The ‘Most-Talked-Of Creature in the World’: The ‘American Girl’ in Victorian Print Culture

As a celebrated and vilified figure in the British press, the American girl constituted yet another prominent form of contested femininity in Victorian Britain, one which Bob Nicholson suggests was reflective of a growing fetishisation of America in British print culture, as well as of a broader cultural anxiety about the effects of the same. If Eliza Lynn Linton’s ‘Girl of the Period’ constituted a threat to the moral health of the nation from within, then the American girl was seen by many as an invasive threat to femininity from beyond Britain’s borders. Nicholson’s essay demonstrates the potency of the girl as a symbolic force in Victorian Britain, as well as the crucial role of the periodical in shaping the various, often competing cultural forms that she assumed.

Mounting the (Century Guild) Hobby Horse

This chapter is entirely dedicated to a pioneering little magazine that elaborated on the example of The Germ and the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (see Chapter 1), the Century Guild Hobby Horse (1884/86–92), which started as the periodical organ of the early Arts & Crafts organisation the Century Guild. To this magazine, the production and design of the material text was as much an opportunity for experiments as its actual contents, a notable aesthetic innovation that was motivated by a notion of artistic artisanship, and that made it a milestone in Victorian print culture. Each issue of the magazine—in which Victorian sages such as Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin made guest appearances— commands for the applied art workers producing it the respect usually reserved for authors and artists working within the category of ‘Fine Art’. So doing, the magazine helped to create a wider appreciation for Fine Printing. After the discontinuation of the Century Guild in 1893, this periodical was temporarily revived by the enterprising publishers at the Bodley Head to boost that firm’s Print-Revivalist credentials. The Hobby Horse is thereby also an early example of how supposedly avant-garde principles are sometimes difficult to distinguish from commercial strategies.

Selling the Yellow Nineties: the Yellow Book and the Savoy

This chapter discusses at length two of the best-publicised periodicals the 1890s, whose relationship reveals much about the reception in wider late-Victorian print culture of the conceptual integration of form and content that increasingly became associated with the little magazine genre. The slyly marketed Yellow Book (1894–97) is arguably the most notorious yet also the most ingeniously commercialist little magazine of all time, and it styled itself a ‘book’ for good reason. By emulating the appearance of a book, its editors and publisher John Lane at the Bodley Head hoped to safeguard their publication against the ephemerality and relative lack of prestige of periodical texts. The magazine drew a number of large advertisers and sold remarkably well until it was implicated in the Wilde trial in 1895. Its characteristic appearance had at that point become so recognisable that the magazine, as well as its rivals at the Savoy (1896) founded by the Yellow Book’s ousted alleged ‘Decadent’ ringleaders Arthur Symons and Aubrey Beardsley, felt that they needed to rethink their design aesthetic. Some material characteristics associated with the little magazine had become iconic and associated with transgressive content.