UC Riverside

To more fully understand nineteenth-century literary production, literary scholars must consider periodical editing as more than biographical footnotes to the lives of famous Victorian authors or secondary details in a text’s publishing history. In The Editor as Producer: Nineteenth-Century British Literary Editors, I seek to render more visible the work of the periodical editor, positing this figure as pivotal to the nineteenth-century literary scene. A single metanarrative of the editorial role is impossible to tell and undesirable insofar as it would necessarily flatten out a rich and varied history of practices and the influences particular men and women have had on literary texts, periodicals, and nineteenth-century print culture; however, critical work on editors has been too fragmented. My approach is to trace the historical trajectory of editorial roles through the nineteenth century but to focus in each period on a pair of editors to explore the editorial trends of professionalization, celebrity author-editorship, and responses to new technologies.

Pairing Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review and William Blackwood along with the fictional Christopher North of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine , chapter 1 focuses on the struggle for professionalization in literary reviews and magazines during the early nineteenth century. In chapter 2, I draw on the figure of the naked editor to represent the emotional openness and literary intimacy audiences pursued in author-editors. William Makepeace Thackeray’s Cornhill Magazine and Ellen Wood’s Argosy form this chapter’s central set of periodicals. Finally, The Editor as Producer concludes with perhaps the most unlikely pairing: George Newnes’s popular magazine Tit-Bits and Henry Harland and Aubrey Beardsley’s artistic quarterly the Yellow Book. The editors of both periodicals responded to late-century changes in audience and technology, but while Newnes embraced the increased pace of modern life and shorter reader attention span, Harland and Beardsley focused on creating a periodical that was first and foremost an objet d’art. Chapter 3 emphasizes how the fitness of periodicals in their cultural environments was influenced by the editor’s vision.