Gender and the Victorian Periodical (review)

Designed to explore how the nineteenth century's mass medium defined and promoted gender ideals, Gender and the Victorian Periodical samples material ranging from the 1830s through the 1890s in sources that include magisterial quarterlies, middle-class family magazines, penny weeklies from a variety of publishers, and specialist journals, such as Photographic News and Woman's Signal. To grapple with their mass of material, the authors adopt a method that is neither descriptive survey nor selective case study but borrows from both: The book's narrative is more or less chronological and simultaneously organized in thematic chapters that draw on recent theoretical studies as well on the Victorian archive.

The first three chapters discuss the gendered writer, the gendered reader, and (under the title "Editorship and Gender") the house style and editorial stance that construct a journal's voice of authority. These chapters rehearse information about journalism's role and about gender ideals that will be familiar to many scholars but is usefully assembled in this context and elucidated with generous quotations from primary sources. It is not a story of separate spheres and ideological straightjackets: The emphasis is on resistance, ambiguity, ambivalence, contradiction, and fluidity. The discussion of "stylistic assimilation" within periodicals is particularly interesting (12). Among the Saturday Review's unsigned essays, for example, it is hard to distinguish Eliza Lynn Linton's contributions from those of John Richard Green, and the clues used by contemporaries to (often mis-) identify anonymous authors reveal some curious assumptions. In the initial response to "Girl of the Period," one journalist remarked that although the Saturday Review treated all subjects "from the point of view of the clever college don, who belongs to a West-end club," its politics were "of an eminently feminine order; its cleverness is just the kind which women think very clever; and its satire is of a calibre which women can understand and appreciate" (26). Chapter three's analysis of the features that mark a journal's house style supplies a brief case study comparing the Edinburgh Review to Eliza Cook's Journal.

Chapters four through seven use gender as a lens to examine several current critical interests. "Gender and the 'Politics of Home'" describes journals that attempted "to achieve a sentimental vision of home, an idealisation turned into a domestic reality" (100). The next chapter, on the periodicals' role in cultural imperialism, concentrates on Australia (where two of the book's authors teach). Chapter six is devoted primarily to the feminist press, and chapter seven, "Gender, Commodity, and the Late Nineteenth-century Periodical," covers not only the highly commercial fashion magazines but also the journals identified with "decadents."

It is not surprising that a book with three authors and a set of topics that leads them to cite many recent studies as well as to quote from a vast body of primary sources does not arrive at any major conclusions. "Periodicals," we are told (for example), "do reveal considerable variation in their approach to issues of race" (130). Though the stated topic is gender, the book says much more about women than about men—fashion magazines but not sporting papers, seven index entries for boys, and fifteen for girls. Working-class reading is largely neglected. Yet the fascinating sample of nineteenth-century phrases, sentences, and attitudes is in some ways similar to Walter Houghton's The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven, 1957), although it is impossible for theoretically informed contemporary scholars to write with Houghton's confident assurance. The bibliography and the appendix, which characterizes some 120 periodicals and lists basic information about price, frequency, publisher, editors, and political or religious affiliation, will be useful for people beginning to explore the vast amount of material that still remains unread in the back files of Victorian periodicals.