| Abstract |
My book The Novelty of Newspapers proposes that the transformation of news throughout the nineteenth century profoundly influenced the fiction of Mary Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Anthony Trollope, and many other novelists. The chapters of this book distinguish five narrative conventions that show how concretely journalism shaped the novel at this time: the shipping intelligence, the agony column, the leading article, the interview, and the foreign correspondence. The first chapter examines why Victorian heroines from Dickens's Esther Summerson to Stoker's Mina Harker were such devoted readers of the shipping news. Chapter Two brings to light the use of personal advertisements to form imagined communities among women readers in 1860s sensation novels such as Lady Audley's Secret, the plot of which hinges on a counterfeit obituary placed on the newspaper's front page. A third chapter looks at how Trollope's Palliser series intervenes in debates over the convention of editorial anonymity giving disreputable journalists like Quintus Slide a 'mask' behind which to influence public opinion. Chapter Four considers the media's most invasive and controversial emblem, the personal interview, described in key novels by Henry James as underwriting the era's 'mania for publicity'. A final chapter uncovers the kinship between Henry Stanley's foreign correspondence in the New York Herald describing his search for Livingstone and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, whose own revelatory figure in Africa writes about his 'moral ideas' in the newspapers. This study thereby challenges the assumed divide between the period's literature and journalism, with all its implications for the production of an idea of culture, and of hierarchies of reading, by demonstrating how the newspaper was integral to the Victorian novel's development -- what this book calls 'the novelty of newspapers'. |