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The final chapter weighs up the trajectories of serialized fiction and women's magazines in the final decades of the nineteenth century to ask what effects Braddon's, Marryat's and Wood's work had on the close relationship between fiction and the female press. Middlebrow women's magazines and feminist newspapers of the 1890s, like Woman at Home, The Englishwoman, Our Mothers and Daughters, and Woman's Signal, while seemingly antithetical in their attitudes towards the ‘new woman’, shared strategies for dealing with the female figure that correspond with those used by the author-editors of the 1860s. As it had for Braddon, Wood, and Marryat, the periodical press of the 1890s provided a space in which conventions of gender and genre could be re-thought for a female audience.

A new episode in the history of spiritual autobiography opened in the late 1730s with the advent of transatlantic Evangelical Revival, and the distinguishing characteristic of this revival or ‘work’ in all its manifestations was the increased incidence of the conversion of individuals. Unlike earlier periods of heightened religious fervour, the revival was uniquely concentrated in time and extended across space. Changes in the North Atlantic world helped to create ‘modern’ conditions for this phenomenon, particularly with the rapid spread of religious news through itinerancy, letter-writing, and the periodical press and the more extensive movement of people, goods, and ideas in the period generally. Includes the case study of the early evangelical Joseph Humphreys—since Humphreys’s experience illustrates how the larger Evangelical Revival was itself constituted by individual conversion experiences, and how these experiences so often compelled converts to retell their life’s story from the beginning, even venturing sometimes to do so in print before an anonymous public.

This first section maps out the argument concerning the relationship between sensation, performance, and the press through the key figures of the female author-editors Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat. Each of these writers is introduced in the larger context of women's journalism in the nineteenth century and the modulating status of editorship during this period. The Introduction then considers the term ‘sensation’, its early definitions, its current contested status, and the ways in which this book uses it to describe an enabling idiom for women writers. In considering Judith Butler's understanding of performativity the chapter also provides a theoretical underpinning for the connections the book explores between the self-conscious performances of gender and of genre.

The first chapter presents Funü shibao in its historical and print context. It emphasizes Funü shibao’s innovativeness in order to highlight both the distinctiveness of the journal and the range of possibilities that existed in this period. Focusing on the remarkable resources of its publisher and the cultural ingenuity of its editor, it also situates the journal within revolutionary and early Republican politics. It excavates the journal’s often implicit political agenda and introduces some of its key female and male contributors. The chapter further outlines the cultural and historical methodology for reading the periodical press that is used throughout the book. This method focuses on the intermediality of the journal itself, its dialogue with other print products, and its position within larger cultural debates and historical developments.

Two issues are addressed in this chapter. First, the standard secular interpretation is shown to be an inadequate account of contemporary reactions to the Exhibition because it ignores the extensive range of primary source material of a religious nature, especially sermons and the contemporary periodical press that commented on the Exhibition from many different denominational perspectives. Such sources provide the basis for reinterpreting the Exhibition within a religious framework. In order to undertake this, the second section of this chapter offers a brief overview of the main divisions within Anglicanism and between the Established Church and Dissent. Particular attention is paid to two themes that recur in later chapters, evangelicalism and the heightened anti‐Catholicism following the recent ‘paper aggression’.

Drawing mainly on the Anglo-Jewish periodical press, it appears that Jewish writers were generally supportive of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Having been chastised on many occassions as anti-intellectual, Jews could portray themselves as traditionally siding with science and rationality at a time when many Christians strenuously opposed evolution. Yet Alfred Henriques was alone in perceiving that Darwin’s theory was as damaging to traditional Judaism as it was to mainstream Christianity. Following Henriques, Claude Goldsmid Montefiore and others pressed for the development of a modern form of Judaism — what became Liberal Judaism — that could encompass an evolutionary account of the physical world. Among the scientific community, Raphael Meldola — who looked to Darwin as his mentor — was the leading Jewish evolutionist.

The Conclusion draws together the strands of the press in which Braddon, Wood, and Marrat had worked and traces the changes they faced in the late nineteenth century and the subsequent decline of their magazines amidst faster-moving ‘New Journalism’. This final chapter argues that these drastic changes in the way that the periodical press worked after the editorial departures of Braddon, Wood, and Marryat have helped to obscure their successful editorships. Finally, it sums up the book's argument that the careers of these women provide models of multiple, complex, and performative genderings both within and beyond the press and demonstrate how performance was vital to their survival within the literary marketplace of the Victorian period.

The first half of this chapter addresses the role of religion in the closing ceremonies and how the religious periodical press assessed the place of the Exhibition in contemporary history. In the second half the responses of the various Christian sects and denominations are reviewed in order to show that although some religious groups were among the Exhibition's sternest critics, others (especially, Congregationalists, Quakers, and Broad Anglicans) were among its most ardent supporters. This diversity is important in showing that there was no single ‘Christian response’ to the Exhibition. Overall it is argued that religion was a highly significant factor in understanding contemporary responses to the most prominent event of the mid‐nineteenth century.

This volume aims to both broaden and deepen understanding of women’s active engagement with this expanded periodical print culture, be that as consumers or contributors, in the context of the ‘general’ press and the dedicated women’s press, in both its commercial and specialised forms. Moving beyond expected periodical titles, geographical locations, and scholarly assumptions, the 35 essays collected in this volume reveal the complexity of women’s participation with print media and the diversity of their contributions as authors, readers, editors, journalists, correspondents, engravers, and illustrators. These chapters demonstrate the variety of trajectories forged by women as they entered into print, cultivated a public voice, and shaped public discourses about women’s lives, issues, and interests. Yet while the growth of the press undoubtedly empowered women to develop public identities and pursue professional careers, the conventions of journalistic publication problematised the notion of individual agency in significant ways. So while this volume showcases the diversity of opportunities created for women by the expansion of Victorian print media, both as producers and as consumers, it also explores the limits of that freedom.

This chapter focuses on the impact of the periodical press on Töpffer's picture stories. In moving to another medium, Töpffer's invention also changed its raison d'être. Its artistic goals could no longer remain the same: the aim was not to produce an autonomous work—a novel in prints—but to share in the life and rhythms of a periodical and its readers. While the periodical press offered rich evolutionary possibilities, it also suffered from an obvious flaw: authors could not control this complex environment in the same way that they were able to control the publication of a novel.

This chapter introduces the genre of the commercial periodical press. It defines the nature of this press by examining a number of terms used to describe it, including popular, women’s, commercial, and general interest. It further discusses the recent redemption of this genre of materials after decades of ideologically driven scholarly neglect that was first instigated by New Culture intellectuals in the late 1910s. It outlines three dialectical tensions that mark the contents of the journal that are central to the analysis throughout the book: tensions between the journal’s reformist and commercial objectives, between its everyday and epic agendas, and between the strategies of its male editor and authors and the tactics of its female writers and contributors. Finally, the introduction briefly outlines each of the succeeding chapters.

This chapter discusses the history of the periodical press in nineteenth-century Ireland. Periodical publishing was particularly scanty in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The most interesting element of the periodical publishing industry is journals. The journals publishing sector picked up the political issues of the 1790s from the radical newspaper press and applied them to the altered climate of post-union Ireland. Of these, the most entertaining was Watty Cox’s Irish Magazine and Monthly Asylum for Neglected Biography (1807–15). By the 1830s, antiquarian zeal had penetrated Ireland, and the decade was particularly rich in scientific and what might broadly be considered learned journals. The 1830s also saw an increase in the establishment of mechanics’ institutes in Ireland, and the reforming, educating function of various societies, such as the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in England. The favoured format for publications from these bodies was the penny magazine.

Chapter 2 introduces the “Republican Ladies” who were both the moving target of and important contributors to the journal. Consisting of three demographics—older, genteel women; professionals; and students—these women represent the first generation of respectable, public Chinese women. Emblems of the new Republic, they do not map onto the familiar categories of “women of talent,” “new women,” or “modern girls.” Denied the formal vote by the Republican regime, their actualization as informal citizens was, in part, dependent on the opportunity to write for journals like Funü shibao. The publication of Funü shibao was, in turn, dependent on this process of female actualization. The chapter devises methods for discerning which writings in the journal were definitively by women.

This chapter examines the author’s function in Walter Besant’s Herr Paulus (1888) and Armorel of Lyonesse (1890). It places the representation of literary and artistic creation in Walter Besant’s novels within the transnational context of the debates on international copyright and the nationalist restructuring of the trade that followed copyright legislation. Both aspects were covered in the pages of the periodical The Author directed by Besant in the same period, thus making a transnational approach in the study of Victorian fiction all the more necessary. The novels provide a poignant critique of the misleading power of make-belief that sustained several forms of literary, economic and social fictions, thus redefining the notion of literary value against the rhetoric adopted by the proponents of the triumphant and often unfair practices of monopolistic liberalism. Walter Besant’s fiction takes aim at the remnants of the Romantic ideology that clouded a materialist assessment of the author’s value in the marketplace, problematizing the Platonist theory of creativity, that was rather counterproductive to the affirmation of the author’s advancement as independent force in the marketplace, the goal of Besant’s reformism.

It tends to be assumed that the Anglo-Scottish relationship has defined modern Scottish literature. This chapter contends that religion rather than nationhood has been the dominant feature of Scottish literature within the Union, and that for most Scots, certainly from the mid-eighteenth-century Secessions, by way of the Disruption (1843), to the reunion of the Church of Scotland with the United Free Church in 1929, denominational allegiances within Scottish Protestantism, often within Presbyterianism itself, were the principal vehicles of identity. Scotland had a rich periodical press during the nineteenth century, but one splintered along denominational lines. Every denomination had its magazine, and Scottish reviewing, and literature more generally, bore marked denominational inflections. Moreover, the vivid characterization, claustrophobic Calvinism, and ingenious plotting of the Whig-Presbyterian novel have continued in no small measure—in works by Robin Jenkins and, more recently, James Robertson—to provide a narrative template for secularized, postmodern Scottish literature.

General-interest periodicals are a preeminent source for the study of popular views and major discursive formations around the navy. This chapter offers a cross-title analysis of some of the most widely read family magazines published between 1850 and 1880 (Chambers’s Journal, The Leisure Hour, Household Words and All the Year Round). They reveal the wider social and cultural context in which the mid-Victorian naval-heroic discourse was situated: issues of masculinity, class, a new professionalism, technological advancement and a qualified attitude towards heroes and heroism. The magazines’ depictions of the navy were not simply laudatory. Above all, they reflected concern that at a time when Britain was still the only world power, its navy appeared to have entered a post-heroic phase.