Victorian Literature – Page 2

Hollywood’s Grandmas Part 2

In 1855, Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger (NYL) started serialising “Fanny Fern” (Sara Payton Willis). He advertised that she was paid $100 per column so that readers could gauge the exact amount she got paid – and could value her writing accordingly. It was at this point that sales – and the profits – of the NYL rose to unprecedented heights. This sent a clear signal across the Atlantic that America, with whom a copyright agreement still did not exist, could now provide rich and proven fodder for the cheap periodical market. The result was that The Family Herald pirated Fanny Fern’s two serial novels from NYL in 1855-6 and other papers widely plagiarised and imitated her columns.

portrait of Southworth from Sarah J. Hale, ed. Woman’s Record (1853), p. 794; also 1855 ed. from http://www.librarycompany.org/ women/portraits/southworth.htm

The London Journal, The Family Herald’s main rival, didn’t want to publish the same thing at the same time and so researched the American mass market. It discovered a tale called The Lost Heiress that the Saturday Evening Post had just published. The London Journal started running it a month after Fanny Fern’s novel had begun in The Family Herald, having changed the title from The Lost Heiress to The True and False Heiress. It published the serial anonymously until its very last episode, when it revealed the author to be E.D.E.N. Southworth. The serial was apparently very successful.

Back in America, this was noticed by Robert Bonner who invited Southworth to write exclusively for the New York Ledger. She started her series of “exclusive” novels for him in 1857 and became one of the most widely read and reprinted authors of the entire nineteenth century. This in turn caused the Ledger’s sales to rise ever higher and The London Journal and other penny periodicals to print more of her stories.

As for why I’ve put 1883 as the terminus of my study you may think that’s curious when copyright plays such an important part in my narrative and the US started regulating international copyright in 1891. But two of the authors I’m focussing on were dead by then – and there are reasons why Southworth appeared in the British mass market periodical much less after 1868. When in 1883 The London Journal made the serious mistake of trying to serialise Zola and lost a large number of readers, they chose to rescue the situation by serialising a Harriet Lewis novel even though she had died 5 years previously. What the original of that novel is I haven’t been able to establish. But I can say that as far as I been able to discover, it hadn’t been published in Britain before and that her name was considered a remedy for the ills of declining circulation. It’s possible of course that she never wrote the London Journal serial: they might have only added her famous name to it. Be that as it may, what appear in Britain are only reprints of works by these three women. 1883 therefore marks a watershed insofar as works new to the market are concerned.

The above is all background to the question I really want to address in these three blog posts which is whether the literary property of these American women was “pirated” – stolen morally (if even if such action was legal) – by the British periodicals.

To answer the question is actually rather difficult, for it depends partly on the definition of the term “piracy” and partly on information that is lacking. There is little doubt that Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Fanny Fern’s writings were pirated in Britain in the same way that the French novels of Sue and Dumas had been in the 1840s. But the cases of the writers I’m talking of present complications.

While I only want to talk of the three novelists in The London Journal I’ve mentioned, May Agnes Fleming, EDEN Southworth and Harriet Lewis, they will provide varied examples of how American women writers were not simply melodramatic victims of wicked men in Europe. Rather I’ve found that, unlike Isabel Archer in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady they could actually benefit from and actively manipulate the system of transatlantic cultural exchange.

image from http://content.lib.sfu.ca/cdm/ singleitem/collection/ ceww/id/385/rec/18

First then, May Agnes Fleming. Her first two novels in The London Journal were pirated in a quite straightforward sense, yet this surprisingly worked to her advantage. In 1868, Fleming had signed an exclusive contract with the Philadelphia fiction weekly Saturday Night. The following year The London Journal took from it a novel originally called The Heiress of Glengower, renaming it The Sister’s Crime and publishing it anonymously. Several papers in America pirated it in return, unaware that it was already copyright in America. It was so popular that when it was legally stopped in the American papers, a “bidding war” for the author resulted. The outcome was victory for Fleming: she accepted the offer of the New York Weekly which immediately tripled her income, later signed a contract that gave her 15% royalties on the sales of her novels in volume format, and, from 1872, made an arrangement to send The London Journal advance sheets for £12 per instalment. Altogether, this gave her $10,000 a year. She didn’t do too badly out that initial piracy.

E.D.E.N. Southworth’s relation with The London Journal was even more complicated. Her first three novels in the magazine were pretty certainly pirated and, like Mrs Stowe before her, she came to England to stop this – for residence in Britain gave copyright protection. However, in the year Southworth came, 1859, although she was under exclusive contract to Robert Bonner, she must have arranged to give advance sheets of her most famous novel, The Hidden Hand, to the former owner of The London Journal, George Stiff, as it appeared in another magazine of his, The Guide, only a week after it came out in the New York Ledger. When Stiff rebought The London Journal he continued his relationship with her. The next year, 1860, The London Journal would publish two more novels by Southworth again only a week after their New York appearance. Hypocritically, in an open letter to readers of the Ledger (10 March 1860) Southworth had just complained about being plagiarised in Britain . In 1861, a novel of hers even appeared in London before it came out in New York (Eudora).

Sailing ever closer to the wind, she wrote Captain Rock’s Pet especially for The London Journal. After this, none of her novels appear in it for two years. Stiff had again sold The London Journal and instead, some of her novels appear in his new magazine, the London Reader anonymously. The next Southworth novel in The London Journal, Sylvia (1864), was probably pirated, as it is a version of Hickory Hall, a serial that had appeared in the National Era in 1850. But such is impossible in the case of her next three novels in The London Journal, Left Alone, The Manhater and The Malediction. These again all appear either a week before or a week after they are printed in the Ledger. Southworth’s last novel in The London Journal, The Double Life (1869), is a version of another National Era serial from twenty years previously, which may again suggest piracy. Perhaps Bonner prevented her from sending more advance sheets. Southworth wrote a particularly strong declaration of loyalty to him dated 12 January 1869, which may be read as finally accepting that she really was under exclusive contract to him. Perhaps it is because of this that The London Journal turned to another and younger New York Ledger staple, also under supposedly exclusive contract to Robert Bonner, Harriet Lewis.

Hollywood’s Grandmas Part 1

An enormous amount of work has been done on the global circulation of culture via electric and electronic media, but it’s becoming realised more and more that there was a set of narratives and imagery shared globally in the nineteenth century too. What I want to do over the next few blog posts is to mark the commercial importance of serial novels by American women writers to a specific but huge sector of British mass-market fiction between 1855 and 1883.

from The London Reader 1899; my thanks to John Adcock's splendid blog for this image

Key to the idea of “commercial importance” is whether the stories these women wrote were pirated or paid for by the British publishing industry. As we know from Dickens, the issue of transatlantic piracy was very important to writers. American publishers waiting at the dockside for new British books could produce an edition almost within hours, as they did in 1823 with Sir Walter Scott’s Peveril of the Peak. In the absence of international copyright agreements, the British author usually received nothing, although Harper Brothers, for instance, paid considerable royalties to Dickens and Macaulay, among others, and later on in the century Lippincott was generous to British authors he published, including Ouida. Accounts of British pirating of American serials commonly refer to how about 1.5 million copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were published in Britain without Harriet Beecher Stowe’s consent, but not much else. In fact there was a huge trans-Atlantic exchange.

I’m not going to write about well-known cases here. Furthermore, rather than talking of the piracy of books (quite expensive at the time) , I’ll focus on serials in cheap fiction magazines. Instead of the high-profit-per-unit-sold model which books operated on, penny periodicals made profit through the quantity sold. Most mid-nineteenth-century British mass-market fiction was published according to the latter model in penny weeklies such as The Family Herald, The London Journal, Reynolds’s Miscellany, The London Reader and so forth. America had its analogues in 4 cent weeklies such as the New York Ledger and the Philadelphia-based Saturday Evening Post. The circulation of all these magazines was enormous, with sales in the 1850s and 60s of 500,000 each (Dickens at his most popular, remember, managed 40,000). Given the usual calculations that are used to calculate readership from sales, in 1860 just the three best-selling magazines amounted to a 50% penetration of the entire population of Britain. Given that then the literacy rate in Britain was around 60%, that means that c. 83% of the literate population of Britain was reading one of these three magazines. The analogous American magazines had comparable sales figures, though given the much higher literacy and population of American – some 31 million as opposed to 19 million in 1860 – their percentage penetration was actually rather lower, if still hugely significant.

Example of a typical cover page of The London Journal

If what I’m saying is not as well-known as it should be it’s because, despite a few academic studies (most recently of American women writers), there are no bibliographical guides or descriptions of any of these periodicals. Some are available through ProQuest’s Periodical Archives Online but one still needs a bibliographical map to find one’s way around. Unless one knows what to look for one cannot find it. Hence the importance of aids such as the Victorian Fiction Research Guides.

The points I am making come out specifically of my bibliographical mapping of primarily the British mass-market: what I found was that I also needed maps of the American and even Australian mass markets too. A focus on one does not give an adequate picture of how the market operated.

That said, in the British market there was a quite strict form of market segmentation along national lines. While some penny periodicals such as Bow Bells, Reynolds’s Miscellany and The Family Herald gave consumers mainly home-grown British fiction, there was another set that from 1855 offered stories written primarily by a mixture of American women and British men. This set comprises three closely related magazines: The London Journal, its offshoot The Guide, and its rival from 1862 The 7 Days Journal renamed in 1863 as The London Reader. These published a very large number of serials by three American women authors: E.D.E.N. Southworth, Harriet Lewis and May Agnes Fleming. The London Journal alone published 237 serials of various lengths – some in fact lasting only a few episodes. At least 50 of these serials, all of them long (and sometimes very long), were by 4 American women: 2 were by Caroline Lee Hentz in the mid 1850s, 13 by Southworth between 1855-1868, at least 22 serials by Harriet Lewis between 1868 and 1883, and at least 13 by May Agnes Fleming over the same period (I say at least as some are not attributed and others which are given signatures I haven’t been able to trace elsewhere).

While Southworth and Fleming have recently become visible again through the work of Nina Baym, Lorraine McMullen and others, it is Lewis in fact who has the largest number of novels published in this market sector as a whole, not just in The London Journal though she is most dominant there. Indeed, there is not a single number of The London Journal without one of her serials for 12 years from 1868, a succession of tales halted only by her death. When I discovered from perusal of her letters that she wrote a large number of serials that appeared under husband’s name Leon and his pseudonym “Illion Costellano”, her market share rose even higher.

The Uncle Tom mania in Britain over 1851-2 is well known and Louis James has pointed out the importance of American fiction in the 1830s British mass market. Susan Warner’s Wide Wide World (December 1850) and later Queechy (1852) had considerable sales on both sides of the Atlantic. Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter created a sensation in 1854 with sales of 40,000 in its first 8 weeks and 70,000 in its first year. But it’s 1855 that is the key date for the beginning of a sustained massive import of American women writers into the British mass-market periodical. That year Margaret Oliphant realised the potency of American fiction in the “sensation” market and the Saturday Review commented on the popularity of American women writers early the following year.

There are several reasons for stressing 1855.

First, there had been recent changes in the law of copyright in Britain. In the 1840s, France had been seen as leading the way in mass-market periodical fiction, and British publishers mercilessly pirated French serials. The economics of mass-market publishing in Britain meant that there was no money to pay authors much: publishing translations of French works already known to sell well was a much safer speculation than publishing work that was untried in the market. But in 1852, there was a change in the copyright agreement with France. Now no longer could publishers in Britain simply take and translate a French work without paying the author. Fortunately, this was also the period when home-grown British writers such as J.F. Smith, Percy B. St John and Pierce Egan the Younger were selling so well there was enough profit on sales to pay them quite well, but of course it was still more profitable to publish works you didn’t have to pay for – and that would also sell well. The problem was now where to find them.

The Summer of 1871: Ouida and Wiertz

continued from previous blogs on Ouida and Mario and Ouida and Bulwer Lytton

When Ouida stopped in Brussels her encounter with the paintings of the recently deceased Antoine Wiertz provoked her into an explicit and public aesthetic statement. In a previously overlooked article in the shilling monthly London Society, Ouida offers a portrait of Wiertz as ‘the ideal artist … [whose] life was consecrated to one passion, and that passion—Art.’

The major concern for Ouida in this essay is conventionally Ruskinian – an interesting departure from her satirical view of Ruskin and Ruskinianism in her early two-part short tale “Beatrice Boville” . Her target is the deleterious effect on art of industrialisation and commercialisation. Only the artist who gives in to them will gain public acclaim she says. But public acclaim is by no means the most important criterion of value. Wiertz remains unknown and created no school, says Ouida, because, believing that ‘gold was the murderer of art,’ and ‘a cancer in the breast of humanity’ (‘un cancer [sic] au sein de l’humanité’), he refused to enter the commercial and industrial marketplace. ‘Exalted on the heights of a superhuman purity of purpose and idealism of belief, he had no common bond of connection with the sheer materialism and venal practices of the modern world.’ Wiertz was an anachronistic figure, having more in common, Ouida continues, with the artisanal aims and practices of Italian renaissance artists and of Rubens than with an era in which ‘the colours are bought ready-mixed, the oils are indifferent, the varnishes are adulterated…’ Out of time and out of place, his whole life was a martyrdom. Indeed, Ouida ends her essay with what appears to be a facile comparison of Wiertz to the type of all martyrs, Christ.

They say that when he lay there, lifeless, the peace refused to him throughout his arduous years came on him at the last; and that when the summer sunrise streamed through the ivy shadows of his casement in the glory of the morning, his face was as the face of his Christ ‑ his Christ, who brake asunder the bonds of the grave and rose triumphant in the power of God.

Is Ouida simply promoting in commercially commonplace terms an artist who refused to do so himself – in other words treating Wiertz as the very object of commerce that he refused to become in life? She is doing that, of course. She presumably is getting paid for this article (unlike for her letter to the Morning Post I mentioned in a previous blog) but she is also imagining a Wiertz that has created himself in the image of his own art.

In Ouida’s vision he has managed to overcome after death the alienation from his labour that he had increasingly felt in the last part of his life: in death he returned to become what Ouida regarded as one of his own best art works, the earlier Triomphe de Christ. To show that, Ouida has drawn for us a word picture of his head that Wiertz himself, the artist of horrible decapitations, might have painted had he stuck to his original principles.

Throughout the second half of her article, Ouida criticises late Wiertz for too great an emphasis on the horrible. Instead, she says, Wiertz should have concentrated on the ‘intrinsically beautiful by proportion, by colouring, and by meaning’ as he had done in his earlier works. It is as if her conclusion were restoring to Wiertz the self Ouida felt he should have been. In some senses too, Ouida’s most famous short story, ‘A Dog of Flanders’ which dates from this time, is also a gift to Wiertz of his lost identity: the underdog hero Nello, like Wiertz, came from a very poor background, was self-taught and, when he came to Antwerp, was ‘entranced and subjugated’ by the Rubens altarpieces in Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal in Antwerp. In this sense “The Dog of Flanders”, like the article, is an analogue of the ivory cigarette case she threw to Mario. She is trying to interpret and give meaning to powerful feelings that art has aroused.

Ouida is conjuring from the dead an anti-sensationalist, anti-commercial aesthetic of the romantic period, where the pen or brush mediates a sincere relation between body and text, and the individual imagination is given priority and autonomy. Of course in these “restitutions” she’s thinking about herself and the purpose of her own art. Why write about passion? From the early short stories she had excoriated the use of other people to satisfy one’s own ends and feelings – a conventional enough condemnation of selfish passion. Real love always means accepting the other for what they are and if necessary standing and holding back. Hitherto, even in the novel about the revolutionary heroine Idalia, the personal had triumphed over the political.

Yet the three encounters I have outlined in these three posts – with Mario, with Bulwer-Lytton and with Wiertz – combined with our knowledge of what comes next – the political and aesthetic celebration of a unified Italy in her next novel– suggest that Ouida was turning towards and looking backwards to a political, communitarian romanticism as an alternative to a purely commercial art, seeking to give it the gift of life that the Judas kiss of selfish commercialism had betrayed. Was this one the elements in that complex of factors that guided Ouida towards Italy in 1871?

Oscar Wilde certainly recognised Ouida’s romantic lineage in a review of her novel Guilderoy in 1889:

Ouida is the last of the romantics. She belongs to the school of Bulwer Lytton and George Sand, though she may lack the learning of the one and the sincerity of the other. She tries to make passion, imagination, and poetry part of fiction. She still believes in heroes and in heroines. She is florid and fervent and fanciful. Yet even she, the high priestess of the impossible, is affected by her age….

His attribution to Ouida of affiliation to Sand and Bulwer is certainly correct. Jane Jordan (“The English George Sand? Ouida the French Novel and Late Victorian Literary Censorship”, Anglistica Pisana VI/i (2009): 107-16) has discussed the former, as have I, and the three encounters I have described suggest the latter and more.

But is there also a fourth encounter in 1871, one with a ghostly revenant that has left only indirect and indistinct traces? All I dare remark for now is that William Rossetti’s edition of the Complete Poetical Works of Shelley had come out with Moxon in 1870 – followed famously by Mathilde Blind’s corrections in the Westminster Review – and that 20 years later Ouida was to publish a long article praising Shelley as the best romantic poet because, according to her, he had “the sentiment and passion of [Italy’s] natural beauty” — and because love underlay his vehement political engagement, just as she was to portray the hero and heroine’s in her next novel, the lyric prose poem in praise of Italy, Pascarel. Did Ouida encounter Shelley too in the Summer of 1871, and was this yet another coal in the steam engine that transported her south? Just as with her enthusiasm for Mario, Ouida would not have been alone in responding to Shelley’s paeans to the visual and narrative pleasures of Italy such as Julian and Maddalo, a poem much praised by Rossetti in his preface, for

How beautiful is sunset, when the glow

Of Heaven descends upon a land like thee,

Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy!

The Summer of 1871: Ouida and Bulwer Lytton

(continuation of earlier post on Ouida and Mario in the Summer of 1871)

What “Art” was and its relation to her writing were very much on Ouida’s mind in mid-1871.

We know from surviving letters that in the early summer Ouida had become concerned with the discussions around a proposed Dogs Act which would give any summary court powers over the destruction of stray, dangerous and rabid dogs. Determined to block the passage of this Act, in early June, having already been told that he liked her work, Ouida contacted Edward Bulwer-Lytton to elicit his support. He wrote her a kindly response and thereupon she invited him to visit her at the Langham Hotel where she had lived with her mother since 1867. He came several times, much to her delight.

Edward Bulwer Lytton in a *Vanity Fair* caricature, 1870

Bulwer-Lytton was a key figure in the development of popular fiction. His help to Mary Braddon is well documented, and, though to a much more limited extent, he acted as Ouida’s mentor as well. After she had left London for her tour of the continent, he wrote Ouida a long but positive critique of her latest novel Folle Farine. His letter does not survive, but Ouida’s response to it does. She wrote it at the Hotel de York, Spa (Belgium), the hotel Baedeker and Bradshaw recommended for English visitors to this already faded (though still respectable) resort. Ouida’s letter is keen to associate her novel with ‘Art’ by attributing it aesthetic value through the conventional eighteenth-century criteria of ‘judgement’ and ‘sympathy’ (I always think of Elinor and Marianne in Austen’s 1811 Sense and Sensibility when I think of those). Ouida ends by justifying her exploration of painful emotion and unconventional sexual arrangements as ‘Art’ and the duty of the artist.

It would be terrible to me to think that I had wrought an injury to any Soul, but it always seems to me that the artist has one duty that he must place before all ‑‑ i.e. to seek earnestly for the truth with all his strength & as he beholds it so to endeavour to set it forth.

She was in November to write to Isabel Burton (wife of the explorer, diplomat, orientalist Richard) and, the following year, to the conservative politician, poet and literary patron Lord Houghton that Folle-Farine should indeed be considered primarily as ‘Art’. Whether this was a retrospective judgement supported by the favourable reviews that compared the Folle-Farine‘s ‘art’ to that of ‘our pre-Raphaelite painters’ or whether the novel had been written intentionally as an ‘Art’ (as opposed to commercial) novel remains unclear. Even though an artist figures very prominently as a heartless Lovelacean seducer in the novel, the nature of art is not substantially discussed in it compared to in Ouida’s novels of the 1870s. Likewise in her response to Bulwer, Ouida doesn’t set out an aesthetic credo beyond saying that in her view the artist should always try to represent the truth without causing “injury to any Soul” – an unambitious and generic programme. As mentioned in a previous blog, for Folle-Farine Ouida had managed to get £900 out of her publisher Chapman – considerably more than she had received for her earlier novels. Ouida certainly knew about the hard cash aspects of art, but her letters suggest that she was at this stage just wondering about what other symbolic systems art might be involved in.

There is another letter that needs to be mentioned here too, a previously unnoticed one from Ouida in the press. On 12 June 1871, the Morning Post published a letter to the Editor from her in response to an article supporting the Dogs Act that had appeared in the paper the previous week. Ouida wrote that while the Morning Post’s position was a very reasoned stance, she wished to add that ‘the emotional side of the subject is one which may be most fairly taken into consideration’ – for dogs are friends who can teach us ‘lessons of faith and fealty.’ Ouida must have been proud of this letter for she sent a cutting of it to Bulwer Lytton. The basis of the letter’s argumentation is the binary of “reason” and “emotion”. It is not too great a leap to match this both to the “judgement” and “sympathy” opposition in Ouida’s later letter to Bulwer and to the sentimental tradition of writing in general whereby the sharing of emotions is regarded as a way to form communities. The purpose of “Art” in this understanding is indeed to forge communities through “sympathy” – common feeling – with the “truth” arrived at through reason/ judgement. To forge a community is necessarily a political act which involves ethics. Ouida is trying to forge a community around an ethical cause and thereby cause political change.

It is not I think too far to claim that we see in this brief letter to the Post Ouida publishing for the first time with a purpose beyond the commercial, and also beyond the economic interests of herself and her family. She may not have found a reason for her ‘Art’ yet, but she has found, on a miniature scale, a reason for writing: to change society for what she believed was the better by appeal to common emotions without thought of payment. A week before the collective ecstasy of Mario’s last performance, Ouida’s explicit political and economic engagement had begun.

An encounter in Brussels would very soon sharpen the edge of her desire for something in her aesthetic and economic life beyond hard cash.

(concluded here)

A Scandal in Bohemia

Summary of Class Conclusions (I’ll write up a discursive version as soon as possible – I’m only putting this up temporarily to help you compare Conan Doyle’s original “A Scandal in Bohemia” with A Scandal in Belgravia (BBC1, 2011).

Space

•Irene has own space – own house (very different from earlier women) Bryony Lodge, Serpentine Avenue – Garden of Eden – Eve? Serpent? •She manipulates space outside – New Woman – identity not just tied to home •She hides in public space (she inverts the secret spaces) •Fluid – more equal •Sherlock Holmes city not zoned so rigorously as Mysteries of London •Sherlock’s area – the homosocial masculine space of 221B information sharing – he can invade her space but not she his (she can only get to outside the door) •The gendering of space

Gender

•Is Irene’s femininity viewed differently than if SH himself had narrated it (SH has low opinion of women’s wit- until end)? •Watson’s masculine narrative control •Professional masculinity v aristocratic –Intellectual and goal oriented v. wealth and objectification of the world –Irene chooses professional •Irene likes freedom of dressing as a man •The Woman = her name? What Sherlock believes a woman should be, the only one worth mentioning • The Woman V . women (contradiction)

Economics

•Opposite of Sweeney Todd –Money is only a means to achieving satisfaction – •Sherlock wants to be paid the picture not money •The price of information is desire [what does this mean? It’s a wonderfully ambiguous phrase!] •Economics also = control of circ of info •Reputation as information •Value depends on satisfaction not the labour that goes into it

Hope – the real Mystery of London?

One thing about G.W.M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London that is impossible to question is that much of it is very visceral.

Doesn’t the unflinching detail of the murder of Polly by Bill while their children look on generate a physical reaction in the reader? It’s rapid but not glossed over so that Reynolds makes us see it in front of us. I am always nauseated while reading it, and afterwards when thinking of it. It makes me angry.

Reynolds is using the technology of print to transport us to places, to make us witness to scenes, that our bodies might otherwise never experience. But it’s not a distant understanding – it’s not the experience of the city that the London Eye gives us. In such moments, technology does not mediate and distance us from the world, but wounds us, hurts us – but in thoughtful ways that are very different from the wounds that, were we to witness these scenes in real life, would so traumatise us that we couldn’t think. Reynolds harnesses the technology of print to make us viscerally present and analytically distant at the same time.

He uses the technology to transport us not only to the past but to another part of the city we couldn’t otherwise visit and be safe, and to other states of thinking and feeling.

How does this tie in with what we discussed today?

You heard about the technology and economics of the mass-circulation text, an example of which Reynolds’s Mysteries of London most certainly was. You heard how London was the most obvious place to produce and distribute such a text, but also how London can’t be seen as an entity complete in itself: you heard a lot about Paris too, and how Reynolds was inspired by his life in Paris and by his knowledge of French literature, especially of Eugene Sue’s phenomenally popular feuilleton, the Mystères de Paris. You also heard about other mysteries of other cities – New York, St Louis and others around the world. The Mysteries of London is just one of many city mystery texts. The French Mystères feeds into it and it in turn communicates with others, just as Victorian London was a city that existed not simply in itself but communicated with the world. London is the city of circulation, of coming and going, of paths, of adventures, of constant transformation, of multiple plots and multiple plottings, where identities as well as texts migrate and change. Movement, transport is the process that defines this London.

You also heard about Reynolds’s involvement in politics. I particularly mentioned Chartism and I stressed the politics of Chartism’s interest in representation both in terms of representation in government and in terms of representation of reality.

The questions you asked were as follows:

•What is the reason for the prologue? •What is the reason for cross dressing? •What happened to Eugene? •Why focus on Wealth / Poverty? •What is the origin of the writing style? •What happens to Richard? •How does this text represent London? •How does the text end?

I added queries about gender, economics and space, and we combined the questions to form 6 topics, one for me to answer (what happened to the characters) and 5 that you discussed: the prologue, gender, economics, style, space. The answers to all these cumulatively will answer more specifically your question about “How does this text represent London”.

The prologue you said set up binaries in order to question them, perhaps deconstruct them, to show that Wealth / Poverty were not absolutes but rather a question of circulation. This notion is set up right away: the opening sentences narrate how “Civilisation” moved East to West – and so may well move on in the future, perhaps again further west to the US.

Gender, we agreed, was a vexed category in The Mysteries of London. It opens with a cross-dressing heroine who isn’t condemned for her transgression. She gets into trouble not for her cross dressing but just because she happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Eliza theatrically feels the rain in the slums near Smithfield Market

Gender is straight away shown as socially performative: Eliza is performing the part of Walter in public while her sex remains, in private for her, never in doubt. It’s the city that enables such gender masquerade (and, indeed, masquerade in general). On a less liberating note, poverty in the city seems to brutalise and unsex mothers – as we see in the case of Polly who intends to put the eyes out of her daughter with beetles. You had bigger problems in defining how the text defines masculinities – even though there are more men than women in the extract we read! But doesn’t the same apply to men as to women? Don’t we see men masquerading? Think of how the City Man Montague (= Eugene) takes advantage of the anonymity and constant circulation of the city to adopt an identity that is not his, to make money – and an identity – out of air.

In terms of style, you noted the redundancy of the style, the padding. I’ve heard this before and your examples were very good but I’m not entirely convinced by how it’s the defining characteristic of the style: after all, the plots are swift moving and very ingeniously interlaced (even in the extracts you read, you saw Montague as Eugene, the wife-murdering Bill as one of the men who threw Eliza into the Fleet in chapter 1). One of the most important experts on Reynolds, Anne Humpherys, reminds us that aspiring writers in the nineteenth century were advised to characterise like Dickens and plot like Reynolds (listen to the interesting BBC radio documentary on Reynolds here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/r3docs). You also stressed the intense realism of the style. It’s here that I want to return to the murder of Polly by Bill. Isn’t the realism and the detail supposed to move us – to shift our mental and emotional positions? Its investigative realism of the kind that it was possible to read in the newspapers at the time is a very specific kind of representation of reality. It seeks to encompass all – from the luxurious boudoir in upper Clapton to the hell of Upper Union Court, from the polite language of the middle classes to the slang of the criminal underclasses. It seeks to represent all – just as the Chartists wanted everyone (well, all men) to be represented in Parliament. The style is in this sense democratic.

Space, we agreed, was heavily zoned into safe and unsafe areas. This applies as much to the bijou villa in Upper Clapton – the private boudoir where men don’t go (unless they are helped by the technologies of Reynolds’s writing and the illustrator’s burin) v. the public parlour where guests are received – as to the city at large. Eliza’s big mistake is to get lost and wander into areas she shouldn’t have been. She needed the technology of a map, just as Richard needed a moral compass – such as Reynolds’s own text is providing – to help him avoid the wiles of Mr Chichester and (a chapter we didn’t read) of Mrs Arlington’s “Salon”. Without technology, they are lost. You also pointed out the key difference between the suburbs and the centre of the city: the safety and health and space of the suburbs where the Markhams and Eliza have their dwellings v. the crowded centre where, even if as in the Park, the environment seems safe and attractive and natural, moral corruption lies in wait just as bodies are threatened by disease and violence in the slums nearby.

The question of economics I thought was the hardest question of all. What economics is Reynolds promoting? The answer was very well explained: free circulation of information and money. In other words, Reynolds promotes free trade, though not a dishonest form of it where trickery and deception are employed to ensure the greatest profit for a few. No: he’s in favour of clear representation of what is put into circulation and how it is put into circulation. That ties up – perhaps bizarrely – to the emphasis on the representation of the underworld, including the sewer which was the Fleet at this time. Let’s think of this in relation to Eliza and her alter-ego Walter. At the end of chapter 3 s/he does the morally correct thing: as “an unknown friend” s/he alerts the potential victim to the plot to rob him. In other words, she puts information into circulation. But before that, she herself has been thrown into circulation first by the storm into the narrative, and then by Dick and Bill who throw her into the Fleet Ditch – the sewer which leads out of the city into the Thames and death. In other words, they try to stop her circulating in the city. S/he saves herself, however, and immediately – before the end of the chapter – starts circulating again. Now isn’t this what wicked greed is in the Reynolds — the stopping of circulation, the arrest of flow and its transformation into accumulation? The idea is based on the Romantic priority of nature over culture, of the countryside over the city. Economics in London should be like the natural flow of pure water; instead, the reality is a filthy sewer polluted and blocked by City Men, swindlers, gamblers and other criminals.

What has this to do with London? Couldn’t this apply to any city? Yes, of course. That’s why, to cite the title of an excellent book edited by Celina Fox in 1992, “London” is a “World City.” Reynolds’s London stands for all corruption, all pollution, all crime. And its realistic and democratic representation may itself represent for us the hope of a different, better future.

The Mysteries of London

Don’t we always think of London as mysterious?

Who understands it? Who grasps it? Who sees it?

Isn’t the archetypal vision of London one obscured by a fog that prevents us from seeing clearly? It’s the Victorian London of Sherlock Holmes and other period dramas where buildings are misty and human bodies are obscured by the capacious swaddlings of coats and mufflers, bustles and crinolines, cloaks – and daggers.

Yet we insistently ask the London Eye – and soon the Shard – to give us a clearer picture. For didn’t the Eye immediately become one of London’s most visited attractions? In its first 8 years, it received 30 million visitors – the equivalent of half the population of the UK. Unable to make sense of the city on the ground, we want to rise above it to see the patterns the streets make, perhaps, or to bring back and share memories – “Oh, look! We went there last week!” – so we can integrate the city into our own life stories, or to stare at the hills beyond the city and so contextualise it in the landscape. In all cases we want to make London somehow manageable. But then the wheel descends and we emerge again into the hurly-burly of the street and riverside. Again we are plunged into a chaos of sense impressions that often seem to make no sense to us.

It seems we like technology to help us understand the city. Perhaps we need it. Perhaps we cannot comprehend the city with our bodies alone; we need technological prostheses.

Perhaps only cyborgs can grasp the city.

That’s not to say we can’t understand the city through our bodies — just not the city as an entity, as a whole, as a city. Of course we can understand some human interactions in the city; we can feel the unevenness of the pavement under our feet and with our hands the stone of the cattle trough in Clerkenwell Green, the gravestones in St James’s Church, the metal railings of Smithfield; we can smell the dampness of the Thames, the traffic pollution of Piccadilly, the roses of domestic and public gardens; we can see and admire the triumph of reason and engineering in the cupolas of the Royal Naval College and St Paul’s, and observe how the imposition of classical balance and authoritative order of the Bank of England is undercut by the visual chaos around it – an impotent and frosty father whose children are out of control.

But these are only parts of the whole. We know we cannot generalise from these parts. Unlike in the ideal cities of the renaissance, or the feng-shui’d cities of China and Japan, or Roman new cities like Londinium, with their planned straight streets and systematised reasons why palaces are here, temples there and workshops elsewhere, we cannot predict what is going to come next in London. Metonymy – taking the part for the whole – may work well as a predictive tool in rationally planned cities (if we meet X, then we know Y and Z will follow) but it doesn’t work in cities like London . It’s too layered, too determined by palimpsests, too mired in history. If we meet X, K or M or L may follow — or even something outside the system altogether (e.g. のぞみ – “nozomi” – Japanese for “wish” or “hope”) .

Parts of the city cannot be taken as predictive metonyms, but as metaphors, standing for something else. The classical facade stands for controlling reason, the irregular space before it and the pigeons for unpredictability and fighting chance. The parts of London our bodies encounter need interpretation.

But who decides what that interpretation is? Can we give any meaning to any part? Who decides that “the classical facade stands for controlling reason”? What authority do they have to claim that? What methods did they use to make that interpretation? What methods can we use to determine the meaning of the parts of London we encounter? Can we really interpret the part of the city we experience with our bodies without technology, with our bodies and minds alone? Does the city tell us that our bodies are not enough, that we need other people and the props of technology to help us come to terms with it, arrive at a way to describe it, give it a terminology, understand it?

Surely this question and its implications comprise the fundamental Mystery of London.