The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain, and: The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction After the Invention of the News (review)

In the mid-nineteenth century, the fictional clergyman Septimus Harding opens his daily Jupiter to find himself assailed by the brassy thunder of a leading article, penned by journalist Tom Towers. Anthony Trollope is the closest point of contact between these complimentary books, which taken together signal a new understanding of how the ubiquity of the evolving genres of the press influence and are critiqued by the equally central presence of the novel in Victorian Britain. The Warden (1855) can present such a crude (though amusing) caricature because the power, influence, and forms of the daily newspaper had very quickly crystallized. Newspaper and novel-reading followed the same upward trajectory until late in the twentieth century. It is only now, perhaps, that both are waning—though economics makes the crisis in newspapers far more severe.

Dallas Liddle’s The Dynamics of Genre is the more theoretical of the two books under review. Its investigation is steered by the genre theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, and its premise is that a generic clash between the forms of the press and the institution of Literature is evident in the mid-Victorian period. His study thus modifies notions of a continuum between the two practices summed up in the term “men of letters,” and challenges accounts derived from the work of Richard Altick, John Gross, and others who see a complimentary and often apprenticeship relation. He posits a “dynamic struggle between Victorian discourse genres” (journalism and literature) that may “be one of the most significant influences on British literature ever not to have been recorded” (33). After considering a number of cases that illustrate this struggle, he widens the theoretical frame in “The Scholars’ Tales” (chapter 6), in which the work of Jürgen Habermas, Benedict Anderson, Pierre Bourdieu, and others is examined.

Liddle nods to another genre, the tale cycle, by framing his material with a prologue and epilogue between which are chapters with Chaucerian titles: “The Poet’s Tale,” “The Authoress’s Tale,” “The Editor’s Tale,” among others. The first of these opens by lasering in on a key passage in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1857), in which the young heroine describes hacking at “cyclopedias, magazines, / And weekly papers, holding up my name / To keep it from the mud” (qtd. in Liddle 14). Liddle uses Aurora’s Wellingtonian disdain to challenge the assumption of “students of the periodical press” that “through the 1850s and into the 1860s journalism was a relatively substantial, thoughtful, and even intellectually serious form of discourse” (17). Liddle doesn’t sufficiently allow, I think, for variety in periodical discourse. Lumping both newspaper leaders and quarterly articles into the genre of the “review essay” will strike many as wrong-headed, both in terms of form and the status of the authors. Not all articles were “market commodities” (18): power and influence were sometimes more important than money, explaining why well-off political figures such as John Wilson Croker were lifelong journalists. The gentleman who penned an article in the Edinburgh Review on foreign policy held his head high; a penny-a-line scribbler for a Sunday paper did not.

As with all strongly argued books, it is easy to pick holes in Liddle’s positions by quibbling over the details, but most objections are disarmed as each successive “tale” gives a new point of view. The book is most valuable, I think, for the way it facilitates a contemplation of the moment when the press swelled with self-importance after the Crimean War and literary figures instantly responded in works such as The Warden, Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography (written...