George Augustus Sala and the Nineteenth Century Periodical Press: The Personal Style of a Public Writer by Peter Blake (review)

In the introduction to Peter Blake’s new work, a quotation from Charles Pebody, author of English Journalism and the Men who Made It (1882), describes George Augustus Sala as the “beau-ideal of a journalist” thanks to his “readiness, his picturesque sensibility, his aptitude for vivid and graphic writing, his great powers of expression, and his still greater powers of illustration” (3). This is an apt description of Blake’s approach to his subject, a study of the versatility and breadth of Sala’s skills and interests and an investigation of how his style of journalism contributed to the rise of the New Journalism. The phrase is repeated in the concluding sentence of the book in a way that seems accidental rather than deliberate, suggesting that the unifying themes of the book are evident but not pulled together fully at the end.

Over a publishing career spanning forty-seven years, Sala was an artist, engraver, journalist, novelist, pornographer, and special correspondent, and between 1860 and 1863, he was also editor of a periodical, Temple Bar, although this last role is mentioned but not explored in this study. His output was prodigious: Blake notes five early panoramas from the 1850s, twenty-three novels and works of non-fiction (mostly travel writing), hundreds of articles (although he lists only fifty of the “primary” pieces), as well as two plays, including a pantomime from his pornographic period entitled New and Gorgeous Pantomime entitled Harlequin Prince Cherrytop and the Good Fairy Fairfuck or Frig the Fuck and the Fairy (1878). Most of the chapters focus on Sala’s career as a contributor to the periodical press, although the final chapter looks at his interest in flagellant pornography, material that was not published in periodicals but in novel and dramatic form and therefore sits a little uncomfortably with the book’s title.

Sala was born in 1828 in London. His mother was an opera singer and singing instructor who moved in high and low circles; she was described as both a “grande-dame and a second-rate artiste” (22). Sala grew up around the theatre and met writers and performers early on, which gave him an ability to move convincingly amongst and between several social classes. He suffered an early trauma when, at six years old, he went blind for two years after an attack of encephalomyelitis, an inflammatory reaction in the brain from an exposure to measles. Blake suggests that this early physical and psychological trauma had a huge influence on Sala’s creative development and that his temporary loss of vision gave him a heightened sense of the visual that coincided, happily, with the rise of the illustrated press.

Sala seemed almost destined to be a journalist. He was a voracious consumer of printed materials and as a young boy bought several periodicals each week, including the Illustrated London News, Penny Magazine, Saturday Magazine, Sunday Times, and Weekly Dispatch, all with his own pocket money. He also spoke several languages and travelled in Russia and Paris, absorbing the poverty and deprivation along with the thrilling dissipation and bohemianism. His early inclinations were towards the visual arts, but these ambitions were crushed when his hero, George Cruikshank, failed to take him under his wing and when his work was rebuffed by Punch.

Thanks to his mother’s connections, Sala was soon introduced to Charles Dickens, who was impressed by the young man’s expressive writing, his interest in everyday urban life, and his willingness to try to understand the lives of the poor and precarious. He was the second most prolific contributor to Household Words, with 160 articles, but was later unfairly accused of imitating the master when his pieces had been subedited to appear more “Dickensy.” Like Dickens, Sala walked all over London (and Paris) and absorbed but did not judge life on the streets. He developed an...