This proposed special session examines modes of celebration and commemoration within the nineteenth-century periodical press. As noted in this year’s presidential theme, celebration encourages us to think about community, repetition, and the passing of time, which are integral to the periodical form. In 1989, Margaret Beetham identified the periodical’s “particular relationship to time” as the core of its “distinctiveness as a literary or publishing genre.”[1]
Defined and marked by dates, and appearing at scheduled, regular intervals, issues of nineteenth-century periodicals brought information and entertainment into readers’ lives in a cycle that valued novelty while simultaneously acknowledging that it would inevitably be replaced by new content the next week, month, or quarter. Editorial columns addressed the periodical’s audience, constructing a virtual community that was sometimes made real by printing letters from readers. Periodicals also often included time-sensitive material, such as competitions with deadlines or advertisements for upcoming publications or events. Thus as James Mussell suggests, “the repetitive appearance of nineteenth-century serials such as periodicals segmented time, providing a set of rhythms that helped structure everyday life.”[2] The form and format of the periodical encouraged the reader to consider their own relationship to the dates stamped on its pages and to the events and moments chronicled therein.
This session’s papers place this focus on temporality in the wider context of nineteenth-century historical conceptualization: how periodicals examined the relationship of the Victorian present to Britain’s past and future through complex and sometimes ambivalent modes of celebration and commemoration.
Anne Stapleton examines the press coverage of the Waverley Costume Ball held in July 1871 to commemorate the centenary of Sir Walter Scott’s birth. This fancy-dress ball celebrated Scott’s legacy by encouraging its aristocratic attendees to dress in costume as characters from his novels, including Rebecca from Ivanhoe, Cleveland from The Pirate, and Jeannie Deans from The Heart of Mid-Lothian. Stapleton analyzes how The Illustrated London News blurred the boundaries between real and fictional individuals and suggested a disruptive collapse of social ranks, literary forms, and ideological positions. By inviting readers to both vicariously participate in such celebrations and to critique their excesses, the periodical made literary history relevant to the later Victorian period by focusing on the Royal family’s heritage and uncertain future.
Celebration as critical political practice lies at the heart of Denae Dyck’s paper, which examines the editorial practices of the Women’s Penny Paper in 1888-89, under the editorship of Henrietta Müller. The weekly’s “Wise and Witty Sayings” column featured quotations from women writers from a range of nationalities, time periods, cultural identities, and political positions. Dyck argues that these sayings use clever juxtapositions and ironic inversions to challenge patriarchal traditions, while the placement of the column within the pages of the paper, juxtaposed with suffragette news, columns on rational dress, and letters to the editor, deliberately suggested a continuity between women of the past and those in the present day, including the paper’s readership. Here, women invested in political, educational, and religious reform crafted a political genealogy to celebrate past successes and future aspirations.
Leslee Thorne-Murphy examines the newspaper coverage of an April 1891 charity bazaar in Kensington sponsored by the Rational Dress Society. At the “Coming Dress” bazaar, all the stalls featured controversial new clothing styles for women, including the divided skirt, muddy-weather dress, Syrian- and Japanese-inspired dual skirt, walking dress, mountaineering dress, and the “Eilitto” short skirt. As Thorne-Murphy points out, not only did the press coverage pun on the bazaar’s name by debating the future of (un)becoming dress, but it also referenced another bazaar, titled “The Coming Race” held in March 1891 in the Royal Albert Hall. This Victorian cosplay event celebrated the Vril-ya civilization from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 dystopian novel The Coming Race, encouraging attendees to wear costumes from the novel and connecting the alternative medicine treatments on display at the bazaar to its futuristic world. Thorne-Murphy examines how celebratory and critical press coverage of these events reveals deeper societal concerns about evolutionary race theory, gender and self-presentation, and the power of women to refashion themselves.
Together, these three papers examine a range of rhetorical, political, and social positions expressed within nineteenth-century periodicals, usefully complicating our understanding of how celebration and commemoration operated in Victorian media culture.
[1] Margaret Beetham, “Open and Closed: the Periodical as a Publishing Genre,” Victorian Periodicals Review 22.3 (Fall 1989): 96.
[2] James Mussell, “Repetition: Or, ‘In Our Last’,” Victorian Periodicals Review 48.3 (Fall 2015): 349.