W. T. Stead, the journalist and editor, is known primarily for his knight-errant crusade on behalf of women and girls in the sensational investigative articles 'The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon' (1885). The controversial success of these articles could not have been achieved without Stead's study and adoption of American journalistic techniques. Stead's importance to nineteenth century periodicals must be informed by an understanding of Stead as a mediating force between British and American print culture. This premise is developed here through exploration of the terms 'New Journalism' and 'Americanization'. Drawing from every stage of his career including his amateur yet dynamic beginnings as an unpaid contributor to the Northern Echo, I will examine Stead's unofficial title as the father of New Journalism and the extent to which this title is directly attributable to his relationship with America, or, to use Stead's term, his Americanization.
From its publication in 1856 to the present-day Dinah Mulock Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman has intrigued readers in its representation of masculinity and potential to be read "aslant", offering a divergent model of manliness, or even the "split consciousness" of the woman writer's self-image refracted through her depiction of a cast of male characters (Showalter, 1975). Most recently Karen Bourrier has discussed the novel's exploration of industry and invalidism as told through the narrative framework of an "intense homoerotic friendship between a strong man and his disabled friend" (Bourrier, 2015), and, in a 2007 article, Silvana Colella uses gift theory to demonstrate the intrinsic codes of gentlemanliness inherent in capitalist economics faithfully embodied in the text. This article considers Craik's representation of men in the novel as a lens through which Craik could engage with, and question, some of the largest theoretical areas of nineteenth-century, male-dominated intellectual life: economics, science, and politics. The article begins with an examination of the novel in relation to Malthus' economic theories of population and the tensions between Lamarckian and Malthusian ideology in the field of evolutionary theory in the works of Robert Chambers, George Drysdale, and others. The article will then explore the effect of Malthusian theory on discourses that emphasised masculine self-control as articulated in the symbiotic relationship of the two male protagonists, before concluding with Craik's intervention in the history of the woman writer as woman writer. I will demonstrate how this enormously popular novel interrogated and intervened in the assumptions of sentimental fiction by contextualising Craik's construction of a male narrative voice and an interdependent male relationship in terms of nineteenth-century economic, scientific, and political theoretical debates.
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