In the Byways with Margaret Oliphant

This essay traces Margaret Oliphant’s attention to popular literature and its audiences through three major periodical debates: the expansion of cheap reading in the 1850s, the sensation controversy of the 1860s, and the function of criticism in the 1870s and 1880s. By focusing on the “byways of literature,” Oliphant’s Blackwood’s essays invite her audience to recognize the social conditions that shape reading practices and reflect on their own status as an interpretive community. While this tendency to categorize readers comes across as elitist in her discussions of penny magazines and sensation, it also leads her to champion popular audiences against the increasingly professionalized critic later in the century.