IV
Finally, publishers and editors were concerned to protect their readers
from moral shock.[50a] Observers
at mid-century and later commented frequently on the improvement in the
moral tone of the press, looking back to such scurrilous and indecent
journals of the twenties and thirties as Theodore Hook's John
Bull, Charles Molloy Westmacott's Age, Barnard
Gregory's Satirist, and Renton Nicholson's
Town.[51] One cause was
the wide circulation of "improving" journals
aimed at the lower-middle and upper-working-class reader. In 1836 a
witness before the Select Committee on Arts and Principles of Design
described how his firm, with their steam printing machines, produced the
Penny Magazine (published by Charles Knight and sponsored
by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge), the
Saturday
Magazine (published by Parker for the Society for the Promotion of
Christian Knowledge), and
Chambers's Journal. "And every
Saturday," he said, "I have the satisfaction of reflecting that 360,000 of
these useful publications are issued to the public, diffusing science and taste
and good feeling, without one sentence of an immoral tendency in the
whole."
[52] Another cause—and
symptom—was the success of
Punch: Bradbury and
Evans,
publisher, and Mark Lemon, editor, took pride in the fact that
"
Punch has blotted out the
Age and the
Satirist, and other vile publications
which, before
Punch existed, were the only amusing journals
of the day."
[53] Thackeray in 1854
commented characteristically on the change. Humor, he said, is a satyr:
But we have washed, combed, and taught the rogue good manners.
. . . Frolicsome always, he has become gentle and harmless, smitten into
shame by the pure presence of our women and the sweet confiding smiles
of our children.
[54]
By the end of the century W. T. Stead could remark approvingly, in a
review of the republication of the first fifty years of
Punch:
The reader may examine every page of these twenty-five volumes
without finding a single specimen of the indecent cartoon, or the more or
less questionable innuendo. . . . You might read
Punch from
beginning to end without ever being reminded of the existence of the
demi-monde.
[55]
And a commentator in the
Quarterly noted that this moral
tone
was financially profitable. "If the literary level of the weekly press be low,"
he wrote, "its morals are irreproachable. Fortunately it has been found that
immorality and indecency do not pay. . . . A print such as the
Vie Parisienne, the
Gil Blas, or the
Petit
Journal pour Rire would not live for a month in London."
[56]
One important function of periodicals is of course reviewing and
literary criticism, current or retrospective; here the caution of publishers
and editors, and the alleged sensitiveness of readers, operated significantly
to limit free expression. An essay by William Hale White on "The Morality
of Byron's Corsair," for example, was rejected by Strahan for the
Contemporary as "a defense of immorality."[57] When Swinburne in the early
sixties
attempted to hoax Richard Hutton of the Spectator with a
review
of an imaginary Baudelairean French poet (Les Abîmes,
by
Ernest Clouet), Hutton was understandably hesitant. "Les Abîmes are
in type," he wrote Swinburne, "but I cannot say I think they will appear.
The subject seems to me to deserve no more criticism than a Holywell
Street publication, nor could I speak of it in the Spectator
without more real disgust than your article inspires. There is a tone of
raillery about it
which I think one should hardly use to pure obscenity."[58] After his experience with the
reviews of
Poems and Ballads in 1866, Swinburne replied with a blast
at
the prudery of the journals:
The disease, of course, afflicts the meanest members of the body with
most virulence. Nowhere is cant at once so foul-mouthed and so tight-laced
as in the penny, twopenny, threepenny, or sixpenny press. . . . The virtue
of our critical journals is a dowager of somewhat dubious antecedents;
every day that thins and shrivels her cheek thickens and hardens the paint
on it.
[59]
Since John Morley had referred to him in the
Saturday
Review
as "the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs," his indignation was perhaps
pardonable.
Admirers in England of Walt Whitman found it difficult to express
their critical admiration for him in reputable periodicals. Edward Dowden
had a laudatory article on Whitman turned down by the
Cornhill
and by Macmillan's; it was finally accepted by the
Contemporary, then (1869) edited by Dean Alford. Strahan
approved, and the article was set up (though Dowden admitted that he felt
Whitman out of place in such a clerical company as the
Contemporary would introduce him to). At the last minute
Alford objected: the article was too "dangerous," too "alarming," to appear.
It finally came out in the
Westminster. In Dowden's first contribution, it should be
noted,
on "French Aesthetics," Alford had asked him to change the word "nude"
("an indecent, or rather, a
nice word"); Dowden substituted
"unclothed."
[60]
Refusal to publish critical opinions if the subject-matter was
unacceptable seems to have been the rule rather than the exception. George
Moore was not allowed to publish in the Fortnightly a defense
of Henry Vizetelly, prosecuted for publishing translations of Zola in
England. H. W. Massingham, the distinguished editor of the Daily
Chronicle in the nineties, stated his intention of defending the
scientific value of Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion in his
paper. When the book was suppressed as obscene, however, the
Daily
Chronicle attacked it as morbid and scientifically worthless. "The
courts of law and the criticisms of the press," Massingham wrote, "are the
responsible organs of public opinion in such matters."[61]
It was in the censorship of creative writing—principally of
fiction— that the publishers and editors of Victorian magazines found
the
most pressing need to interfere with their contributors to avoid giving
offense to their readers. While serving as editor of Bentley's
Miscellany in 1837, Dickens wrote to an unnamed author of a paper
which had been delayed in publication:
Mr. Bentley considers it too broad, although it does not strike me as
so broad, as to render its insertion dangerous. The question
is,
whether you can so alter it, as to make the doubtful lady a mantua-maker
and give the interview more of a "courting" character.
[62]
In 1880 William Blackwood, who succeeded his uncle John as editor of the
family magazine, warned a contributor about a passage in a serial novel.
"Parsons," he said, "will tolerate any amount of looseness if you don't
point it against themselves, and in a novel of this kind we do not want to
provoke the Parsons."
[63] Ten years
later, in setting up his immensely successful
Weekly, Arthur
Pearson proclaimed as his motto "To Interest, to Elevate, to Amuse"; he
promised a supply of pure fiction as well as the "tit-bits" of curious
information which his master, George Newnes, had found so profitable; and
he assured his readers that "from title to imprint no word or suggestion will
ever appear that is capable of giving offense to the most fastidious."
[64]
The history of the Cornhill—conducted for forty
years
under what
Leslie Stephen called "the moral code proper to a popular magazine, the
first commandment of which is 'Thou shalt not shock a young lady'"
[65] furnishes perhaps the best
examples of
this phase of the problem. Mrs. Browning, contributing at Thackeray's
request, sent "Lord Walter's Wife" (1861) and Thackeray rejected it, with
apologies:
You see that our Magazine is written not only for men and women,
but for boys, girls, infants, sucklings almost, and one of the best wives,
mothers, women in the world, writes some verses, which I feel certain
would be objected to by many of our readers—Not that the writer is
not
pure, and the moral tone pure chaste and right—but there are things
my
squeamish public will not hear on Mondays though on Sundays they listen
to them without scruple. In your poem you know there is an account of
unlawful passion felt by a man for a woman—and though you write
pure
doctrine and real modesty and pure ethics, I am sure our readers would
make an outcry, and so I have not published this poem.
[66]
When Thackeray turned down Trollope's short story "Mrs. General
Talboys" on the ground that allusion is made in it to a man with illegitimate
children and to a woman not as pure as she should be, Trollope wrote
understandingly:
An impartial Editor must do his duty. Pure morals must be supplied.
And the owner of the responsible name must be the index of the purity. A
writer for a periodical makes himself subject to this judgement by
undertaking such work, and a man who allows himself to be irritated
because judgement goes against himself is an ass.
He defended himself none the less by reference to other novelists, including
Thackeray. "You speak of the squeamishness of 'our people,'" he added.
"Are you not magnanimous enough to feel that you write urbi et
orbi:—for the best and wisest of English readers; and not mainly for
the
weakest?"
[67] Leslie Stephen, editor
in the seventies, had to continue such censorship. His troubles with Thomas
Hardy will be discussed later; other contributors were also carefully
watched.
"The fear of Mrs. Grundy was ever before his eyes, and this rendered him
inexorable," W. E. Norris recalled.
[68]
And in the nineties when Reginald Smith, George Smith's son-in-law,
became editor, contributors complained of his propriety: he would not
permit such words as "stays" or "corsets" to appear in the magazine.
[69]
A number of Victorian writers, including Trollope, Charles Reade,
and Wilkie Collins, were made to undergo bowdlerization by magazine
editors.[70] The most striking example
of this was Thomas Hardy, who was plagued during his whole career as
novelist by problems of this sort. When two instalments of Far from
the Madding Crowd had appeared in the Cornhill,
Leslie
Stephen wrote urging that Fanny's seduction be treated in a gingerly
fashion. "I mean," he wrote, "that the thing must be stated, but that the
words must be careful." Complaints from readers had been received about
a passage of rustic humor already published. When the novel appeared in
book form, the Times singled out the very passage for
quotation
and commendation, and Hardy was triumphant. Stephen replied, "I spoke
as editor, not as man. You have no more consciousness of these things than
a child."[71] So in The Hand of
Ethelberta
Stephen asked Hardy to change "amorous" to "sentimental," and to
"Remember the country parson's daughters. I have always to
remember them!" After reading the opening chapters of The Return
of the Native, Stephen feared that the story would develop into
something dangerous for a family magazine, and Hardy wrote no more for
the Cornhill.[72] In
Belgravia, however, where the novel did appear, it had to be
substantially softened, especially as to the past actions and future intentions
of the tempestuous Eustacia.[73]
The Mayor of Casterbridge, A Group of Noble Dames, and
Tess all were subjected to similar censorship in the
Graphic, The Woodlanders in Macmillan's, and
Jude in Harper's (American and English
editions
simultaneously). Before sending Jude Hardy had promised
that
it would be "a tale that could not offend the most fastidious maiden"; but
the
first instalments brought protest from H. M. Alden, editor of
Harper's. He wrote, "My objections are based on a purism
(not
mine,
but our readers'), which is undoubtedly more rigid here than in England."
Hardy agreed to bowdlerize. He must have known, however, that British
standards were if anything stricter than American, for
A Group of
Noble Dames and parts of
Tess had appeared
uncensored
in Harper's
Weekly and
Bazar, purified in the
Graphic.
[74]
The changes Hardy made for magazine publication were partly
verbal: "lewd," "loose," and "bawdy" in Far from the Madding
Crowd, for example, appeared in the Cornhill as
"gross,"
"wicked," and "sinful."[75] More
substantial changes, such as the omission of the seduction scene in
Tess and the substitution of a mock marriage, were more
damaging to the structure and characterization of the novels.[76] Hardy restored and revised for
book
publication nearly all that the caution of editors had made him modify; but
marginal notes on his manuscripts ("deleted against author's wish, by
compulsion of Mrs. Grundy," for example) show how he felt. In an article
on "Candour in English Fiction," published in the New
Review
in 1890, he made his views explicit. Magazines and circulating libraries, as
media for "household reading," tend to exterminate by monopolizing all
literary space the novel "which reflects
and reveals life." Not only do they pre-empt the market, but they modify
the shape of the product:
The opening scenes of the would-be great story may, in a rash
moment, have been printed in some popular magazine before the remainder
is written; as it advances month by month the situations develop, and the
writer asks himself, what will his characters do next? What would probably
happen to them, given such beginnings? On his life and conscience, though
he had not foreseen the thing, only one event could possibly happen, and
that therefore he should narrate, as he calls himself a faithful artist. But,
though pointing a fine moral, it is just one of those issues which are not to
be mentioned in respectable magazines and select libraries. The dilemma
then confronts him, he must either whip and scourge those characters into
doing something contrary to their natures, to produce the spurious effect of
their being in harmony with social forms and ordinances, or, by leaving
them alone to act as they will, he must bring down the thunders of
respectability upon his head, not to say
ruin his editor, his publisher, and himself.
[77]
Hardy's conclusion was that as a vehicle for fiction dealing with human
feeling on a comprehensive scale the magazine was tottering to its fall, and
might as well assume openly the position it already covertly occupied, that
of a purveyor of tales for the youth of both sexes.
A reply appeared in Macmillan's in the following
month,
probably by Mowbray Morris, the editor who had warned Hardy about
The Woodlanders ("If you can contrive not to bring the fair
Miss Suke to too open shame, it would be as well. Let the human frailty be
construed mild").[78] It was no answer,
but an appeal to the past in defense of the status quo:
He must be a very remarkable novelist who does not think that form
of publication good enough for him which has satisfied Thackeray, Dickens,
Lytton, Lever, Whyte Melville, George Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell, Anthony
Trollope, the Kingsleys, Charles Reade, Wilkie Collins, Miss Braddon, Mr.
Blackmore, Mr. Besant, Mr. Meredith and Mr. Thomas Hardy! So we will
leave the editors and their magazines alone.
[79]
One recurrent theme may have been noted in this examination of the
problem. Editors and publishers, in warning and censoring contributors,
implied a double standard of judgment in protecting the reader. It was "my
squeamish public"; it was "a purism not mine but our readers'." "Forgive
this shred of concession to popular stupidity," Leslie Stephen wrote to
Hardy, "but I am a slave." I think there is no hypocrisy here. Editors and
publishers acted in this matter under a complex of influences: economic
pressures, literary conscience, social and political and religious influences
all played their part. It is doubtless just to say that the reading public got,
from publisher and editor, the kind of periodicals it deserved. But public
demand — the satisfaction of the reader, as Trollope called it
— was
considered a legitimate influence.
It was a part of the Victorian compromise — a serving of God
and
Mammon, of which Dickens, with his sensitivity to the circulation of
Household Words and All the Year Round, was
a
conspicuous example. But the compromise is potent today in the affairs of
the few gallant survivors ("quality" or "upper-middle-brow") from the great
age of periodicals. For, setting aside subsidized specialist journals and little
magazines, the publisher must keep his readers or perish. The result is
bound to be conservatism in ideas, opinions, and literary forms. The
successful editor, however, can adjust the conflicting demands of publisher
and contributor without either alienating his readers or (at the other
extreme) merely supplying what they are supposed to want. That he must
occasionally strain his literary and intellectual conscience in doing so, this
glimpse of some Victorian prototypes has demonstrated.
