Gender and the Victorian Periodical (review)

To paraphrase Lytton Strachey, the history of the Victorian periodical will never be written: we know too much about it. Strachey's study of four eminent Victorians dipped into the waters of the nineteenth century to find the typical and the characteristic. This study by Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green, and Judith Johnson approaches their subject in a slightly different way. Using articles from about 120 London and Edinburgh journals, they address the depiction of woman and the feminine (which they acknowledge was "fractured" in this period), and they identify as well representations of gender that constructed cultural practice in the nineteenth century. In a word, they approach the typical from a different angle. They argue that the Victorian periodical played a powerful role in mediating gender ideologies just at the moment when it exercised considerable influence in spreading knowledge and forming social attitudes. They also look at the ways in which the periodical press formed gender ideologies and the roles that women played as proprietors, editors, writers, and readers of Victorian periodicals. Their methodology is empirically grounded in the historical specificities of the era, its culture and society, and in cultural studies. This is then, not merely a study of women as participants in the world of nineteenth-century journalism, but one that looks at the ways in which notions of gender shaped the periodical.

The Victorian periodical's influence was pervasive, and there was scarcely any area of life it did not discuss or touch. The very numbers, well into the thousands of titles, guaranteed that the periodical addressed virtually every topic of national importance. Likewise, there was scarcely any area of the Victorian periodical in which questions of gender were not prominent. Some periodicals addressed themselves specifically to women as mothers, wives, consumers, or potential participants in the political life of the nation. Others were directed toward a male audience. Women transformed the Victorian periodical in at least two ways. Though early in the Victorian period they were often anonymous participants in the world of journalism, as the nineteenth century wore on, they became more prominent as writers, editors, and publishers. The growth of consumer culture in the later nineteenth century itself became a driving force, and many periodicals attempted to identify a particular feminine consumer taste and cultivate it. Other magazines aimed at women had express reform purposes. The English Woman's Journal, Woman's Signal, and Victoria Magazine all had a suffrage agenda and explicitly challenged accepted norms and gender conceptions of the later nineteenth century. The gender of a specific category might be fluid, and things gendered female at one time, e.g., the Empire, which in the 1850s was described in the language of the home and nation, by the 1890s had become distinctly male: Home and the sons of the nation.

Competition was keen, and publishers engaged in a never-ending search for readers and formulas for success, which were at least as important in many instances as any editorial considerations. Some journals thrived. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was published from 1817 to 1980; in other words, before, during, and after Victoria's reign. Home Chat appeared from 1895 to 1958, and the Dublin Review was published from 1836 to 1969. Others were extraordinarily ephemeral: Girl of the Period Almanack ran for only one annual edition in 1869, and Girl of the Period Miscellany lasted a scant eight months, from March through November 1869.

This is a good book and an interesting one. Its treatment of women editors is excellent, as are its analyses of workings of gender within commodity culture. Other areas are less satisfactory; the chapter on the gendered reader deals more with the exceptional than the typical, and the treatment of the Empire is limited almost exclusively to Australia, largely because other areas do not fit the authors' paradigm. In addition, the study neglects an important aspect of periodical influence. It is one thing to note the character of cultural changes and quite another...