Chapter 1

Journal of Victorian Culture, 2007

2017

Library History, 2008

For the Victorians, just as for us, information and knowledge were being used and manipulated in a complex series of ways to sell, to inform, and to represent a culturally fluid and dynamic information society. Based upon a detailed empirical study of every weekly issue of the British Penny Magazine and the Illustrated London News (ILN) for a period of twelve months between May 1842 and May 1843, this paper argues that there was a strong contemporary awareness of this dynamism. Both The Penny Magazine and the ILN embraced the idea of preserving knowledge by themselves becoming part of the process of preservation, in a conscious effort to become objects of reference and of the historical record. In contrast to the notion that such publications were largely ephemeral products of the Victorian publishing world, it is suggested in this paper that The Penny Magazine and the ILN contributed to, and reflected the desire to see, knowledge popularly preserved and referenced as well as popularly disseminated, and that they had a substantial and significant degree of success in their editorial efforts.

Victorian Periodicals Review, 2010

This book is the first full-length study of one of the most widely read publications of nineteenth-century Britain, the London Journal, over a period when mass-market reading in a modern sense was born. Treating the magazine as a case study, the book maps the Victorian mass-market periodical in general and provides both new bibliographical and theoretical knowledge of this area. Andrew King argues the necessity for an interdisciplinary vision that recognises that periodicals are commodities that occupy specific but constantly unstable places in a dynamic cultural field. He elaborates the sociological work of Pierre Bourdieu to suggest a model of cultural 'zones' where complex issues of power are negotiated through both conscious and unconscious strategies of legitimation and assumption by consumers and producers. He also critically engages with cultural theory as well as traditional scholarship in history, art history, and literature, combining a political economic approach to the commodity with an aesthetic appreciation of the commodity as fetish. Previous commentators have coded the mass market as somehow always 'feminine', and King offers a genealogy of how such a gender identity came about. Fundamentally, however, the author relies on new and extensive primary research to ground the changing ways in which the reading public became consumers of literary commodities on a scale never before seen. Finally, King recontextualizes within the Victorian mass market three key novels of the time - Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (serialised in the London Journal 1859-60), Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1863), and a previously unknown version of Émile Zola's The Ladies' Paradise (1883) - and in so doing he lends them radically new and unexpected meanings. Contents: Preface; Part 1 Periodical Discourse: Periodical questions; Periodical titles; or, 'The London Journal' as a signifier. Part 2 Periodical Production; 1845–9. Theoretical issues; or, genre, title, network, space; Cultural numerology; or, circulation, demographics, debits and credits; 1849–57. Moving from the miscellany; or, J.F. Smith and after; 1857–62. When is a periodical not itself? or, Mark Lemon and his successors; 1862–83. The secret of success; or, American women and British men; Part 3 Periodical Gender; or, the Metastases of the Reader: 1845–55. Gender and the implied reader; or, the re-gendering of news; 1863. Lady Audley's secret zone; or, is subversion subversive?; 1868–83. Dress, address and the vote; or, the gender of performance; 1883: The revenge of the reader; or, Zola out and in; Appendix; References; Index. About the Author: Dr Andrew King is a senior lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University College, UK. Reviews: '… King has taken on the task of correcting this historiographic imbalance by thoroughly excavating some of the more obscure purlieus of mid-nineteenth century Grub Street, and nearly every page of the book bears witness to the assiduity and ingenuity of his primary research... a detailed and illuminating contribution to the expanding list of books dealing with various aspects of Victorian print culture published as part of Ashgate’s impressive 'The Nineteenth Century' series.' SHARP News '... this remarkable study. Its comprehensiveness and interdisciplinarity are likely to make it attractive to scholars in such diverse fields as media history, library science, cultural studies, journalism, and literary studies. King makes a convincing case for the London Journal as a key text in the history of the mass media, and provides a variety of interpretative tools that scholars are likely to find useful as they continue to explore the vast field of Victorian journalism.' The Library 'Andrew King has succeeded in writing a well-informed and thought-provoking study that breaks new ground, particularly in the way it balances theoretical insights with more traditional periodical historiography.' Victorian Periodicals Review ‘Andrew King's detailed examination of the production and reception of the London Journal during the mid-nineteenth century offers an excellent model for analyses of literary periodicals…’ Script and Print

English Studies, 2016

Victorian culture was dominated by an ever-expanding world of print. A tremendous increase in the volume of books, newspapers and periodicals was matched by a corresponding development of the first mass reading public. This reference set provides a composite picture of this expansion. Its aim is to gather together material rare or otherwise available only in disparate sources so as to facilitate a new understanding of the ways print media operated. Hitherto it is the book that has dominated the study of the nineteenth century; recently, though, there has been increasing awareness of its interconnectedness with what has been regarded as more ephemeral forms, periodicals and magazines. But we expand this still further to include the production, distribution and consumption of advertisements in newspapers and the East End ‘Poetry of Seven Dials’ to illustrations in expensive annuals and the working conditions of journalists. We accordingly provide here a resource for students both of literature and of media history: indeed we see the two as conjoined.

American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World, 2013

"Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies After Elizabeth L. Eisenstein," ed. Sabrina Baron, Eric Lindquist, and Eleanor Shevlin (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 125-39.

American Literature in Transition, 1920-1930, ed. Ichiro Takayoshi, 2017

In an oral history interview given at the end of his life, Bennett Cerf of Random House presented himself as part of a closely-knit group of Jewish publishers who had changed the face of American publishing. Cerf had started his career in the 1920s, and he mentioned his contemporaries Donald Klopfer, Harold Guinzburg, Richard Simon and Max Schuster, as well as those who had predated him (Ben Huebsch, Alfred and Blanche Knopf). Cerf’s first employer, Horace Liveright, would be another one to add to this list. For Cerf, their success was “an affront to the old guard who didn't think that Jews belonged in the publishing business.” This sense of exclusion from the centre of the publishing business was a defining element of the new publishers of the 1920s. And according to an oft-repeated narrative, this marginalization led them to sign authors rejected by established publishing houses – including modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. This chapter has two objectives. First, it will offer a more subtle account of the positioning of the new publishers. They certainly took risks by selecting overlooked authors that later became part of the canon of modern literature. But in doing so, they were competing not only between themselves, but also, to a certain extent, with traditional publishers. Scribner, one of the most staid and conservative publishing houses, signed both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. The second point is that the new publishers were commercial publishers interested in selling their titles to the widest possible audience while preserving an aura of exclusivity and sophistication. They made no difference between books that we now see as “high,” “low” or “middlebrow.” Liveright published both Eliot’s The Waste Land and Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, for example. They sold modern literature not as a difficult movement for an elite, but as an appealing product that anyone could enjoy.