Women, Work and the Victorian Periodical: Living by the Press by Marianne Van Remoortel (review)

In the introduction to her compelling new work on women’s contributions to the Victorian periodical industry, Marianne Van Remoortel observes that while “post-structuralist thinking has encouraged us to view periodical texts as performative of gender and class, it has often done so at the expense of the individuals staging the performance” (4). To correct this oversight, Van Remoortel offers a number of what she refers to as “qualitative case studies” of individual women whose work in the industry included editing, illustration, compositing, and needlework instruction. Together, these studies illuminate the “multiplicity of lives and careers that underpinned the development of the Victorian periodical press” (135). Although the case studies are denoted “qualitative,” their subjects—and significance—are brought to life through an impressive amount of quantitative detail, detail gleaned not just from the pages of periodicals and publishers’ archives in Britain, North America, and beyond but also from painstaking searches through less conventionally “scholarly” resources, such as a large number of genealogical databases. The result is an engagingly fresh and eminently readable account of how a number of Victorian women launched themselves into the world of letters and tried (sometimes desperately) to stay afloat. Early versions of some chapters have appeared in VPR, and readers will be glad to see these ideas pulled together and fleshed out further.

Van Remoortel’s choice of subjects constitutes one of the many strengths of this study. The women’s professional lives not only represent a very interesting cross-section of the kinds of work and opportunities that existed in the Victorian publishing world, but their personal details also reflect quite diverse backgrounds and outcomes. There are some familiar names here—notably Christina Rossetti and Emily Faithfull—but it is largely the unfamiliar names, and the processes by which Van Remoortel went about tracing their details, that make this book such an interesting read. She writes, “Finding the female contributors is one thing, but getting to know more about them is quite another” (10). Barbara Onslow’s Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2000) was one source of inspiration. In a characteristic passage, Onslow mused about the near-anonymity of some nineteenth-century magazine contributors: “Scanning runs of journals, one’s eye is caught by once popular, almost forgotten names like Mrs. T. K. Hervy and Miss Pardoe, and others less familiar and less frequent. Who was Maria Norris . . . or Mrs White who surfaced in ladies’ papers about the same time?” (qtd., 10). One of the pleasures of Van Remoortel’s new work is that we learn the answers to some of these questions of identity. For example, it turns out that Maria Norris not only contributed to the Ladies’ Cabinet (where Onslow spotted her) but also to Household Words (where she was partially identified in Anne Lohrli’s index to the magazine) and to the New Monthly Belle Assemblée. Norris also published biographies and at least one novel before turning from literature to millinery and then to running a school (22–23).

But Norris’s story is really only a sidebar that demonstrates how newly available electronic resources can be usefully mined to resolve some abiding scholarly questions. The main subjects of Van Remoortel’s study, each of whom commands a chapter, are Eliza Warren Francis, editor of the long-running domestic magazine the Ladies’ Treasury (1857–95) and author of a number of popular books on household management; Matilda Marian Pullan, a prolific contributor of needlework patterns, editor of the handwork columns in a variety of periodicals, and eventually editor of the American Gazette of Fashion, which later became Frank Leslie’s Lady’s Magazine (1854–82); Christina Rossetti, poet; Florence and Adelaide Claxton, artists who became “two of the most popular and most prolific British female magazine illustrators of the 1860s” (92); and women’s rights activist Emily Faithfull, founder of the Victoria Press.

The chapter on Eliza Warren Francis...