The London Journal, 1845-1883: Periodicals, Production and Gender (review)

The London Journal, although only a weekly publication, outsold the Times newspaper by ten million copies in the year 1855 alone. This estimate was made by Sir George Cornewall Lewis the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, not to attack the spread of such periodicals, but to argue that the Journal's respectability showed that the newspaper tax was no longer necessary to protect the reading public from the effects of cheap literature. Other notices were more dismissive. Victorian arbiters of taste, while accepting as part of 'the purified penny press', dismissedThe London Journal as sensational reading for parlour maids. In 1957 Alvin Ellegård influentially categorized the periodical as 'trashy', an ephemeral journal read exclusively by 'lower to lower middle class women, education standard low'. Recent scholars looking for a leader in the world of mid-Victorian mass periodicals have tended to focus on the more sensational Reynolds's Miscellany, which in fact sold fewer copies. Yet, as Andrew King notes in this impressively researched study, The London Journal was 'perhaps the best-selling publication of mid-century Europe'. It was bought by a broad if shifting range of readers in Britain and throughout the Commonwealth, and played a significant role in the emergence of modern popular journalism.

Behind the flurry of informative, radical and entertaining periodicals that accompanied the first Reform Bill agitation of the 'thirties lay the massive expansion of the reading public so clearly documented in William St Clair's recent study The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004). By 1845 this readership was stabilizing, and The London Journal was created as a self-proclaimed economic venture to supply cheap weekly reading for consumption in this new market. As King illustrates, the first year was a time of experimentation in both content and in the style of its woodcut illustrations, which were a strong selling point from the periodical's inception. In the first numbers the first editor G.W.M. Reynolds veered between the sensational Gothic, 'entertaining knowledge' and domestic themes. In 1846 Reynolds broke away to start his own Reynolds's Miscellany. The proprietor and printer George Stiff replaced him with John Wilson Ross. Ross maintained some of the Journal's more sensational aspects, notably the translations of contemporary French fiction, which was both popular and free. But in a symbolic shift, Stiff moved the editorial office from the dubious associations of Holywell Street to the eminently respectable site of 334 Strand, a door away from the Morning and Evening Chronicle. The Journal's news coverage abandoned the radical bias of Reynolds's Miscellany for the graphic journalism of The Illustrated London News.

This journalistic content did not survive the Crimean War. King attributes this to the growing predominance of women reading the serial, turning it into a predominantly fiction magazine. The supply of French novels had been stifled by the 1848 Paris revolution, and the Journal turned to homegrown matter, notably that written by John Frederick Smith. Michael Wheeler plausibly claims in his ODNBentry on Smith that he was 'England's most popular author of the mid-nineteenth century', a figure perhaps parodied in Mrs Braddon's The Doctor's Wife (1864) as the manic Sigismund Smith, a sensation writer immensely popular 'amongst the classes who like their literature like they like their tobacco – very strong'. It was above all the success of Smith's Stanfield Hall (1849-50), Amy Lawrence (1850-51), Minnigrey (1851-2), The Will and the Way (1852-3) and Woman and Her Master (1853-4) that launched The London Journal to the top of the circulation charts, with sales of half a million. King is excellent in piecing together whatlittle we know of an elusive author whose one potentially authoritative obituary, a supplement to The London Journal, is mysteriously missing from the one otherwise complete run in the British Library. King gives some useful plot summaries of his major novels. But it would...