Sam Saunders is a current PhD candidate at Liverpool John Moores University, where he is researching the role of the periodical press on the construction and evolution of Victorian detective fiction. His research explores non-fiction periodical discussions on the police and crime, as well as early examples of serialised crime fiction. Sam has previously written for the British Association for Victorian Studies and is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post UK. He is also completing articles for the Journal of the Police History Society and the Law Crime and History Journal, due to be published later this year.

You can find him on twitter @samfordsaunders or by email at s.j.saunders@2014.ljmu.ac.uk

 

The Private Space of the Police and the Prison: Periodicals and the Voyeuristic View of Victorian Law Enforcement

In this post, I intend to highlight the voyeuristic aspects of nineteenth century crime fiction and articles on crime published in mid-nineteenth century periodicals, and relate this to the chronology of crime fiction. I will explore the interest in making the private world of criminality and law enforcement public, and suggest how this aspect of periodical writing can help augment our understanding of the crime fiction genre and its evolution.

One of the earliest places where we can see a voyeuristic interest in readers of crime literature is eighteenth and early nineteenth century execution broadsides. This has already received some scholarly attention; in her book The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Heather Worthington argues:

 

…the broadsides made their appeal to the voyeuristic interests of the masses, exposing the gory and sometimes salacious details of the crimes and making public what had been private.[i]

 

Worthington here refers to execution broadsides when she argues that they appealed to the voyeuristic interests of the masses and presenting a public view of hitherto ‘private’ spaces. However, this can also be readily applied to Newgate Calendars and other early crime writing designed to ‘render the private public’. Execution broadsides were popular throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, written and sold by peddlers at public executions. They were single-sheet, heavily sensationalised accounts of the lives of criminals, their crimes that led them to the gallows and a usually graphic description of the executions or other punishments. They also usually included a crude woodcut of the execution taking place, and the prose was often accompanied by a piece of penitent verse, usually printed surrounding the details of the crime and a crude, generic woodcut of the execution taking place (see fig. 1).

 

On one hand, execution broadsides publically demonstrated ‘sovereign or state power … encapsulated in pictures and prose and the spectacle of execution reached a wider audience than would have been possible in reality.’[ii] This complements the purpose of the public execution itself, however the broadsides’ alternative purpose was to entertain, and the provision of moral, social or religious instruction remained more a pretence as opposed to the main reason for broadside publication.[iii]

This tension between information and entertainment highlights the execution broadside as a space where a public desire to see ‘inside’ the private arena of the criminal world can be identified.  Execution broadsides complemented a spectacle that was already publically visible, and the detail as to why this particular person had been condemned by the state was therefore a matter of public interest.

Picking up on the broadside’s popularity, The Ordinaries of Newgate began publishing their own versions from inside the prison. These accounts of criminal misdeeds and executions were known collectively as the Accounts of the Ordinaries of Newgate, and were much less sensationalised than common broadsides. The Ordinaries’ access to criminals also gave them an extra edge over the broadside; they could obtain information that a street-seller could only speculate about.[iv] Their widespread popularity reveals a public desire to see inside the private space of the prison – contextual information surrounding a criminal and a highly public execution proved very popular.

Both publications were eventually collated and published as a volume – publications known as The Newgate Calendar(s). The first of these to appear under this name appeared in 1773.[v] These became less focused on executions, and more interested in criminals’ lives. Each story was focused on a specific criminal, their crime and their punishment, and again we see a form of crime-writing that renders a private space public – in this case the life and misdeeds of a stranger, either contemporary or historical. These accounts also often depicted a narrative of the proceedings that took place inside the court-room, another private space that this kind of writing rendered public.

Some issues of the Newgate Calendars were subtitled ‘Comprising Interesting Memoirs the Most Notorious Characters who have been Convicted of Outrages on The Laws of England’. The concept of a ‘memoir’ suggests a link to a form of writing that emerged in the mid nineteenth century that continued the voyeuristic interest of readers – police memoir fiction. One of the first examples appeared in 1827, titled Richmond, or, Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Runner and is attributed to Thomas Sturr, though it was anonymously published. The text surrounds the life of John Richmond, a Bow Street Runner – one of the first organised groups of law-enforcement prior to the establishment of the Metropolitan Police in 1829.  It was not published in a periodical, but as a three-volume novel. However, it fits into the memoir-style category by relating Richmond’s life and his experiences in the Runners as if he were relating a tale to the reader after he had left. For example, Richmond reflects on his memories of joining the Runners:

 

My first adventure in my new capacity [as a Runner] gave me a strong interest in the sort of life I had now adopted, and compensated for many of the awkward and disagreeable feelings which I had to undergo. I was by this time tolerably well acquainted with London; but was personally a stranger to police transactions, and everything at Bow Street was new to me.[vi]

 

There are, however, some aspects that distinguish Richmond from later police memoir writing. It is too biographical – the first half is devoted to Richmond’s childhood and early-adult experiences – his adeptness at playing pranks, his schooling, his first love-interest (who tragically dies early on) and his experiences of early adulthood living amongst gypsies. These details are not completely irrelevant; by using this contextual information the novel creates a sophisticated plot-relationship between the two halves of the story, using details from the first to create the second. For example, the loss of Richmond’s first love-interest disassociates him from emotional ties and allows him to undertake the antisocial occupation of a police officer free from emotional attachments. Secondly, Richmond’s life among gypsies prior to starting as a Runner gives him connections in the criminal underworld which he uses as accomplices or for information in his exploits.

This novel is therefore a sophisticated yet isolated example of a police memoir, as later examples of this genre published in the mid-century and in periodicals cannot as effectively use the early life of the character as effectively to set up their narratives. Despite its isolation both chronologically and formulaically, it is an example of a police memoir that continues the theme of allowing readers to see inside a private space, and as such deserves recognising as a milestone in the genre’s development.

In the 1850s and 1860s, police memoir fiction became a popular feature in periodicals, frequently emerging in the pages of a variety of titles. A prolific author was the largely unknown William Russell – distinct from the more widely remembered William Clark Russell. Russell was a writer living in London throughout the 1850s, contributing significant amount of fiction to periodicals and magazines – notably Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal and The Sixpenny Magazine before its untimely demise.

Russell’s earliest example was published in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal between 1849 and 1853, entitled Recollections of a Police Officer. It was an example of pseudo-non-fictional insight into the police force, designed to appeal to the reading public’s curiosity about the police and provide a literary window into the police force. The serialised publication in Chambers’s proved popular enough for the stories to be collected into a three-volume collection in 1856 (see fig. 2). However, it was retitled Recollections of a Detective Police-Officer.

Crucially, the collection of the stories into one three-volume edition added the opportunity to justify, or perhaps explain, the idea behind the creation. In a newly-added preface, Russell argues:

 

I, therefore, offer no apology, for placing these rough sketches of the police experience before the reader. They describe incidents more or less interesting and instructive of the domestic warfare constantly waging between the agents and the breakers of the law…[vii]

 

Russell informs us that these stories are specifically designed to give the reader an inside-view into how the police operated, and he remained interested in this genre as it developed. Perhaps his most widely distributed example of memoir fiction was Experiences of a Real Detective, published in The Sixpenny Magazine in 1862. In the first instalment, published in March 1862, Russell argues:

 

“Detective” literature, if it may be so called, appears to have acquired a wide popularity, chiefly, I suppose, because the stories are believed to be, in the main, faithfully-told, truthful narratives. I have read them all, and need hardly say have discovered mistakes that proved to me that the best, most popular of them were the handiwork of a literary man, not the records of an actual experience. I have frequently made remarks in this sense to my friends, several of whom thereupon suggested that I should publish my own real experiences.[viii]

 

This is an aggressive passage with which to open a new set of stories about the exploits from within the police force. It suggests a growing awareness by the author that detectives and police officers are proving to be popular figures in cheap, accessible and widely published literature. Secondly, the idea of ‘detective literature’ here specifically refers to memoir fiction, suggesting that the perceived nature of ‘detective fiction’ at this time was memoir fiction. The passage specifically points to the fact that the point of the genre was to relate the experiences of a real police officer to the reader. This is unlikely to be true, however it suggests the fact that these narratives were specifically designed to appeal to the voyeuristic interests of readers.

Police memoir writing performed two overall tasks. It began to blend non-fiction with fiction, as it was influenced by much earlier genres of non-fictional crime literature. By looking ‘inside’ the police force, a police memoir style of writing offered a new perspective to experience criminality for readers by following the police officer, rather than the criminal. These memoir writing narratives did however keep an element of the ‘non-fiction’ marketing that these earlier genres also maintained.

The second task that memoir writing performed was help to proliferate understanding of the operational structure and social remit of the police force as an everyday organisation after 1856.The police were often seen as a physical manifestation of Governmental influence in far flung regions away from London, and police memoir-writing allowed readers to get a more first-hand, internal view of the force. It also helped to lay the foundations for later, more recognisable detective fiction.

 

Endnotes

[i] Worthington, H., The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2005), p. 7

[ii] Ibid., p. 7

[iii] Ibid., pp. 6-8

[iv] Ibid., p. 7

[v] Knight, S., Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction, Basingstoke: Macmillan (1980), p. 9

[vi] ‘Richmond’ (attrib. T. S. Surr), Richmond, or, Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Runner, New York: Dover Publications (1976) (orig. published 1827), p. 89

[vii] Russell, W., Recollections of a Detective Police-Officer, London: J&C Brown and Co. (1856), p. vi

[viii] ‘Experiences of a Real Detective’, The Sixpenny Magazine, March 1862, p. 325

 

Bibliography

‘Experiences of a Real Detective’, The Sixpenny Magazine, March 1862, p. 325

‘Richmond’ (attrib. T. S. Surr), Richmond, or, Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Runner, New York: Dover Publications (1976) (orig. published 1827), p. 89

Knight, S., Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction, Basingstoke: Macmillan (1980), p. 9

Russell, W., Recollections of a Detective Police-Officer, London: J&C Brown and Co. (1856), p. vi

Worthington, H., The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2005), p. 7

 

 

Amelia Joulain-Jay is a PhD candidate in History/Linguistics at Lancaster University. For her PhD project, she has been exploring the promises and challenges involved in using corpus linguistics to derive historical insights from large amounts of digitised historical texts. She was awarded the 2016 Gale Dissertation Research Fellowship in Nineteenth-Century Media for this work. She will be delighted to answer (to the best of her abilities) any queries you may have about using corpus linguistics for your research on c19th newspapers.

You can contact her on Twitter via @joulain_jay or email her at a.t.joulain@lancaster.ac.uk.

 

Corpus Linguistics, and why you might want to use it, despite what (you think) you know about it

 

 

As part of the Spatial Humanities project at Lancaster University, and in collaboration with the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences, the central aim of my PhD research project is to investigate the potential of corpus linguistics to allow for the exploration of spatial patterns in large amounts of digitised historical texts. Since I come from a Sociology/Linguistics background, my personal aim since the start of my PhD journey has been to try and understand what historical scholarship practices look like, what kinds of questions historians are interested in (whether they are presently being asked or not), how historians may benefit from using corpus linguistics, and also what challenges historians might encounter when trying to take advantage of corpus linguistics’ affordances. I don’t think I can over-stress how helpful coming to the RSVP conferences has been in this respect, and how grateful I am to the welcoming and helpful community of scholars I have encountered there.

I have chosen to write this post as an introduction to corpus linguistics for several reasons. First, on many counts RSVP members have asked me to explain to them what corpus linguistics consists of; I hope this post begins to answer that question. Second, I have sometimes encountered a reluctance to consider computerised text analysis methods. This reluctance is understandable and should be taken seriously. There are indeed very real challenges to working with computers in the Humanities and it is worth considering them. Ultimately, I hope to help bring corpus linguistics to the attention of those scholars who may find it useful.

The Humanities unavoidably involve messy data and the messy, fluid, categories which we try to apply to them. Computers on the other hand are all about known quantities and a lack of ambiguity. So why use computers in the Humanities? Computers are bad at what humans are good at: understanding. But they are also good at what humans are bad at: performing large and accurate calculations at remarkable speed. Generating historical insight cannot be done at the press of a button, but computers can assist us in manipulating the large amounts of data which are relevant to the questions we care about.

The most fundamental tool in corpus linguistics – the area of linguistics devoted to developing tools and methods to facilitate the quantitative and qualitative analysis of large amounts of text – is the concordance: a method which has been in use for centuries. A concordance is simply a list of occurrences of a word (or expression) of interest, accompanied by some limited context (see figure 1). Drawing up such a concordance manually is a very lengthy process, which can occupy years of an individual’s life. In contrast, once the data has been prepared in certain ways, specialised computer-based corpus linguistic tools can draw up such a concordance within a few seconds, even for tens of thousands of lines of text drawn from a database containing millions of words.[1] For just this simple feat, computers are invaluable for the historian. But why use corpus linguistics tools? After all, all historical digital collections come with interfaces which offer searchability through queries of some sort.

The answer to this question is simple: design. Corpus linguistic tools have been developed for linguists, who care about language and (linguistic) context, so the tools make it easy to switch between a concordance and lengthier sections of text around a particular concordance line (see figure 2). This is definitely faster and more practical than locating the correct page in the correct paper volume; it is also more useful than the format of results offered by most commercial database interfaces which assume that the user will be consulting results one at a time, with no simple way to relate results to each other (in the form of a concordance) or repeatedly switch from the results lists to the text itself. [2]

One of the most central concepts of corpus linguistics is collocation. The term has been defined in many different ways but these ultimately all refer to an observation about language: some words have a tendency to occur in proximity to other words. When we read concordances, we notice that certain words tend to occur together; these kinds of patterns often become precisely what is interesting about the texts we are looking at, and what we want to trace and analyse in a body of text. ‘What terms are used to describe this group of people, this location, this idea?’: this kind of question occurs in many different research contexts. Identifying words which frequently occur close to a word of interest is hence a useful endeavour, and a natural next step when working with a concordance. This can be done in an ad hoc matter whilst doing close reading; it can also be done more rigorously whilst close reading – this will involve keeping track of how often words occur.

This counting is a crucial step, because humans are not impartial – we tend to notice things that interest us and/or which are unusual. This makes our intuition and ad hoc observations a poor guide for frequency. To identify the most frequent patterns of co-occurrence, there is no other option but to count. It is not that the counts are interesting in and of themselves; instead, the counts describe the evidence which will support our conclusions. Corpus linguistic tools are designed to make the identification of such words easy (see figure 3), and they often include various statistics to help make this identification sounder by taking into account the frequency of all words in the data being considered. In addition, they make it easy to switch between lists of counts and concordance lines.

This is not to say that corpus linguistics can answer all questions and solve all problems. The use of corpus linguistic methods in history poses some challenges, primarily that of lack of context. Current corpus linguistic tools offer no ways of retaining the visual characteristics of the original sources – font choices, layout, illustrations, all these are absent from the tools. In addition – and this challenge is not exclusive to corpus linguistic methods but is associated with all attempts to take into account large amounts of data – when working with large amounts of data, how do we generate, or even simply keep in mind, all of the relevant rich contextual information historians are accustomed to working with? Identifying/locating/generating important contextual information about every aspect of all these data pieces is very challenging, if not in some cases simply impossible.

Hence corpus linguistics, I suggest, could prove a useful addition to the historian’s toolkit, but by no means should it simply replace existing historical methods: in fact, it is probably most helpful in combination with other context-rich and perhaps more localised approaches. In this, as is probably the case for an increasing number of fields, I believe inter-disciplinary work holds great promise: as historians, linguists, computer scientists, and others share their experiences and approaches to tackling specific historical problems, we will surely uncover new layers of insights particularly surrounding patterns which operate across higher geographical- and time- scales than those it has previously been realistic to explore.

If I have succeeded in piquing your curiosity about corpus linguistics, you may be interested in the following links:

• Laurence Anthony’s AntConc tool, the downloadable user-friendly concordance tool which is featured in the figures of this article. (Tutorials are available here.)
• Lancaster University’s free Corpus Linguistics MOOC, which covers central corpus linguistic concepts, methods and tools as well as providing illustrations of applications to the Humanities and Social Sciences. (It does not assume prior knowledge of linguistics or corpus linguistics.)
• Steven Pumfrey’s conceptual history article on using manual and corpus linguistics approaches to explore the shift in meaning of the word ‘experiment’ from a religious to a scientific meaning in the 1660s.
• CASS’s briefing on Helen Baker’s research into the changing conceptions of poverty during the seventeenth century.

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[1] Each concordance line corresponds to one instance of the search-term accompanied by some context; there are hence 10 concordance lines in figure 1.

[2] I am certainly not the first to point this out. Nicholson (2012: 242) has, for example, similarly pointed out that most such interfaces have been designed ‘with close rather than distant forms of reading in mind’.

 

Megan Peiser is a PhD candidate in the department of English at the University of Missouri where she is currently working on her dissertation, ‘British Women Novelists and the Review Periodical, 1790-1820’. Her project uses her Novels Reviewed Database, 1790-1820 (NRD) to track the contemporary critical response to the only period in literary history when women published more novels than men. She is particularly interested in how the fields of book history, literature, digital humanities, and material culture intersect in the field of periodicals studies.

You can contact her on Twitter via @MeganPeiser or email her at megan.l.peiser@mail.missouri.edu.

Review Periodicals and the Visibility of William Lane’s Minerva Press

 

 

If you opened a Review periodical in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, you would find, tucked in the less prestigious Monthly Catalogue section, reviews of novels published by William Lane and his notorious Minerva Press.[1] Review readers knew how to navigate the monthly Review periodical, reading longer reviews of more prestigious publications in the opening 60 to 100 pages, and flipping to the back pages where shorter reviews were divided by genre. The ‘Novels’ section was the penultimate section (followed only by ‘Sermons’). Regular Review readers would find short reviews there, very often of novels published by William Lane. Indeed, almost every issue of The Monthly Review and The Critical Review from 1790 to 1820 included a review of one of Lane’s novels.

Despite an almost constant presence of his novels in Review publications, William Lane’s Minerva Press was largely condemned by contemporaries, and is only now beginning to receive attention from scholars. The Minerva Press and the novels it produced became synonymous with hack writing, and factory-produced plots. Lane’s novels fed his own circulating library, and the many other lending libraries popping up around England during the period. It is, in part, thanks to Lane that novels were made available widely and cheaply for the growing population of novel readers of the early nineteenth century. It was also thanks to Lane’s Minerva Press that many women writers became published novelists during this period. Lane’s influence is perhaps hard to see because the novels he published have not made their way into our modern canon. However, by reading Review periodicals from the period with a new methodology, we can piece together a picture of how the reading public might have encountered Lane’s novels.

In my project I research Review periodicals using a combined qualitative and quantitative method. I read periodicals qualitatively by analysing their contents page-by-page, via archives, microfilm, and digital reproductions. And I also read Review periodicals through data analysis, using my Novels Reviewed Database, 1790-1820 (NRD). The NRD includes data on 1,215 novels, 1,639 book reviews, 445 identified authors, and more. This two-pronged approach has brought me some surprising insights in to the practices of criticism by the first two review periodicals in England: The Monthly Review and The Critical Review. The contemporary critical response to this period in the novel’s history, and this period of women writers’ dominance of the novel has not yet been closely studied. The NRD enables me to conduct a study of a large amount of textual information—thirty years of reviews—to identify trends in criticism, authorship, elements of the novel genre, and as in Lane’s case, publishing.

The period from 1790 to 1820 that the NRD explores is significant in women’s literary history—women writers were, for the first time, publishing more novels than men. The Minerva Press was a great supporter of their dominance, putting out more works by women than any other publisher. 1790 to 1820 is also the period during which the Minerva Press was booming. Set up by William Lane at Leadenhall Street in London in 1790, it became synonymous with voluminous and hastily printed novels that Jane Austen would call ‘the trash with which the press now groans’.[2]

Using the NRD I have found that the novel publisher long labelled a hack, William Lane, was very visible in the Reviews. Novels in our modern canon, like those of Frances Burney or Jane Austen, received more pages of review, and reviews in the prominent front section of the Review periodical (rather than relegated to the Monthly Catalogue), but Lane was the most visible in terms of volume. The Reviews’ mission to review all recent publications forced them to include even those of which they disapproved, and this practice worked in Lane’s favour.

William Lane’s Minerva Press published one third of all new novels in London during the period the NRD considers.[3] If a person were a regular shopper at bookstalls in the metropolis, it would be impossible to overlook the degree to which Lane’s publications dominated the novel market. But what about those many readers in England not strolling the streets of London? What about rural readers? Subscribers to circulating libraries? They were reading Reviews. Derek Roper estimates that one sixth of England’s reading public was purchasing a Review periodical, and that as each issue was likely read by upwards of 10 people: much of England’s reading population was consuming a Review periodical.[4] And where novel reviews were concerned, Lane was easy to see in their pages.

Number of Reviews

My first method of tracking visibility in the Reviews is by number of review articles. Across the NRD, reviews of Lane’s novels make up 16.5% of all reviews—more than any other single publisher. Chart 1 represents reviews of Lane’s novels compared to the six next most prolific publishers.

Lane far outstrips the others in number, receiving 272 reviews. A novel reader using the Reviews as their guide could not have thought of the marketplace without Lane. When it came to number of reviews by publisher, Lane and the Minerva Press were most visible. A reader of Review periodicals would reliably run into a review of one of Lane’s works every month.

Location of Reviews

But what about the novel-reader who paged through the front section of the Review periodical – the section with longer, essay-style reviews? The NRD enables me to create data visualisations. These visualisations (the charts included here) show how changing our question about what makes a novel-publisher visible to Review readers re-casts Lane’s dominance as the most visible novel-publisher from this period. We have considered that the number of reviews might make Lane more visible to Review readers, but how might the location of the reviews present him to those readers?

Only 11% of all novels reviewed during this period were featured in the front section. As Chart 2 shows, between 1790 and 1820 Lane had a mere five novels reviewed in the front, more prestigious section of the Reviews. Longman’s novels received the most front-section reviews with 37 (approximately one novel per year). Cadell is the only publisher whose novels are reviewed equally in both sections.

Number of Review Pages

The number of pages of review a novel received would have increased its visibility to Review consumers. And if we examine the number of pages of review that each of these novel publishers received, Longman comes out on top again:

The number of pages of review space in Chart 3 is calculated by combining the number of pages of criticism, and the number of pages of excerpt from the novel each review printed. Long excerpts featured in the front section almost exclusively. This explains Longman outstripping the other publishers by more than 200 pages. Those novels reviewed in the Monthly Catalogue could expect a few lines of criticism at best. Because Lane has the most novels reviewed in the Monthly Catalogue (see Chart 2), his sheer volume of reviews calculates a page space equal to that of Cadell seen here in Chart 3.

Even though Lane’s novels are not so prominently placed, or as lengthy as Longman’s, he still maintains strong visibility in two of the three categories the NRD has helped us to consider. In number of reviews Lane is clearly #1, and his novels still make a strong showing in terms of number of pages. It is likely then that a regular Review reader of the period would have been just as familiar with Lane and his novels as Jane Austen’s biting comment shows she was. Studying Review periodicals helps to deepen our understanding of his dominance of the novel market.

Using the NRD helps us to think about the variety of ways a Review reader might understand the novel marketplace, and Lane’s role in it. While a reader in the period would not have these charts available to them, they would have felt the levels of representation that my findings reveal to modern periodical scholars about Review visibility. When researching periodicals it is often difficult to grasp their influence on their contemporary readers. Even when we read historical periodicals widely and deeply, we are still doing so in a removed state. Quantitative readings of periodicals cannot make up for our lack of historical proximity, but they can help us to ask new questions about periodicals that our distanced reading obscures from our view.

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[1] I adopt Derek Roper’s practice of referring to periodicals as the ‘Reviews,’ and individual articles within the periodicals as ‘reviews’. See Derek Roper, Reviewing before the Edinburgh, 1788-1802 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978).

[2] Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey ed. Susan Fraiman (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004), 22.

[3] William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 244.

[4] Roper, 24-25.

 

 

Emily Eiben is a PhD candidate in the department of Religious Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Her project focuses on the popularisation of Buddhism through the British periodical and newspaper press in the years 1875 to 1895 – between when the Prince of Wales visited the Buddha’s tooth in Ceylon in 1875 and when Sarah Bernhardt starred in a Buddhist-themed stage play in London in 1895. She is particularly fascinated by the way that pop culture and the media joined forces to create an enthusiastic new audience for a once little-known ‘heathen’ religion and the ways that this enthusiasm was fuelled by the British colonial encounter.

You can contact Emily at Emily.Eiben@campus.lmu.de.

 

What’s So Funny About Buddhism? Unexpected Humour in the Late Victorian Popular Press

When I began exploring the depiction of Buddhism in the British newspaper and periodical press at the close of the nineteenth century, I was astounded by the diversity and sophistication of views I encountered in my sources. What really blew me away, though, was the surprisingly wide array of jokes, satires, and comics that the late Victorians produced about Buddhism and Buddhists. The Victorians thought Buddhism was funny? This was new. This comedic material—some of it still surprisingly funny 130 years later—shed a whole new light on the playfulness, wittiness, and sophistication of the Victorians’ encounter with Buddhism. More than any other discovery in the digital archives, my immersion in the unexpected humour of the newspaper and periodical press profoundly altered my understanding of my subject.

 

On the one hand, I stumbled across a plethora of groan-inducing one-liners about tree buds and ‘bud’-dhas, like the ones above, that feature a simple, straightforward style of humour based on the apparently universal Victorian penchant for puns and homonyms. This style of humour was designed to appeal to all ages, classes, and literacy levels; here were jokes that could be read aloud in the club, to a seatmate on the omnibus, or to the children on a Sunday afternoon. These one-liners encapsulated the ubiquity of talk about Buddhism in the 1880s; in my dissertation, they help me to demonstrate its total and seamless integration into everyday speech language and contexts.

But barbless and family-friendly was notthe only type of Victorian humour, of course, and many periodicals took a sharply satirical view of their contemporaries’ interest in Buddhism. This Victorian penchant for satire has received renewed academic attention in recent years, especially as digitisation has made it possible to locate larger amounts of comic material from a wider variety of sources. (Most will know of Bob Nicholson’s project, with the support of the British Library, to create a “Victorian Meme Machine” – see his blog here. I can’t wait to explore it!) In my dissertation I examine a number of sharply satirical pieces involving Buddhism that appeared in some of the most widely-read popular comic papers in the in the 1880s, such as Fun, Punch, and Judy. These are not one-liners and puns, but elaborate comedic setups whose decoding requires deeper analysis of their context. In many of the satires, the new interest in Buddhism presents itself as a lively and competitive option for an increasingly choosy (if overwhelmed) public – faced with the task of evaluating increasingly diverse options in the marketplace of religious ideas.

In one of my favourite specimens, the comic paper Fun sharpened its knives on the Victorian national-cultural obsession with the discovery of Buddhist relics in a satire from 1889 titled ‘The Latest Discovery.’[1] The satirical ditty is a direct commentary on British archaeologist James Campbell’s discovery near Asoka (India) in late 1888 of a fingernail supposedly belonging to the Buddha. The discovery was first reported in England by the Daily Telegraph, and the story was quickly picked up by the other major dailies—The Spectator and The Times—and then by evening society papers such as the Pall Mall Gazette. Fun‘s piece, published a scant week after the serious newspaper reports, appears close on the heels of the discovery and is obviously eager to take the wind out of its sails and make the whole episode look ridiculous. Fun‘s humorous ‘take’ on a serious archaeological find transformed how I viewed the Victorians’ responses to such discoveries.

I also unearthed a plethora of quotes and quips that were strongly suggestive of how Buddhism formed part of the common cultural currency of the period. In many cases, a mere reference to the Buddha sufficed to imply a world of meanings. Most amusingly, in the political realm, both Disraeli and Gladstone were compared to Buddha when they wore passive or bored expressions in Parliament: “The Prime Minister [Disraeli] moves on sublimely indifferent to all that irresponsible and frivolous outsiders can speak or print. He appears, like Buddha, to be absorbed in contemplating with imperturbable self-satisfaction, his own perfections of his policy, and nothing can disturb his blissful reveries.”[2] The allusion was not party-specific: Gladstone, too, was described in 1883 as possessing that “bland passivity with which the image of the Buddha contemplates the prostrations of his adorers.”[3] (The likeness does seem more fitting for Gladstone than for Disraeli!) These short quips rely on a familiar interpretation of Buddhism that draws mainly on the remarkably persistent popular understanding of Buddhist nirvana as a passive cessation of interest and activity, if not a complete annihilation of personality. Here, too, was more evidence of exactly what I was hoping to prove in my dissertation: that Buddhism had been absorbed into the quotidian language of everyday men and women.

The jokes I found were instrumental in changing my approach to my subject and in deepening my appreciation of the sophistication with which the late Victorians tackled the cultural developments of their day. Specifically, these comedic materials assisted me in gauging the extent to which Buddhism had penetrated popular discourse, offering valuable evidence for understanding both the depth of knowledge as well as the types of associations that circulated in popular culture. Satire, in particular, is tightly bound to popular culture in a mutually (de)constructive way and offers unique insights into contemporary cultural concerns. Most of the jokes I discuss in my dissertation work with, and play off, other contemporary discourses; most are only obliquely funny (if at all) until one probes the social context of the joke and the frameworks of knowledge that undergird it.

Finally, these comic materials bear powerful witness to the active role played by the mass media and popular culture in shaping contemporary opinions. The jokes I mention here are creative and constructive (rather than merely derivative); they use contemporary forms and formats to comment on what was, at the beginning of the Victorian era, still a highly specialised topic for academics and missionaries. Comic magazines such as Punch and Fun as well as family magazines such as All the Year Round, played a central role in translating serious, abstruse Buddhism into the language of popular culture. This insight was instrumental in transforming how I understood the late Victorians’ talk about Buddhism. The wry, winking humour of the popular periodicals provided a much-needed antidote to the moral seriousness and intellectual intensity that one finds in more ‘serious’ periodicals, and reminded me again and again that—contrary to popular contemporary stereotypes—the Victorians may actually have had a better sense of humour than we do. It was in their jokes, of all places, that the Victorians really came alive to me, practically leaping off the pages into the present with a sense of humour that works across time.

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[1] “The latest discovery.” Fun. April 3, 1889, 149.

[2] “Summary of the Week.” Manchester Times (Manchester, England), Saturday, August 9, 1879; Issue 1129.

[3] Aberdeen Weekly Journal (Aberdeen, Scotland), Friday, October 12, 1883; Issue 8944.

 

 

Emma Burris-Janssen is a third-year PhD student at the University of Connecticut. Her research interests centre on gendered violence and trauma, which is how she became acquainted with the work of Mona Caird and the Great Marriage Debate of 1888, and she is currently working on a larger project connecting Mona Caird’s work on marriage with that of Thomas Hardy. Her dissertation will bring these research interests into tighter focus by examining figurations of criminalised abortion in the British periodical press (particularly medical journals) and the British novel from 1861-1967. As this project is in its early stages, reading recommendations are more than welcomed!

You can contact Emma via email at emma.burris-janssen@uconn.edu or via Twitter @CairdTooMuch.

Is Our Memory of the Great Marriage Debate a Failure?

Some weeks ago, the building of a museum dedicated to celebrating the women of London’s East End was supposed to be nearing completion. Instead, as Lisa Mckenzie observes in her blog post for Times Higher Education, “what [has] opened on 12 Cable Street is a museum that […] sell[s] T-shirts and coffee mugs featuring a black silhouette of the Ripper stood in a pool of blood, reducing the women of the East End to a red smudge.” Quite rightly, the Jack the Ripper Museum’s opening has stirred public protest and created a controversy, with the designers of the museum recently calling the fruit of their own labours (they too thought they were building a women’s history museum) so much “salacious, mysogynist rubbish.” What is at issue here is memory. How are the women of the nineteenth-century East End to be remembered? Are they to be remembered as voiceless, victimised bodies laid bare to the prurient public gaze? Or, are they to be remembered as agential subjects who started and sustained numerous grassroots rights movements?

Of course, this is not the first time that the sensationalised image of the Ripper has threatened to silence a more nuanced representation of women’s histories. In 1888, a similar battle was waged in the pages of the Daily Telegraph with the Ripper murders eventually overwhelming the Great Marriage Debate – a public dialogue partly spurred by the words of early feminist journalist and novelist Mona Caird. As Judith Walkowitz puts it in her classic book City of Dreadful Delight, the “two media events, the marriage debate and the Whitechapel horrors, tensely coexisted for four weeks, but the balance of interest and fascination began to shift from West of East, from left to right. Finally, after 29 September the marriage correspondence ceased publication, and the Ripper murders took over the whole newspaper” (168). But, the problem of how we remember Mona Caird and the Great Marriage Debate does not start or end with the Ripper murders.

Though August of 1888 is now better remembered as the month of the first Ripper murder, it was also the month that Mona Caird published her article entitled “Marriage” in the “wicked” Westminster Review. Because Parliament wasn’t in session and there wasn’t much to print, the much more popular Daily Telegraph decided to use Caird’s article as an excuse to pose the question that would spark the Great Marriage Debate of 1888: Is Marriage a Failure?

An estimated 27,000 readers responded, giving their personal views on the institution. Some used the opportunity as a vehicle for publicly airing grievances about such cardinal sins as a husband’s tendency to place his feet on the mantelpiece (oh, the horror!). Others wrote desperate pleas for help – for someone to bear witness to the daily cruelties, insults, and abuses they had to suffer at the hands of their spouses. Still others took the opportunity to declare their pious, undying loyalty to the institution.

Even before the intervention of the Ripper murders, the terms for remembering Caird’s “Marriage” essay were problematic, as it is unlikely that many of the Daily Telegraph’s letter writers would have read Caird’s original article in the Westminster Review. Even in the official 1888 collection of the Daily Telegraph’s Great Marriage Debate letters, Caird’s original article was not reprinted in full. Instead, the collection’s editor, Harry Quilter – a conservative barrister, who was far from sympathetic to the concerns of “New Women” like Caird – directed interested readers to the relevant edition of the Westminster Review if they wanted more than an extracted version of Caird’s piece. In the meantime, a “brilliant” paper by one Mrs. Lynn Linton (an opponent of women’s rights with whom Caird tangled in 1892 in the pages of the Nineteenth Century) was provided to the reader in full. While Quilter labels Caird’s text “rather vague and high-falutin’,” he commends Linton’s for its “vigorous common sense, its absence of sentimental feeling, and its concentration of wide experience,” all of which make it “well worthy of the closest attention, while as a piece of literary workmanship it is more than admirable” (13-14). And, it is this very collection of the Daily Telegraph’s letters that is still regularly referenced in discussions of Caird and the Great Marriage Debate.

127 years after the publication of Caird’s controversial essay, I still find myself swimming in questions about the way its content – and the public reaction to its content – has filtered into popular memory: How accurate is Quilter’s edited memorial to the Great Marriage Debate? What is re-membered in its pages? What is forgotten? And, beyond that, how accurately did the Daily Telegraph itself depict the nature and content of the 27,000 letters that allegedly flooded its editor’s desk? What has become of those letters? Do they still exist? What can they tell us about the relationship between the public and private spheres during this period? What can all of this tell us about which women’s experiences are remembered and which are erased?

In a discussion of memory, women’s rights, and Mona Caird, I can do no better than leave you with Caird’s own last words from the “Marriage” essay that eventually became so notorious. I have always found these lines to be haunting because of what they could not possibly have foreseen. There’s such a delicate optimism to them – an optimism that has too often been denied in the various rememberings, forgettings, and distortings of the piece:

We see a limitless field of possibility opening out before us; the adventurous spirit in us might leap up at the wonderful romance of life! […] We shall begin, slowly but surely, to see the folly of permitting the forces of one sex to pull against and neutralise the workings of the other, to the confusion of our efforts and the checking of our progress. We shall see, in the relations of men and women to one another, the source of all good or of all evil, precisely as those relations are true and noble and equal, or false and low and unjust. With this belief we shall seek to move opinion in all the directions that may bring us to this “consummation devoutly to be wished,” and we look forward steadily, hoping and working for the day when men and women shall be comrades and fellow-workers as well as lovers and husbands and wives, when the rich and many-sided happiness which they have the power to bestow one on another shall no longer be enjoyed in tantalising snatches, but shall gladden and give new life to all humanity. (252)

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Works Cited

Caird, Mona. “Marriage.” 1888. “Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors”: Victorian Writing by Women on Women. 2^nd ed. Ed. Susan Hamilton. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2004. Print.

Mckenzie, Lisa. “Why I Am Protesting Against the Jack the Ripper Museum.” Times Higher Education Blog. Times Higher Education, 5 August 2015. Web. 10 August 2015.

Quilter, Harry. Is Marriage a Failure? London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1888. Hathi Trust. Web. 19 October 2014.

Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Print.

 

Lucy Warwick is a PhD candidate at the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies at Oxford Brookes University. Her thesis focuses on the representation of the British Empire in the works of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 1832-1845.

She can be contacted via Twitter @LxWarwick and at lwarwick@brookes.ac.uk

 

Piecing the Story Together

 

They are probably the most dreaded and feared words for any researcher: ‘not in place’, or even worse, ‘missing’, ‘lost’. These words strike fear into my heart as a library invigilator as well as a researcher.

Sometimes the archives just don’t exist, they’ve been ‘lost to the war’, or simply thrown away, but sometimes items have gone missing more recently. This is often a more frustrating situation, and has been a frequent occurrence on my mission to uncover the work of wood engraver and draftsman, Stephen Sly.

My work on Stephen Sly is part of my PhD thesis at Oxford Brookes University which investigates how the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) represented the British Empire in their publications. The Society was founded in 1826, with Henry Brougham as its chair, and several prominent men on its committee, including politicians, academics, men of science, and of religion. The SDUK aimed to ‘impart knowledge’ to those who had no access to schooling, or simply wished to learn alone. It began its publishing operations in 1827 with scientific treatises on subjects such as mechanics and optics, before moving on to subjects of a broader appeal, including several on wildlife- wild and domestic, plants- edible and ornamental, and travellers’ tales of foreign lands. However these were sold at 2s, or 4s 6d (bound in fancy cloth) and were therefore still fairly expensive. In March 1832, under the superintendence of publisher Charles Knight, the Society began its Penny Magazine, aiming to provide an alternative to the coarse language and provocative politics of the radical unstamped press. From the start, Knight, as editor of the Penny Magazine, wanted to provide his readership with high quality illustrations to aid the reading of otherwise complex articles.

The Penny Magazine is not unknown to us, but there is a distinct lack of information on those who created the illustrations the magazine is known for, and indeed, was bought for. This left a gaping hole in my research which I was determined to fill. In order to understand the magazine’s production I wanted to know the minds behind its biggest selling point. The illustrations in the magazine are nothing less than eclectic and encyclopaedic; they range from reproductions of great works of art, to views of British cities, to peoples and animals from far-flung corners of the globe. Who were the men that brought the world to the fingertips of the Great British reader?

Knight’s circle of draughtsmen brought together by the Penny Magazine included two prominent names: William Harvey, and John Jackson. As pupils of the ‘father of wooden graving’—Thomas Bewick—their names survive, but another part of Knight’s circle remained shrouded in mystery: Stephen Sly & Co.

As far as I am aware, Knight’s archive was largely thrown away by his wife, and any remains were destroyed in the Second World War, so my first port of call in researching the mysterious Stephen Sly was the SDUK archive. To my delight, Sly was listed twice in the SDUK correspondence index, for one personal folder of correspondence, and another addressed to the firm of Sly, Wilson and Evans. UCL, who hold the archive, allow six items to be pre-ordered two weeks in advance – you have to pick wisely! I chose the Sly correspondence and the corresponding out-letter books, as well as the boxes of papers on illustrations belonging to Charles Knight. This seemed to me like it would give me the whole picture of the relationship between Knight, the SDUK, and Sly.

In the two weeks leading to my archival visit, I did as much additional research on Sly as possible. I found entries for him in map engraving indexes, and several mentions in contemporary periodicals. These sources all gave me glimpses into his life, but most turned out to provide contradictory dates, and almost no insight into Sly’s work outside of the SDUK.

Arriving at the archive, I was incredibly excited to be treading new ground, revealing the life of a talented, but forgotten, engraver. I opened the box of ‘S’ correspondence and sifted through to find Sly’s folders. They weren’t there. I checked, and checked again. That dreaded word ‘missing’ came to mind.

Only a year into my doctoral research, I hadn’t experienced this before. What do you do when archival papers are missing? They’re the truest window into the past a researcher can find, and provide answers that no secondary source can replace. I continued to see if I could salvage details of Sly’s life and work anywhere. Charles Knight sent lists to the SDUK of every woodcut Sly made for their volumes, as well as information relating to how much they cost, but there was nothing on the Penny Magazine at all. There was, however, a circular in the box that listed Sly, Wilson and Evans as the proprietors and publishers of a scientific and literary journal, The Verulam. I located two copies of the journal, both in the British Library. I was elated! Sly’s work was within my reach. But when I arrived to the reading room, my order had been cancelled, and I met those words again: ‘lost in the war’. Sly continued to evade me.

My last hope was a copy of The Verulam in the British Library’s Newspaper Reading Room, which, against the odds, was there and in place! It revealed much about both Sly’s early work, and a little about his interactions with the SDUK.

So I was left with fragments: snippets from Sly’s career with the SDUK, patchy information from engraving dictionaries, and some mentions in secondary sources. But what I considered the keystone—the correspondence—was missing. Nonetheless I was able to piece together what I had, to tell at least a partial story of Sly and Co. from their beginnings with The Verulam, to their work with the SDUK, and their feats in colour printing, including William Lee’s Classes of the Capital, Knight’s Old England, and advertisements for the London and Dover Railway. Despite his invisibility in our history books, one of Sly’s illustrations is well known: the view of the Thames on the masthead to the first issue of the Illustrated London News. It contains his name hidden in a boat in the corner of the woodcut.

I have only scratched the surface of the mammoth undertakings of Sly and Co., and I will continue to research the firm to uncover the works of these brilliantly talented tradesmen. But for now, what I have found so far on Sly and Co. is indicative of what I’d like to convey in this post, that research is not always straightforward, and it is easy to consider your topic lost beyond hope when there are missing pieces. To uncover untold stories and bring to light the lives of those missing from our history books is not easy, and sometimes you have to piece together what you can, patching the holes that cannot be filled by archives. There is no ‘right way’ to deal with the problem of missing archives, but the years we spend researching help to train us to find innovative strategies to deal with these otherwise disappointing situations.

This correlates with my work in antiquarian book buying and the rehoming of editions abandoned by libraries. We often see pleas for help saving archives on book history mailing lists, and it is devastating to think of this primary material being lost. I blame this feeling for my SDUK-book buying habit and recent acquisition of 102 years of the history of science journal Isis that was being disposed of by a university library in favour of digital editions.

But, in the words of Tristram Hunt MP, on missing files in the National Archives: ‘I’m hopeful it’s a temporary aberration…These things do get lost and come back to life.’

And that is our job as researchers, to bring history back to life.