Much is known about the activities of large publishing houses during the Victorian period such as Macmillan’s and Blackwood’s, both of which sponsored eponymous periodicals, the Macmillan and Blackwood families usually hiring the staff to edit and manage day-to-day operations. And much is also known about novelist-editors of periodicals such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Belgravia and Charles Dickens and All the Year Round. However, many of the editors of less well-known Victorian periodicals, were neither full-time authors nor publishing magnates, but rather came from other fields, such as the Foreign Service, visual arts, law, and the theater. Often they took up editing as a kind of sideline to their “day jobs”; some did not have to work at all to provide for themselves and their families. Were these editors professionals or dilettantes? In this essay, I examine and analyze the concepts of the work and labor of these periodical editors and how those ideas intersect with notions of professionalism, vocation, avocation, and class. My examples will include a founding editor and a tapped editor, and Clement K. Shorter, who played both of these roles, and, in many ways, illustrates the complexity of defining the identity of the “Victorian periodical editor.”

A good example of a founder/editor who did not make his living from writing or publishing is Oswald Crawfurd who established the short-lived New Quarterly Magazine in 1873. Crawfurd was a career diplomat, though, interestingly, the 1912 Supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) lists his occupation as “author” (439). The son of a diplomat, he had the advantage of a Victorian upper-class education at Eton and Oxford, yet he did not earn a degree. He had a twenty-four year career as a statesman, resigning his position as acting consul in Portugal in 1891 after violence erupted and was quelled in Oporto in 1890. He then devoted his efforts completely to literature, but even while a diplomat, Crawfurd maintained a parallel concurrent devotion to the world of letters. He wrote on a variety of topics, publishing three book-length studies of Portuguese scenery and customs, eight novels, half a dozen short stories, two verse plays, and two books of literary criticism (“Crawfurd” 439). He had equally diverse connections with periodicals and publishing. In addition to editing the New Quarterly, he contributed to the Fortnightly Review, the Nineteenth Century, and the Times, he was an original director of Black and White (founded 1891), and he became managing director of the publishing firm of Chapman and Hall. Crawfurd’s writing and editing constituted a full second career. That he worked very hard both before and after he retired from the Foreign Service as what Victorians called a “man of letters” is without question. However, as the DNB notes, “literature was for Crawfurd merely a recreation,” and, indeed, his life in letters suggests that he could “play” at being a novelist or editor or playwright because he could economically afford to do so (“Crawfurd” 440). The DNB intimates that he was a dabbler, averring that he got his position as director of the publishing firm of Chapman and Hall through being friends with owner Frederick Chapman, and baldly stating the post was one “for which he lacked qualification” (“Crawfurd” 440). In terms of editing, Crawfurd seems to have taken up the New Quarterly Magazine as a lark. While to ensure its success, he made appropriately “editorial” decisions which distinguished the periodical from its contemporaries and competitors – the timing, as quarterlies were virtually non-existent by 1873; the appearance of full-length “Tales” in each number (“Prospectus” 319), clearly going against the tide of serialization; and identifying authors and reviewers by their signatures, also still somewhat unusual in 1873 – he gave up his experiment after only four years, selling the New Quarterly to another proprietor/editor, Francis Hueffer, and the periodical’s last number appeared in 1880. Having experienced mixed success and having to write more than half of the first few numbers might have motivated Crawfurd’s decision. His life in letters for the rest of his life was largely in the arena of creative writing – novels, verse, and plays. The point is, whether because of overwork, disappointment, or boredom, Crawfurd could easily make the decision to stop work on his magazine without risk to his living conditions or reputation, and, thus, it seems reasonable to classify his editing stint as an avocation. Crawfurd’s editing was professional, but not his profession, and he had the economic means to give up his labor when he opted. His material conditions gave him the wherewithal, we might say the luxury, to choose how much, at what, and when, to work.

My next example was similarly economically well-placed enough to shift the conditions of his labor; however, Joseph William Comyns Carr (1849-1916), chosen by Alexander McMillan to edit the publishing house’s newly launched periodical, the English Illustrated Magazine, consciously chose to become an art critic, an editor, and a journalist. As Carr noted in Some Eminent Victorians, the English Illustrated was established by Macmillan’s in 1883 to compete with the popular illustrated American periodicals, Harper’s and Scribner’s (158). While Macmillan’s Magazine (1859-1907) continued to be a successful periodical for the Macmillan publishing house from its inception through the end of the nineteenth century, that monthly did not include illustrations as did some of its rivals, such as the Cornhill and Temple Bar. Alexander Macmillan was clearly ready to branch out into illustrated periodical and volume publishing, and the success of the English Illustrated in its first decade may have prompted the firm’s inauguration of the successful illustrated “Cranford Series” in 1890, as well as “Macmillan’s Illustrated Standard Novels” (1895-1901).

Editing was part of Carr’s professional identity and he took his labor for the English Illustrated seriously. A multi-faceted Victorian man of letters, he was, as the biographical reference Men and Women of the Time noted, “called to the bar at the Inner Temple 1872, but gave up the practice of law to devote himself to literature, and particularly to art criticism” (Plarr 178). He was art critic of the Pall Mall Gazette, the English editor of L’Art, and co-founder of the Grosvenor Gallery. During the 1870’s and 1880’s, he wrote several books on art; during the 1890’s, he turned his attentions to the theater, composing numerous plays, and becoming managing director of the Lyceum from 1902-1904. One of Carr’s many talents seems to have been his ability to successfully bridge the worlds of publishing, editing, writing, adaptation, art, and theater, making him an almost a real-life version of Jasper Milvain from George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891). He had bottomless energy; in Some Eminent Victorians, he writes that, as a young man,

His work under the editors Edmund Yates of the Globe, Philip Harwood of the Saturday Review, and especially Frederick Greenwood of the Pall Mall Gazette, prepared him to edit the English Illustrated. Furthermore, his position as art critic for L’Art and the Art Journal gave him the knowledge to push the magazine in the direction stipulated by Alexander Macmillan, to create an illustrated monthly magazine that was both notable for its art and competitive with pictorial British weeklies such as the Illustrated London News and the Graphic. In fact, Carr’s wife believed it was both his founding of the journal Arts and Letters, “edited and largely written by himself” (Reminiscences 66), and his “series of lectures before the Society of Arts entitled ‘Book Illustrations, Old and New’” that were responsible for “one of his many adventures of which he was most proud: the planning and editing, at the request of Messrs. Macmillan, of their beautiful magazine, the English Illustrated” (Memories 47).

Though Carr notes in Some Eminent Victorians his ability to attract the talents of literary contributors such as George Meredith, Algernon Swinburne, Henry James, and Bret Harte during his three-year stint as editor of the English Illustrated, he is clearly most proud of the periodical’s achievements in illustration. He writes, “One of the things which gave me most pleasure in my record as editor was the encouragement that I was enabled to afford to that gifted young draughtsman Hugh Thomson [1860-1920, noted for illustrating special editions of works by Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens], on the threshold of his career” (159). However, illustration historian Simon Houfe records that:

In fact, because of this innovation, Carr writes, he decided to give up his post as editor. He says In Some Eminent Victorians he writes, the “art of the wood-engraver was already suffering through competition with those mechanical processes of reproduction by which it is now almost entirely destroyed. And it soon became evident that the more careful work we were trying to present could not compete in popular acceptance with those rougher and readier methods which [. . .] were already widely employed” (159). Unable to fulfill his vision for the art in the English Illustrated Magazine, he left editing and most of his other journalism jobs to work in the theater until the end of his life as a producer, adapter of novels, and collaborator of musicals and dramas. Carr, then is a good example of a professional editor, one willing to give his best efforts for a publisher but equally willing to go on to other work when no longer supportive of that publisher’s vision. Like Crawfurd, Carr had the economic means to sustain himself while he pursued work in the theater, and, while more talented at his new profession than Crawfurd had been at his second career, had the fortune to choose to which field to devote his skills.

Clement K. Shorter (1857-1926) was named editor of the Illustrated London News by William James Ingram, the periodical founder’s son, in 1891. Shorter did not have the economic, class, or educational advantages of Crawfurd and Carr, having been while still a child left in poverty in Australia after his father’s death, and while he enthusiastically embraced his chosen field of journalism, his intended autobiography (the draft of which was later edited and published posthumously by J. M. Bulloch) is quite bitter about the fact that he never made much money from all of his efforts (Page DNB 771). Shorter began his career in journalism as book critic for the Star (1888-1918). While working for the Ingrams’ conglomerate, he edited their Illustrated London News, the Sketch, the English Illustrated Magazine (after the Illustrated News Office purchased the monthly from Macmillan’s), the Album, and the Pick-Me-Up. He may be best known as the editor of the Sphere, a weekly paper he founded in 1900 after, according to the DNB, “he parted from Ingram, in pique over a criticism of the Sketch” (Page 772). For twenty-five years, he wrote a weekly literary letter signed C. K. S. for the Sphere, a column that allowed him the freedom, according to John Gross, “to gossip, preach, extol the English classes, puff his friends, sneer at his enemies” (219).

Shorter is a fascinating figure from the last decade of the Victorian period. He illustrates the enormous capacity of certain men to be immersed in the world of letters without contributing much in the way of creative literature. By day he worked as an editor/journalist; by night he wrote somewhat self-serving books about the Brontës and Victorian literature, and composed introductions that highlighted his literary connections and memorabilia rather than analysis of the subject. The DNB notes that Shorter’s biographies “were compilations of facts, governed much more by the novelty of their discovery than by their importance, set forth with no literary grace, and with hardly any attempt at critical attention” (Page772). Gross believes Shorter “sounds like somebody waiting to be put into the more satirical pages of New Grub Street” (220). And J. M. Bulloch, editor of the notes Shorter left for his proposed autobiography, writes that above all, Shorter “liked to meet literary folk” (xiii). This last aspect of Shorter’s personality is reflected in his plans for the conclusion of his autobiography; these intentions included chapters on authors he claimed to know well, such as Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, G. B. Shaw, and J. M. Barrie; as well as a chapter on Shorter’s second wife, Dora Sigerson, through whom he met many figures from the Irish Literary Revival (Bulloch xv).

Shorter’s own words provide perhaps the best evidence of his motive for his transition from columnist to editor in the periodical press. At the end of his chapter, “I Become an Editor,” he writes, “Suddenly, my life was entirely changed. The numerous authors whom I had worshipped from afar might now be ranked among possible friends, or at least acquaintances” (59). On the other hand, he also writes,

In other words, being able to say he knew Thomas Hardy and Robert Louis Stevenson was more valuable to Shorter than raising the literary content of the Illustrated London News (ILN) by publishing their fiction; being the acclaimed editor of a wildly successful weekly pictorial was more important than, as Shorter claimed, leaving “subscribers cold” with an “exciting story” (C. K. S. 84). Still, as Nigel Cross avers, Shorter “made every effort to secure copy from the best possible writers, even if it was nowhere near their best work” (209). In fact, Shorter continued to solicit high quality fiction when he first became editor of the ILN. In 1893, however, when he was editing three (and possibly five) periodicals at one time, the pressure to locate so much fiction and non-fiction seems to have affected his judgment of prose, for the quality of the novels and short stories in the Illustrated London News lessened somewhat. The illustrations retained their power, however, and it is doubtful that the weekly’s audience noticed this drop-off in the standards of the fiction.

Shorter’s relationship with Thomas Hardy exemplifies how the editor/groupie/fanboy combination did little to serve either Shorter’s chosen profession or those authors and publishers he tried to associate with. During the 1890’s, Hardy composed four short stories for periodicals of which Shorter was the editor - the Illustrated London News, the English Illustrated Magazine, the Sketch, and the inaugural number of the Sphere. These were among the last short stories Hardy wrote, and they do not rank among his best. The relationship between editor and author continued until the end of Shorter’s life, but underwent substantive changes because Shorter took liberties with the acquaintance, reprinting Hardy’s short story “Benighted Travellers” in the May 2 and 9, 1903, numbers of the Sphere, even though the story had already been collected in A Group of Noble Dames and Hardy had expressly written to Shorter earlier in 1903 to prevent such a “resuscitation” (Collected Letters iii 48). By 1908, Hardy maintained a kind of approach/avoidance relationship with Shorter. Discovering Hardy’s manuscripts were unbound, Shorter was allowed by Hardy to arrange for formal binding and to keep the MS. of Return of the Native as “payment” for the favor. However, Hardy refused to sign the MS., writing to Shorter that “it would be affectation now to invent the fiction of a gift” (Collected Letters iii 319). But by 1916, Hardy had had enough of the Shorter connection, having been, as Hardy biographer Michael Millgate says, annoyed during the Great War years by Shorter’s private printings of some of Hardy’s poems (469), pamphlets which Hardy bibliographer Richard Purdy calls “undistinguished, even ugly in format” and unlimited in the number issued (349). Shorter’s reputation as a contentious and cantankerous man underscores the notion that personality can have as much to do with being a successful professional as the dream of being one, and this editor, despite his wishes, had problems with those he worked for, such as Ingram, and with, such as Hardy.

Of the three editors, Shorter is the professional who most depended on his labor for his livelihood, and that had the least latitude in choosing the field to which his efforts should be devoted or in simply leaving the field when he became dissatisfied by the lack of reward for his toil. Near the end of the draft of his autobiography, Shorter wrote, “It is, however, borne in upon me, the more mature my judgment in the field of journalism grows, that the editorial side of a newspaper is not its most important part – that the business management is of far greater moment, and is indeed of paramount importance” (108). He goes on to thank mentors upon whom he depended to grow his business acumen, but also states with a hint of wistfulness at not being able to completely devote his efforts to journalism, “I have found rest and serenity in the purely commercial side of my life” (109). That Oswald Crawfurd, J. Comyns Carr, and Clement K. Shorter did the work of editing is evident, yet their achievements in the profession were significantly influenced by factors such as work ethic and necessity. Our twenty-first century impressions of these editors and our ideas of labor and professionalism are equally significantly influenced by our notions of class and just what it means to do labor in print culture.

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