reviewing [End Page 267] your book—will certainly do so. Family historians and local historians are likewise trawling for proper names, filling their files with information that they might not otherwise have found in a lifetime of research with printed sources or microfilmed surrogates. I strongly suspect that the cumulative effect of years of this kind of routine use of digitized newspapers and magazines—the tidal deposit of all of these bits of information, much of it hitherto undiscoverable, about the quotidian lives and beliefs of people in the nineteenth century—will wind up being the most impressive legacy of these collections, dwarfing the discoveries of even the most ambitious digital humanities projects. That accumulation is already having an enormous impact on the annotation of Victorian texts, the writing of Victorian biographies, and much else. For students of the Victorian press itself, such abundance has nevertheless come with roadblocks to further progress. As Bob Nicholson notes, commercial collections, with all of their expense and their restrictions on sharing, have far overtaken smaller non-profit digital initiatives, although the latter continue to move forward in important ways. If I could change only one thing about the currently available nineteenth-century full-text digital collections from commercial publishers, it would be for them to follow the lead of the National Library of Australia’s Trove project by making the underlying, uncorrected text directly available to researchers, a form of access that would not only allow for crowd-sourcing of improvements in the accuracy of that text but would also hugely facilitate the kinds of scholarly sharing that Bob notes are crucial to our progress. Laurel Brake helpfully recounts how other barriers to accessing both printed originals and digital facsimiles have continued to bedevil the enterprise of historical and literary research. The bulky volumes of newspapers and magazines that remain in libraries have steadily migrated from open stacks to closed stacks and often to distant off-site storage. A great many of those titles remain entirely un-digitized, and many that have been digitized have been aggregated into expensive subscription-only collections that...
Reviewed by: Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820–50 by Brian Maidment Patrick Leary (bio) Brian Maidment, Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820–50 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. x + 223, $105/£70 cloth. Brian Maidment’s important new book pushes back an ingrained habit of scholarly contempt for the popular comic art of the 1820s and 1830s. That condescension is rooted in a narrative that sees a tragic falling-off from the achievements of single-plate caricature under such masters as Rowlandson and Gillray, dwindling under the pressures of a widening consumer marketplace into a smattering of small jokes about small matters in fugitive and forgettable comic papers. Maidment counters this narrative by highlighting the restlessly experimental creative energies attending the explosive growth of a “middlebrow” market for visual culture and expressed through such key reprographic methods as lithography and wood engraving. His book explores these protean changes as reimaginings and adaptations of a new set of commercial pressures and incentives, with a new focus on social relationships. Maidment begins by describing the long afterlife of Regency caricature, pointing out that many of these supposedly transient comic images were present in the Victorian visual imagination throughout the nineteenth century, avidly collected and frequently reprinted in one form after another, often with additions and substitutions and reworkings that would have startled their originators. Images that were originally published as a series of stand-alone plates might be reordered and reassembled into a narrative, with text added or juxtaposed in new ways. Floating free from their original settings, the work of artists like Kenny Meadows, Robert Seymour, and Henry Heath reappeared in unexpected settings, telling different stories. [End Page 146] Maidment’s favorite example of such reappropriation is Seymour’s Sketches, whose original stand-alone lithographic plates, first published from 1834 to 1836, were reprinted, redrawn, and reissued in various formats for new audiences during the Victorian era, becoming a touchstone for visual satire. As the most influential inheritor of these traditions, Punch followed a similar pattern within twenty years of its debut in 1841, repackaging its illustrations for audiences new and old, a process that continues to this day. In emphasizing this remarkable persistence, Maidment introduces a theme that recurs throughout the book: the crucial adaptability of Regency comic art, its “openness to reappropriation” made possible by the nature of the comic vignette as it evolved in the 1820s and 1830s to serve a reading audience that was increasingly interested in adapting imagery to its own purposes (34). The same openness that made this longevity possible, Maidment argues, was part of the original appeal of this evolving form. A key part of the book’s fascinating exploration of the popular subgenres of comic art is the craze for “scraps,” which commonly took the form of brightly colored lithographic images that could be bought by the sheet, cut out, and pasted into albums (hence, “scrapbooks”). Caricaturists soon got into the business with such productions as George Cruikshank’s Comic Composites for the Scrapbook (1821) and Scraps and Sketches (1828–32) as well as Henry Heath’s The Caricaturist’s Scrap Book (1834), which repackaged previously issued drawings to exploit the new fad. Periodicals themselves responded to the demand by adopting formats that made it easy for readers to assemble their own books by cutting and pasting, a process that, as Maidment shrewdly observes, allowed those readers to turn the deliberately ephemeral productions of comic serials into permanent possessions. The discussion of scraps appears in the book’s long third chapter, “Continuity, Innovation and Change, Comic Visual Culture 1820–1850,” a masterful overview that should henceforth be required reading for all students of nineteenth-century popular culture. The small miseries of middle-class urban life were an unfailingly popular theme for generations of comic artists, and Maidment traces this theme from its mainly textual expression in the first decade of the century to the surging popularity of woodcut vignettes by the best-known artists of the day and the proliferation of comic magazines and pamphlets. One favorite and often neglected medium for this new illustrative energy is the songbook, which moved from a textual object with occasional prints to...
Remembering Eileen Curran Patrick Leary (bio) Eileen M. Curran, Emerita Professor of English at Colby College, tireless and resourceful investigator of the Victorian periodical press, longtime contributor to VPR, and early member of RSVP, died in Scarborough, Maine, on April 22 at the age of eighty-five. A few years ago, doing some research into the history of that monumental achievement, the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, I stumbled upon a December 1958 letter from the index’s guiding genius, Walter Houghton, to fellow Victorianist Richard Altick. Houghton had written excitedly of a newly discovered ally for his fledgling project: “I’ve found a demon at Colby who eats, sleeps, talks, dreams nothing but contributors to Victorian journals, and already, aged 30, has a tremendous knowledge of British archives. Name: Eileen Curran.” Eileen was touched when I showed her this passage. She vividly remembered Houghton’s offer of an editorial position with the new project a few weeks after he had written this letter. She also remembered her own sense of discovery: Curran, it turns out, had been as glad to find Houghton as Houghton had been to find Curran. Recently hired by Colby College in Maine, she was on the lookout for someone who shared the passionate interest in Victorian periodicals that she had cultivated under the guidance of Francis Mineka, who had supervised her dissertation (on the Foreign Quarterly Review) at Cornell. Mineka, in turn, had been one of that remarkable group of graduate students working with Emery Neff at Columbia (including Miriam Thrall, Leslie Marchand, and Merle Bevington) whose dissertations in the 1930s and 1940s had pioneered scholarly research on nineteenth-century periodicals. Eileen had spent the summer of 1958 doing research in London, Edinburgh, and Cambridge, in the process adding substantially to the “tremendous knowledge of British archives” that Houghton would so admire. By the time of his invitation, she had already compiled a number of discoveries that would ultimately find their way into the new project’s files. [End Page 159] The Wellesley Index and associated projects would become the work of Eileen Curran’s life. The ferocious dedication that Houghton had so astutely detected in the young assistant professor marked her entire career. For over fifty years, despite a bad knee (the result of an accident as a teenager) and many competing responsibilities and distractions, she relentlessly pursued contributors to the Victorian press, many of them maddeningly elusive, through archive after archive, in Britain, America, and around the world. Sending materials back to Walter and Esther Houghton at the Wellesley Index offices and answering query after nervous query from Walter, she worked tirelessly through summer research trips, sabbatical expeditions, and many long nights to help strip away the veil of anonymity that had for so long hidden the authorship of much of what had been published in the most influential organs of opinion of nineteenth-century Britain. Eileen was always proud of the fact that she had never sought or accepted any payment for any of her work on the Wellesley Index, finding all of the funding elsewhere for her many research trips and expenses. She was the Houghtons’ colleague, not their employee, and that sturdy independence marked their long collaboration and friendship. She and Walter routinely battled one another in long, fierce arguments over how to interpret minute evidential details, arguments whose echoes could sometimes be heard in her conversation and writings long after his death in 1983, as she recalled “what Walter always contended” or “where I disagreed with Walter” about this or that. Unlike most of the other editors, Eileen did not work on just one periodical but ranged widely over many, collecting evidence wherever she found it. Her numerous archival discoveries included the astonishing riches of the Royal Literary Fund archive, which she had been the first Victorianist to explore, sending her notes to Walter in 1972. Rosemary VanArsdel, another pioneer of periodical research and a Wellesley Index veteran, has written to me of her hope that “everyone can begin to understand that Eileen should be ranked alongside Walter Houghton as the originator and preserver of periodicals scholarship. I may be one of the few still left who knew and...
Deep in the recesses of the British Library sits a long oval dining table of plain deal, its battered surface scored with initials carved around the edge. This unprepossessing piece of furniture was once the most famous table in London: the Punch table where the staff of the most successful and influential comic magazine the English-speaking world has ever seen gathered every week. Based on extensive research among unpublished letters, diaries, minute books, and business records, "The Punch Brotherhood" takes the reader inside this Victorian institution, and brings to life the tightly-knit community of writers, artists, and proprietors who gathered around the famous Punch table, and their uninhibited conversations, spiced with jokes and gossip. Highlighting the role of talk in the understanding of 19th-century print culture, and shedding new light on the careers of literary giants Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray and of the many lesser authors who laboured in their shadow, this groundbreaking study vividly demonstrates how oral culture permeated and shaped the realm of print, from the dining tables of exclusive men's clubs to the alleyways of Fleet Street.
Obituary for Richard D. Altick Patrick Leary (bio) The field of Victorian periodicals research lost one of its oldest and best friends this past year when Richard D. Altick died, on February 7, 2008, at the age of 92. The most profound of Altick's contributions to the field was also among his earliest. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900, appeared in 1957, the fruit of ten years of research. Fifty years later, this pioneering study retains the power to amaze with its sheer plenitude of useful detail, the sureness of its judgments, the clarity of its prose, and the sprawling vitality of its narrative. Nothing like Altick's survey had been seen before, and it remains the most frequently cited source for what the Victorians read and published, and an inspiration to Victorianists and "book historians" alike. Like Walter Houghton's The Victorian Frame of Mind, another masterpiece that appeared that same year, The English Common Reader helped to map the territory that students of Victorian culture have been exploring ever since. The most prolific Victorian scholar of his generation, "RDA," as he often signed himself, wrote or edited twenty-five books in all, and contributed innumerable articles and reviews for scholarly journals, including the VPR. From 1958, when Walter Houghton first sought his counsel, Altick proved an unfailing source of sensible advice and encouragement to the fledgling enterprise that would at last appear as The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals. But his closest engagement with the subject came near the end of his career as a writer, with a study of one of the most successful and influential periodicals of them all. In Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841-1851 (1997), Altick brought his legendary erudition and peerless powers of scholarly detection to bear upon the task of unpacking the many meanings that Punch's first readers had taken from its pages. The most significant study of the magazine to appear for a hundred years, the book capped a lifetime of scholarship that has left all of us deeply in Richard Altick's debt. [End Page vi] Patrick Leary Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Patrick Leary Patrick Leary has most recently written about Victorian authorship in a chapter (co-written with Andrew Nash) of the forthcoming volume of The Cambridge History of the Book In Britain devoted to the nineteenth century, and currently serves as Vice-President of RSVP. His book on Punch will appear next year. Copyright © 2008 Victorian Periodicals Review
Moriarity, James*; Collia, Alexander†‡; Olson, David§; Buchanan, John||; Leary, Patrick*; McStephen, Michael†; McCrory, Paul‡Author Information
Reviewed by: Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841–1851 Patrick Leary (bio) Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841–1851, by Richard D. Altick; pp. xxiv + 776. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997, $59.50. Beginning as only one of many comic periodicals hastily cobbled together by penurious hacks over drinks in pubs, Punch quickly evolved into a central institution of Victorian print and visual culture, avidly seized upon each week by peers, politicians, and common readers alike. It is no wonder that the very first article in the inaugural issue of Victorian Studies in 1957 was devoted to Punch, a piece by Oscar Maurer exploring the magazine’s responses to the American Civil War. Given Punch’s undeniable importance, the wonder is rather that it has received so little sustained scholarly attention in the decades since. Bringing his now legendary erudition to the task of remedying this neglect, another contributor to that first issue of VS has produced the most important study of Punch to appear in over a century, since Marion Spielmann’s 1895 history of the magazine. Indeed, it is difficult to think of anyone else who could have accomplished the kind of extended contextualization that Richard Altick gives us in this stout but animated volume. Even for most specialists in Victorian history and literature, the experience of reading all of the way through a mid-century volume of Punch remains largely an exercise in not quite getting the jokes. As Altick demonstrates, one of the keys to the comic weekly’s early success was its knowledgeable satiric commentary on the news and personalities of the moment, and the difficulty of deciphering the meanings behind that commentary are compounded by the extraordinary range of reference embodied in the work of the magazine’s artists and writers. The Punch staff ransacked classical mythology, current novels and poems, talked-about paintings, popular catch-phrases, advertising, folk customs, gossip, fashions, and the periodical’s own back issues for comic parallels to people and events in the news. Altick is at his best in showing the many ways in which Punch functioned as a distorting comic mirror of The Times, a paper whose writers were not above drawing from the satirical weekly in turn to enliven their own pages. The concern with exploring topical immediacy closely links this study with its magisterial predecessor, The Presence of the Present (1991). Both books turn the process of scholarly annotation inside out by taking the kinds of detailed identification and explanation usually relegated to endnotes and expertly foregrounding them in extended form as a coherent topical exegesis that, for all its thoroughness, is nevertheless permeated by the author’s charming sense of fun. The value of this procedure as Altick applies it to the first ten years of Punch quickly becomes apparent. Introductory chapters tell the story of the birth and astonishing early success of the magazine, demonstrating just how pervasive that success became on both sides of the Atlantic. (Among the author’s delightful anecdotal discoveries is the revelation that Emily Dickinson was an early and appreciative audience for Punch’s high jinks.) The real meat of the volume, however, comes in the chapters that follow, which in their number and abundance of carefully nuanced detail resist easy summary. A fascinating discussion of the magazine’s unparalleled inventiveness in parody and pastiche is matched by an exploration of the visual puns whereby multiple levels of allusive topicality were folded into a vast array of art that was never merely decorative. Together these set the stage for a deeply informed survey of Punch’s engagement with the social and political issues of the 1840s, from Douglas Jerrold’s relentless radical critiques of hard-hearted Poor Law commissioners and game-preserving landowners to its often rough handling of such figures as Sir Robert Peel, Lord John Russell, Benjamin Disraeli, and its favorite butt, [End Page 552] Henry Brougham. Along the way, Altick is illuminating on the subject of the magazine’s appeal to its readers’ coarser prejudices, particularly the nasty strain of anti-Semitism that would disfigure its pages for decades, as well as its resort to crude stereotypes of...
ADVERTISEMENT RETURN TO ISSUEPREVTech ReportNEXTPoint Group I, II, and IIIMargaret E. Kastner , Patrick Leary , Jonathan Grieves , Keith DiMarco , and James Braun View Author Information Department of Chemistry, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837Cite this: J. Chem. Educ. 2000, 77, 9, 1246Publication Date (Web):September 1, 2000Publication History Received3 August 2009Published online1 September 2000Published inissue 1 September 2000https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ed077p1246.2https://doi.org/10.1021/ed077p1246.2product-reviewACS Publications. This publication is available under these Terms of Use. Request reuse permissions This publication is free to access through this site. Learn MoreArticle Views497Altmetric-Citations3LEARN ABOUT THESE METRICSArticle Views are the COUNTER-compliant sum of full text article downloads since November 2008 (both PDF and HTML) across all institutions and individuals. These metrics are regularly updated to reflect usage leading up to the last few days.Citations are the number of other articles citing this article, calculated by Crossref and updated daily. Find more information about Crossref citation counts.The Altmetric Attention Score is a quantitative measure of the attention that a research article has received online. Clicking on the donut icon will load a page at altmetric.com with additional details about the score and the social media presence for the given article. Find more information on the Altmetric Attention Score and how the score is calculated. Share Add toView InAdd Full Text with ReferenceAdd Description ExportRISCitationCitation and abstractCitation and referencesMore Options Share onFacebookTwitterWechatLinked InRedditEmail PDF (109 KB) Get e-Alertsclose SUBJECTS:Group theory,Physical chemistry,Undergraduates Get e-Alerts
