The January 1861 Quarterly Review as Genre, Media Event, and Research Heuristic

Nothing could be duller, alas, than the image of the periodical I have chosen for this forum’s exploration of Victorian media: the January 1861 Quarterly Review. The Illustrated London News, so often identified with modernity itself, had permanently altered newspapers with its first issue in 1842, naturalizing the linking of current news, words, and vibrant images in ways that would forever change readers’ media tableau (Brake and Demoor 2–3; see also Sinnema). Of all this, the Quarterly is innocent. (See fig. 1; ironically, to gauge the Quarterly’s lack of pictures or visual interest, I have provided an image of it here.) The Quarterly adds no headlines or title gracefully set off by white space, as in the contemporaneous Cornhill Magazine, the monthly magazine edited by William Makepeace Thackeray, which had begun a year earlier. Indeed, aside from the omnibus listing of titles at the top, the page shown here could as easily come from a book as from an ephemeral periodical. This was no coincidence. As Joanne Shattock points out, each issue of a quarterly was around 250 pages, with eight to ten articles; a single issue was so expensive (at four to six shillings) that only the affluent could afford it, and once a year’s issues were bound together, the volume more closely resembled a book than ephemera (523). Everything on this Quarterly page, then, glances backward, toward the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the great quarterlies were founded (the Edinburgh Review in 1802, the Quarterly in 1809), and signals a determined avoidance of popular appeal or up-to-date innovations. On one hand, then, the January 1861 Quarterly indicates in its old-fashioned format the unevenness of media history, the persistence of older media forms amid radical change—just as today, paper newspapers survive, however tenuously, in the era of the Internet and phone apps.

On the other hand, popular appeal is precisely what this specific issue had. So voracious was the demand for it that it had to be reprinted five times. According to John North’s Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals: 1800–1900, the circulation of the Quarterly was eight thousand in 1860; if each edition repeated this number, forty thousand copies of this single issue were printed in all. A thousand of these were sent to Mudie’s Circulating Library so that they could be borrowed rather than bought (W. 705). The issue was even reviewed among other current publications, as in the February 1861 Dublin Review (“Essays” 458, 475). Despite its unprepossessing format, then, this issue of the Quarterly was clearly a media event. Why? And what questions does this media event pose for our understanding of Victorian periodicals, described by scholars as the era’s most pervasive medium and characteristic genre (Altick 318; Saintsbury 166)?

[Wilberforce, Samuel]. “Essays and Reviews.” Quarterly Review 109 (Jan.1861): 248–49.

The reason for the issue’s popularity is straightforward—and a salutary reminder of how much questions of religion mattered to middle-class and more affluent Victorian readers. In 1860, seven Anglican clergymen, including Benjamin Jowett of Balliol College, Oxford, drew upon the approaches and methods of higher criticism in Essays and Reviews (1860). Higher criticism, largely developed in Germany, applied the historical methods developed for classical texts to the Bible and, in doing so, brought attention to many textual inconsistencies (for example, Moses, generally understood to be the author of the Pentateuch, narrates his own death). Though George Eliot had translated David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu in 1846, higher criticism did not affect a wide sector of Victorian Christians until the publication of Essays and Reviews. The effect was electric. As Mark Knight and Emma Mason observe, “The publication of Essays and Reviews had a significant effect on Evangelicals’ consciousness and elicited a far stronger reaction from them than the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859.” In illustration of the point, they cite the Evangelical Christian Observer: “If the Bible is plainly...