"Periodical Performance": The Editor Figure in Early Nineteenth-Century Literary Magazines

Long considered the literary representatives of the public sphere, British periodicals underwent significant changes throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Improved literacy rates and technological advancements in the production and distribution of print meant that the republic of letters, once a venue for discussions between gentlemen, was now more open to a larger and more diverse audience. This increase in potential readers left periodicals uncertain of the identity of their own readership, forcing them to create discourses that helped to define their readers and form them into distinctive audiences. This thesis examines the role that the editor figure played in the formation of readers for specific periodicals. Its focus is on how, both directly and indirectly, early to mid nineteenth-century literary magazines crafted distinctive figures of the editor through which they managed the pressures attendant on them as publications positioned between the popular, commercial market and the literary sphere. In particular, it examines the different ways that the discursive construction of an editor (an "editor figure") offered readers a personal relationship, which evoked aspects of the eighteenth-century public sphere, as an antidote to the expanding print market. Readers were thus socialized, brought into a relationship with a periodical through the editor figure, who acted as an intermediary between the market and the publication, a friendly face in an otherwise confusing world. The nature of a periodical's society, like the figure of its editor, varied, but the point was to lead readers to consider themselves not simply individual readers but part of a distinctive audience, gathered into a community through the guiding hand or personality of an editorial presence. Divided into four chapters, the thesis focuses on key sites in periodical culture in which an editor figure, constructed through direct commentary and editorial practices and techniques, defined readerly roles and relations in ways that both harnessed and counteracted the impact of the technological powers of print. Beginning with an analysis of the contrasting figures in John Scott's London Magazine and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the thesis then moves to the realm of cheap publications in a chapter on Charles Knight's Penny Magazine and the Chambers brothers' Chambers' Edinburgh Magazine. The thesis then concludes with a look at Leigh Hunt, who activated the rhetoric of intimacy he had established over the course of a long career as an editor when he himself ventured into the sphere of cheap publication with his London Journal