Ouida and the Parergic 2

Ouida, of course, from when her first story appeared in Bentley’s (she was just 18), had had to write for money. She knew where the power and money lay, and “mythical swelldom” was one place. In 1857 George Lawrence’s Guy Livingstone had appeared. It went through at least 6 editions by the mid-60s (the image is of an 1867…More

Parergy and the Beginnings of the Mass Market in the 1840s

Two decades after the proofs of my first monograph were submitted for publication it seems an appropriate time now to revisit key concepts I invented to help explain the field of Victorian popular publishing. The book, a version of my PhD thesis, was a study of the first four decades of a Victorian penny weekly…More

Annotated edition of Ouida’s Two Little Wooden Shoes Chapter 1.1

Ouida TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES Chapman and Hall, 193 Piccadilly, 1874 CHAPTER I. Bebee sprang out of bed at daybreak. She was sixteen. It seemed a very wonderful thing to be as much as that — sixteen — a woman quite. A cock was crowing under her lattice — he said how old you are!…More

International History of Magazines 6: Australia and New Zealand

AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND The small populations of Australia and New Zealand in the nineteenth century meant that there were few market possibilities for magazines until the 1870s. There were certainly magazines before this, but most were shortlived and unsuccessful, notable exceptions being the Melbourne-based Australian Journal (1865-1962), a popular fiction weekly modelled on (and…More

International History of Magazines 5: Latin America

LATIN AMERICA “Latin American” (Iberoamericano) is here defined geographically to refer to those magazines published in South and Central America, Mexico and the West Indies. The diversity of the region and its histories is enormous, but, despite the risks of flattening the very varied historical and geographical terrain, the amount of material to cover is…More

International History of Magazines 4: China and Japan

JAPAN AND CHINA As one of the most literate countries in the world, Japan has a rich magazine history even if relatively short. That the newspaper and magazine are Western formats is well known, and yet as in other, mainly non-Anglophone, countries the distinction between the two is not always clear. Just two years after…More

International History of Magazines 3: Spain and Portugal

IBERIAN PENINSULA: SPAIN AND PORTUGAL There is no volume-length general history of Spanish of magazines beyond Sánchez Vigil (q.v.), most studies of the press focussing on newpapers. In the Spanish case, however, the instability between newspaper and magazine is especially notable: José Maria Carnereo’s Revista española (1831-1836), for instance, underwent not only several different changes…More

International History of Magazines 2: Italy

ITALY As in other European countries, magazine publication in Italy was begun in order to disseminate the ideas of elite groups, in the Italian case a process closely allied to the Catholic Church, at least initially. Unlike in France and Britain, there was no single capital city as, like Germany, Italy was divided up into…More