Touchstones and Tit-Bits: Extracting Culture in the 1880s

Matthew Arnold attacked the New Journalism, but his insistence on the power of the reprinted extract parallels the importance of the excerpt in late Victorian periodicals such as George Newnes’s Tit-Bits. This essay juxtaposes Arnold’s “The Study of Poetry,” written as the introduction to The English Poets (1880), with Tit-Bits (established 1881). Both turn to the excerpt in response to the prospect of textual overproduction and the expansion of mass readerships in the 1880s, a response that cuts across literature and journalism, high and low culture. Indeed, part of the extract’s value was that it promised to bridge these divisions.