The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain

1. THE POET'S TALE: Literature, Journalism, and Genre in 1855

1 the Poet’s tale Literature, Journalism, and Genre in 1855 Throughout the entire development of the novel, its intimate interaction (both peaceful and hostile) with living rhetorical genres (journalistic , moral, philosophical and others) has never ceased; this interaction was perhaps no less intense than was the novel’s interaction with the artistic genres (epic, dramatic, lyric). mikhail bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel” As book 3 of elizabeth barrett browning’s verse novel Aurora Leigh (1856) opens, its poet-protagonist is a moderately successful woman of letters in mid-nineteenth-century London. Aurora Leigh’s reflections on her early professional career are often celebrated as among the first artistic portrayals of a British woman writer, but one passage in particular is remarkable for the way Barrett Browning paints the problems of the midVictorianauthor .Herprotagonist’sdilemmaatthispointisnotbetweenaction in the world and poetic discourse, though that might have been expected after the agon between Aurora and her cousin Romney in book 2. The poet’s more recent struggle has been between two kinds of discourse. As she moves with uncharacteristic hesitancy to identify the second discourse, however, Aurora seems to have something on her mind—or conscience. The midnight oil Would stink sometimes; there came some vulgar needs: I had to live that therefore I might work, And, being but poor, I was constrained, for life, To work with one hand for the booksellers While working with the other for myself 14 The Poet’s Tale And art: you swim with feet as well as hands, Or make small way. I apprehended this,— In England no one lives by verse that lives; And, apprehending, I resolved by prose To make a space to sphere my living verse. (3: 299–309)1 Like her distant literary cousin Moll Flanders, also a single woman in London , Aurora prefaces an embarrassed confession of the expedient she has used to survive with a string of explanatory or exculpatory clauses. Although Aurora’s vocation is poetry, in mid-Victorian England the market for poetry is too small to provide primary income even for a single poet: “No one lives by verse that lives.”2 The literary artist who needs income must also participate in more flourishing markets. Aurora has therefore written “prose”—a kind of text booksellers will pay for. The full secret is not yet out, however. As Aurora reveals in the next lines, the booksellers have dictated more than her prosody; under their direction she has learned and practiced highly specific forms and genres. I wrote for cyclopaedias, magazines, And weekly papers, holding up my name To keep it from the mud. I learnt the use Of the editorial “we” in a review As courtly ladies the fine trick of trains, And swept it grandly through the open doors As if one could not pass through doors at all Save so encumbered. I wrote tales beside, Carved many an article on cherry-stones To suit light readers,—something in the lines Revealing, it was said, the mallet-hand, But that, I’ll never vouch for: what you do For bread, will taste of common grain, not grapes, Although you have a vineyard in Champagne; Much less in Nephelococcygia As mine was, peradventure. Having bread For just so many days, just breathing-room The Poet’s Tale 15 For body and verse, I stood up straight and worked My veritable work. (3: 310–29) Her veritable work may be that of a poet, but Aurora reveals here that she has solved one pressing problem—and created another—by also becoming a professional journalist. She has written extensively for multiple venues in the periodical press (“cyclopaedias, magazines, and weekly papers”), returning to her poetry in precious intervals when she has written just enough to pay for food and shelter a few days ahead. But Aurora’s distaste for her own periodical writing is clear. At best she regards it with arm’s-length amusement, at worst with revulsion: “The midnight oil would stink.” The distancing Aurora does here seems based in a conviction that in producing periodical text she has not in some sense really been writing at all, but only reproducing the preexisting forms and voices of the periodicals themselves . Some of the conventions she participates in, such as the anonymity that was still in 1856 almost universal for periodicals, seem to have relatively little impact on her text itself—and unlike some contemporary journalists...