The Life and Death of the Cuckoo

Kathryn Ledbetter's Curran Fellowship project, "Edmund Yates, Gossip, and Personal Journalism in Victorian Print Culture," is well underway, and she offers the following report on her most recent discovery.

A new daily penny newspaper named the Cuckoo: The News and Gossip of the Day was announced above the masthead of the World on March 2, 1881, as a "novelty in evening journalism."¹ Its inaugural issue was slated to be published on March 11 and edited by the innovative celebrity and gossip journalist Edmund Yates, who was also owner/editor of the World. The sixteen-page paper was clearly a business extension of the World: its editorial, advertising, and publishing addresses were the same, and Yates's name was attached to the Cuckoo's title. However, the paper is not listed in the Yates bibliography compiled by P. D. Edwards for the Victorian Fiction Research Guides III, and Edwards only briefly mentions the Cuckoo in the concluding paragraph of a chapter in his book, Dickens's 'Young Men': George Augustus Sala, Edmund Yates and the World of Victorian Journalism (1997). The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism has no entry for the Cuckoo, and the Waterloo Directory's listing is merely a place-holder: "The Cuckoo, 11 Mar. 1881–8 Oct. 1881. London, Middlesex."² Thus, I hope to add a small piece of information about a Victorian periodical that had a short but interesting life. A preliminary investigation suggests the paper's importance to studies of the New Journalism, gossip journalism, and Edmund Yates.

Fortunately, searchable databases of periodicals and archives accelerate the project of assembling a snapshot of the Cuckoo. Ironically, such a patchwork of second-hand information about the paper mimics the

Figure 1.

Front page head design for volume 1, no. 1 of the Cuckoo, published on March 11, 1881. The wood-engraved illustration by Joseph Swain (1820–1909) depicts a pen and inkwell placed at the center of the periodical's title, presented as tree branches encircling words from its motto, "The News of the Day." A large cuckoo bird, sun rays behind its head, flies behind the display, on the verge of consuming a bee and a butterfly, signifying the paper's diet of gossip and news. Edmund Yates's name is spelled with twigs of the cuckoo's nest, with the word "conducted" in the branch of fruit that hangs overhead.

abbreviated, gossipy news style of Yates and thus can only inspire speculation. However, the language of the Cuckoo's prospectus suggests its potential influence in the history of journalism by designating the short-lived Cuckoo as a stylistic phoenix that would be reborn in future headline news formats. The novelty of the Cuckoo rests on brevity, not just its publication of gossipy, personal items like those Yates featured in his column "What the World Says" in the World but also its printing of daily news jotted down from the latest telegrams. The prospectus promises to deliver only the most important developments "in paragraph form, the news condensed and sublimated, the comment independent and concise."³ The Cuckoo will serve new readers who are weary of the "dullness which has overgrown the daily press" and who want all the news but "ask for their nourishment in lozenge form."⁴ Leading articles of "single-line-of-rail journalism" will be replaced by paragraphs unadorned by tropes, "barbarous" jargon, and metaphors.⁵ Ironically, the announcement then metaphorically describes the outmoded newspaper style as a "procession of omnibuses" monotonously rumbling along at the same pace.⁶ The prospectus reasons that the "age of the paragraph has commenced"; men and women no longer want the solid columns of hard news when the "essence of a whole drove of cattle can be compressed into a single plate of soup."⁷ The magazine's soup will include a hefty serving of "that unprinted but everywhere spoken gossip, which is the actual salt of the social salmi" and peppers much of Edmund Yates's journalism.⁸

As was customary with his pet projects, Yates cross-promoted the...