Journalists and newspapers were portrayed negatively by the likes of Anthony Trollope, whose self-serving editor-characters tended to be more interested in disrupting society to serve their own ends than the public interest.
To Dr Jessica Valdez of the School of English, this phenomenon is an opportunity for considering how 19th century novelists conveyed ideas about the literary value of the novel. A one-time aspiring journalist herself – she interned at the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post – she is investigating the depiction of news and newspapers in Victorian England and how this related to not only novels but also national identity, for a RGC Early Career Scheme-funded project.
Both the novel and the newspaper were fairly new phenomena at this time and had each been vilified as corrupting influences on society. Novelists like Trollope responded through unflattering portrayals of newspapermen, while Charles Dickens took a different tack, portraying a writer-character like David Copperfield sympathetically but “hiding the labour of writing as part of the effort to elevate the novel as a literary form,” Dr Valdez said.
“I’m also looking at what these attitudes tell us about their idea of the nation and the relationship of literature to the nation. Obviously the newspaper is essential to creating a sense of a national community through the perception that many other readers are also reading the same newspaper every morning. At the same time, though, many of these novelists were concerned about the effect that a mass media might have on the morality of the nation – how it sought to titillate readers and often jumped to conclusions.”
For someone like Dickens, the novel itself represented unity. It brought together different forms of writing (such as serialisation) into a single whole, while at the same time containing characters from different classes and opening up their eyes to each other, she said. In the political sense of unity, it competed with the newspaper.
“I’m also looking at what these attitudes tell us about their idea of the nation and the relationship of literature to the nation. Obviously the newspaper is essential to creating a sense of a national community through the perception that many other readers are also reading the same newspaper every morning. At the same time, though, many of these novelists were concerned about the effect that a mass media might have on the morality of the nation – how it sought to titillate readers and often jumped to conclusions.”
For someone like Dickens, the novel itself represented unity. It brought together different forms of writing (such as serialisation) into a single whole, while at the same time containing characters from different classes and opening up their eyes to each other, she said. In the political sense of unity, it competed with the newspaper.
In contrast, the sensation novel, which appeared in the 1860s and 1870s and offered fictionalised accounts of lurid newspaper stories, challenged such unity. Dr Valdez is also looking at the writer Wilkie Collins whose female characters were bigamists, poisoners and the like who sometimes looked to newspaper headlines for guidance “almost like a horoscope”.
“Wilkie Collins asks the reader to enter into the interiority of a character who we might otherwise write off. In a way he is challenging the idea of nation and the way that the national community is built on exclusion.”
Dr Valdez hopes her project will contribute to a better understanding of the novel, which continues to be subjected to debate about when it began and where the line of “fiction” can or should be drawn. “I hope, with my analysis of the depiction of another form of writing within the novel, to see if this gives us an understanding of how Victorians understood novel-ness.”
See the original article in Arts Faculty Newsletter Winter 2015.
“Wilkie Collins asks the reader to enter into the interiority of a character who we might otherwise write off. In a way he is challenging the idea of nation and the way that the national community is built on exclusion.”
Dr Valdez hopes her project will contribute to a better understanding of the novel, which continues to be subjected to debate about when it began and where the line of “fiction” can or should be drawn. “I hope, with my analysis of the depiction of another form of writing within the novel, to see if this gives us an understanding of how Victorians understood novel-ness.”
See the original article in Arts Faculty Newsletter Winter 2015.
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