I
From the beginning to the end of the Victorian period the fact that a
successful periodical must be financially profitable, must supply a demand,
was realized and accepted or deplored. In the eighteen-thirties Carlyle, then
a leading contributor to Fraser's Magazine (which he
variously
described as a "Dog's-meat Cart," a "Scavenger-cart," a "chaotic,
fermenting, dunghill heap of compost," and "one of the main
cloacas of Periodical Literature")[3] wrote hopefully to John Stuart
Mill: "A
question often suggests itself, Whether we shall never have our
own Periodical Pulpit, and exclude the Philistine
therefrom, above all, keep the Pew-opener (or Bibliopolist) in his place;
and so preach nothing but the sound word.[4] He was never to achieve such a
pulpit. In
1833 Richard Henry Horne, poet and journalist, published his
Exposition of the False Medium and Barriers Excluding Men of
Genius from
the Public, in which he made explicit the complaint implied by
Carlyle:
Nearly all the periodicals are strictly commercial in their origin and
foundation, which commonly influences, directly or indirectly, all the
writers which they engage. . . . Few of the very few who know and wish
to say what is right, can afford to do so; neither can they afford to be
silent. Hence the periodicals in general, while they seem to lead, only
follow public opinion, which is a far more profitable proceeding.
[5]
At mid-century and after, the success of two magazines edited by
their publishers (John Blackwood, who edited his firm's monthly from 1845
to 1879, and George Smith, actual editor of the Cornhill in
the
sixties)[6] led some observers to
believe that such a system was a practical solution to the problem. After his
unsuccessful venture as editor of St. Pauls Magazine Anthony
Trollope (whose knowledge of the economics of literature was extensive and
peculiar) admitted that he had occasionally been too soft to his contributors:
I think, upon the whole, that publishers themselves have been the best
editors of magazines. . . . The proprietor, at any rate, knows what he wants
and what he can afford, and is not so frequently tempted to fall into that
worst of literary quicksands, the publishing of matter not for the sake
of the readers, but for that of the writer. . . .
The object of the
proprietor is to produce a periodical that shall satisfy the
public.
[7]
And in a reminiscent tribute to John Blackwood, the Reverend A. K. H.
Boyd, a voluminous and popular contributor to mid-Victorian magazines,
expressed the same opinion:
I am quite sure that a publisher makes the best Editor. He is much
less likely than a man of letters to fill a periodical with unreadable papers
which echo his own crotchets. He is much more accurate. He is absolutely
without jealousy. He knows nothing but the success of his magazine or
review. Some editors are like certain unpopular clerics of my youth, who
would much rather have their churches empty than filled for them by some
better preacher.
[8]
Both these apologists for success assumed that the publisher's
criterion would naturally be commercial, and tacitly approved. Other
mid-Victorian observers made the same assumption, but deplored the
results. Writing in Bradlaugh's iconoclastic National
Reformer
on the controversy over Swinburne's Poems and Ballads,
James
Thomson let out a characteristic growl:
Periodicals—newspapers, magazines, reviews—are the
Fools'
Paradise of the commonplace, the mediocre, the orthodox, the respectable.
. . . A periodical to live must be a commercial success; the faintest thrill
of new ideas would affect its circulation by shocking off some of its regular
readers; it must suit its articles to the size of its customers—a very
little
hat for a very little head, a very little thought for a very little brain.
[9]
Thomson, whose militant atheism kept him out of respectable journals, may
have been expressing a personal pique. But a more cautious commentator,
"Matthew Browne" (William Brighty Rands), an indefatigable contributor
to the reviews, echoed his sentiments a few years later—in spite of
the
efforts of Morley in the
Fortnightly and Knowles in the
Nineteenth Century to maintain open forums for the
expression
of all shades of opinion:
Since the time when Jeffrey ruled the
Edinburgh, and
even since the death of Mr. Napier, 'the advertising element' and
commercial elements in general have played a great and new part, an
increasing part too, in the fortunes, and thus in regulating the quality and
tendency, of current literature. One result of this state of things is an
ever-inceasing tendency
to compromise in the expression of opinion. In spite of the spirit of
tolerance of which we hear so much, there was perhaps never a time in
which the expression of opinion was so much emasculated in the higher
periodical literature, or in which so much trickery of accommodated
phraseology was going forward. This will last for a long time yet—as
long as perodical literature is a matter of commercial speculation.
[10]
At the end of the century, when Newnes, Pearson, Harmsworth, and
their followers had pushed their mass-circulation periodicals to the
half-million mark and beyond, an ambitious and somewhat cold-eyed young
journalist then known as Enoch Arnold Bennett commented in the
Academy on the "revolution in journalism." (Bennett had
served
as sub-editor and then as editor of a weekly called Woman,
which bore on its cover the motto "Forward! But Not Too Fast"):
The old autocrats of
Maga and
Cornhill
may
be conceived as saying to their readers: 'This is good for you; in
consideration of a just payment we permit you to read it.' And when those
august periodicals were issued, the readers approached the perusal of them,
certainly with some pleasure, but also with the austere and braced feeling
of duty to be performed. The modern editor proceeds upon a different path.
He explores the nature of the demand as patiently and thoroughly as a
German manufacturer. With a mixture of logic and cynicism he states
boldly that what people ought to want is no affair of his, and in ascertaining
precisely what they in fact do want he never loses sight of the great
philosophical truth that man is a frail creature. He assiduously ministers to
human infirmities.
[11]
Here we are plainly approaching the realm of pre-tested consumer response,
if not of the engineering of consent.
A few examples may further enlighten some of the problems that had
to be faced by publishers, editors, and contributors. John Black-wood,
whose magazine was solidly successful in the middle years of the century,
once told a young journalist his formula:
I don't, he said, engage the regular literary man. He is apt to be too
maniéré. I look out for a man who, say a Dean, has gone
in for bee
culture for an article—never mind the writing, we will see to that,
so
long as it has facts. . . . So I get the freshness and knowledge which attract
and keep readers.
[12]
In 1869 John Murray (third of the honorable name) co-operated in the
establishment of the
Academy, a learned monthly to consist
of
signed articles by experts; its editor, C. E. C. B. Appleton, hoped to model
it on such scholarly German reviews as the
Literarisches
Centralblatt. Murray had doubts from the start: "No exclusively
learned periodical in this country has ever survived to become profitable,"
he told Appleton on seeing a specimen number. But he helped by his
prestige and connections to launch the journal, even contributing an
unpublished Byron letter from the family archives to the first
number—
a concession to sensational journalism which embarrassed the scholarly
Appleton. Murray was alarmed by the uncompromisingly learned tone of
the
Academy, especially, it seems, by the reproduction of
cuneiform and Syriac characters in some of the articles. His friend Mrs.
Grote suggested that it would be easy "to dilute it with a dash of
Athenaeum-like twaddle"; Appleton naturally refused; and after a few
months Murray bowed out, taking a considerable financial loss by the
surrender of his
copyright.
[13]
The Fortnightly Review exemplified another sort of
publisher-editor relationship. John Morley (editor, 1867-82) made it a vital
journal of "liberalism, free-thinking, and open inquiry," and recruited a
distinguished group of contributors, including Mill, Arnold, Huxley, and
Leslie Stephen. The publisher, Frederic Chapman of Chapman and Hall,
Morley recalled, was "a thorough Philistine, hating all our views"; and yet,
since the Fortnightly was making a profit, Chapman refused
to
sell it to Morley for three times what he had paid for it.[14] Later, during Frank Harris's
editorship,
Chapman apparently asserted himself and began to censor the contents of
the magazine, provoking Harris's rueful reminiscence:
I had to be taught that to edit a review in London is not to be a priest
in the Temple of the Spirit, but the shopman pander to a childish public
with a gigantic appetite for what is conventional and commonplace.
[15]
Consider also the difficulties of William Ernest Henley during his five-year
editorship of Cassell's
Magazine of Art. John Cassell, who
had
begun life as a temperance lecturer, had launched a number of highly
successful family magazines; it was a house rule that beer, wine, or spirits
could not be mentioned, nor represented pictorially, in a Cassell
publication. Henley as art critic submitted to this regulation. But his praise
of Corot, Whistler, and Rodin, his disparagement of moral and
literary criteria in the judgment of art, were too advanced for Cassell's
readers. Circulation dropped, and Henley resigned.
[16]
