W.M. Thackeray and the Mediated Text: Writing for the Periodicals in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (review)

Like Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray was a journalist before he was a novelist. Like Dickens, too, he remained an inventive, independent, and often successful journalist once he had established his name as a popular novelist. Unlike him, however, Thackeray was inclined to think of himself as a gentleman who had somehow strayed into writing rather than as a representative of a new breed of professional writers, men and women who made their livelihood by their pens and who were proud of their achievement. Such professionals were, as Thomas Carlyle had recognized, representative figures in the culture of their time.

Richard Pearson has produced a very thorough and often very perceptive study of the periodical journalism that Thackeray published between the age of twenty-one and his premature death at the age of fifty-two in 1863. The chapters variously cover the contributions to the Paris Literary Gazette,Fraser's Magazine, the Constitutional,Punch, and the Cornhill, as well as the essays collected in The Paris Sketch Book (1840) and, especially interestingly, the fictional treatment of a young journalist's ambitions in Pendennis (1848- 50) and The Adventures of Philip (1861-62). Pearson dedicates his first chapter to the future novelist's work for the National Standard, a literary journal that Thackeray himself purchased in 1833 using part of his inheritance, much of which would shortly disappear with the collapse of the Indian banks in which his money was invested. Pearson remarks that the experience of owning, running, and writing for the National Standard transformed the "leisured man-of-letters" into "the fractured figure, half tradesman, half professional, part producer, part product, that negotiates the commercial necessities of modern capitalism" (7). Such an observation is characteristic of much of this study. It offers us a sharp insight, and yet it somehow overinterprets. The risks involved were very much characteristic of the frenetic financial world of the early 1830s, although whether it is useful to suppose that Thackeray was ever "fractured," or that the process of fracturing is concomitant with the nature of modern capitalism is debatable. Thackeray certainly benefited from the discipline of running a journal, and he used the many and varied reviews he wrote for it as a means of coming to terms with the state of modern letters. Yet, again, Pearson makes this point somewhat unfelicitously: "Thackeray does not delimit the boundaries of the text as the controlling parameter of his reviewing. He is [...] concerned with the integrity of the medium of writing itself, especially that writing which is produced within the new business of the periodical" (8). Pearson is a fine scholar, and he is often an acute observer, but he also constantly seeks to remind us that the twentieth century evolved theories of the text that the nineteenth century scarcely dreamed of (though Thackeray often proves to be disconcertingly innovative as a writer and a critic). Pearson frequently views Thackeray's journalistic career through perspectives on the text delineated by Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, Norman Feltes, and, above all, Michel Foucault. Pearson's introduction asserts that "the generation of an author's self-identity is not culturally isolated, but is embroiled in the generation of models of masculinity/femininity and perceptions of racial and class identities" (xiii). Although he recognizes that Thackeray relished the "shapeless" nature of journalism and the fact that it was "driven by momentary gratification (of payment, of pleasure)" he nonetheless concludes that this places his consciousness at the beginning of "a cultural line that runs to Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes" (xiii). This point is somewhat awkwardly pressed home by a reminder that Barthes once played the part of Thackeray in a film about the Brontës. Ultimately, however, these gestures towards twentieth-century cultural theory impede rather than advance Pearson's...