Victorian Journalism: Exotic and Domestic: Essays in Honor of P.D. Edwards (review)

Victorian Journalism: Exotic and Domestic: Essays in Honor of P. D. Edwards, edited by Barbara Garlick and Margaret Harris; pp. ix + 228. St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1998, $29.95.

This festschrift comprises essays contributed by P. D. Edwards's colleagues, former students, and friends, celebrating his work in Victorian literature (with emphasis on Anthony Trollope studies) and especially in the field of Victorian journalism. Hence the major theme of these essays is "Victorian journalism" and, within this broad topic, "the gradual professionalism of the journalist [. . .]; the conflicting demands of the higher journalism and the popular press; [and] the negotiations that women journalists had to make across the public/private domain" (vii).

Thus Virginia Blain deals with "Anonymity and the Discourse of Amateurism," as exemplified in the career of Caroline Anne Bowles Southey (1786-1854) and her relationship with Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine during the years 1820 to 1847. In discussing this relationship, Blain notes that Bowles did not hesitate to exploit "ladylike conventions of politeness with a more dashing gentlemanliness (or aristocratic ladyhood) to get exactly what she wants" from her publisher (15). Blain also studies Bowles's "reliance on anonymity, the refusal to associate the private and social self with the public, published self" (11).

Judith Johnston's essay on Anna Brownell Jameson (1794-1860) considers how she established her credentials as an art critic and journalist on the short-lived, highbrow Monthly Chronicle from 1838 to 1843. In view of the great interest in German culture during the early Victorian era, Jameson's work was particularly valued by the Chronicle's founders, Dionysius Lardner and Edward Lytton, because of her "connections to and knowledge of German intellectual and social life," her expertise in art, and especially her skill as a writer (24). But more important was Jameson's "social journalism," the best examples of which were her candid discussion in the Athenaeum of working women and "the problems of middle-class women forced to support themselves and their families" (34). She was certainly in the vanguard of the struggle for the right of women "to retain their wages for work outside the home" and among the first to assert "the need for their presence in the work-force to be both acknowledged and accepted" (34).

In a delightful article on a minor comic classic, "Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures," which ran in Punch from January 1845 to November 1846, Michael Slater rightly declares that "few comic characters in nineteenth century British literature [. . .] made as big a splash on their first appearance as Douglas Jerrold's Mrs. Caudle," a shrew who inflicted her "nightly matrimonial harangues" on the domestic events of the day on her hapless husband, Job (38). Much to Jerrold's surprise, the series became a sensation and "set the whole country laughing and talking"; he had created "an endearing popular classic," which was translated into several foreign languages and continued to be popular during the first quarter of the twentieth century (39).

Barbara Garlick examines Harriet Martineau's commentaries on the role of the obituarist and biographer in the second edition of her Biographical Sketches (1869), the collection of obituaries she had originally contributed to the London Daily News from 1852 to 1858, and which "anticipates by almost fifty years the great debate about biography which attended Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians in 1918" (46). As Garlick notes, Martineau's Biographical Sketches did not conform to the accepted pattern of biographical writing because she "deliberately eschewed the contemporary passion for hero-worship [. . .] and instead chose to write 'honest portraiture'" (47). She insisted that to "conceal or falsify, is to play false to society" (47). Fortunately the Daily News allowed Martineau, a "crusading obituarist," "the freedom to experiment with a new style of biography" (59). And Garlick's keen evaluation of Martineau's work suggests that her obituaries have greatly influenced the obituarists of the present...