The London Journal, 1845-83: Periodicals, Production and Gender (review)

As the author rightly claims, this study is the first full-length account of a highly popular nineteenth-century penny fiction weekly. It constitutes an ambitious attempt to offer not only a detailed history of a best-selling journal based on hard data, but also an exploration of various methods of writing about mass market media in general. In the Preface, King professes his dislike of representing products of low and high culture as competitors in a horse race in which the owners of high cultural capital must inevitably come out as winners. Nor does he believe in setting up an alternative race in which it is the publication with the biggest mass-market appeal that wins the prize. That, he argues, would merely be a case of inverted snobbery, whereas what is ultimately required is a more objective and interdisciplinary approach that recognizes the volatile nature of periodicals as commodities operating in a constantly mobile market. Moreover, modern readers need to recognize the nature of "commodity as fetish." A periodical like the London Journal was not merely an assembly of facts regarding its production and distribution, but also functioned as a magical, aesthetic object that gave its readers imaginative pleasure. In this study, King therefore tries to find a balance between dealing with his topic as, on the one hand, physical object, and, on the other, metaphysical image, alternating between "soft" media studies and "hard" historical data.

King has organized his material into three parts. The first, entitled Periodical Discourse, sets up the theoretical framework for what is to follow, and discusses contemporary readers' perceptions of the London Journal (or rather, "The London Journal', as King makes a point of typographically differentiating the signified from the signifier). The chapter dealing with "Periodical Questions" is particularly helpful and enlightening, as it provides a brief introduction to many theoretical issues confronting the modern-day researcher of nineteenth-century periodical literature.

In the second – and arguably strongest – part of the book, King moves on to aspects of production. This is the section of the book in which most of the "hard facts" related to the magazine's history find a place, although it should be added that King is at his most effective when he undermines the notion that facts somehow provide access to an objective historic reality. Moreover, this section introduces a number of interesting theoretical concepts, notably that of the "parergic." King uses this term to refer to "a system whereby texts are based on originals that are invested with greater symbolic capital and authority," a complex and stimulating notion developed and amply illustrated throughout the later chapters of the book.

King's skills as a historiographer of periodical literature are brought most prominently to the fore in the sixth chapter, when he discusses the background to the remarkable drop in circulation which resulted from new proprietors placing the journal in the hands of Mark Lemon (longtime editor of Punch) in 1857. In King's view, it was Lemon's complete misreading of the values of the cultural zone into which he had been parachuted that alienated a significant part of the magazine's regular readership. A notable example was the serialization of three of Walter Scott's novels, which King reads convincingly as a misguided attempt on Lemon's part to assimilate the London Journal into the cultural zone which may have been his own natural habitat, but certainly was not experienced as such by readers of cheap fiction weeklies.

In the first chapter of the third and final part of this book, the author announces his intention of wanting to "negotiate the labyrinth of gender, violence, appropriation and transformation by means of the thread of metastasis and the murky light of psychoanalysis." A certain murkiness does characterize the theoretical underpinning of these final four chapters, in which the topic of gender provides the dominant thread. Mainly, however, these chapters deliver persuasive evidence of the by-now familiar premise that reading fictional...