Matthew Rubery. The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780195369267. Price: US$65.00/£40.00

Reading a newspaper from the middle of the nineteenth century can be a disorienting experience, even for a scholar of Victorian literature. Instead of headlines and long articles, the front page may consist of announcements, advertisements, and perhaps the shipping news. And what is inside may be equally hard to parse: “leading articles” in which summaries of recent news slide rapidly into partisan editorializing, formulaic personal interviews, and columns of miscellaneous foreign correspondence. Matthew Rubery’s The Novelty of Newspapers helps dispel the strangeness of nineteenth-century newspapers by offering a real sense of how readers eagerly made sense of newspapers in the nineteenth-century, and how novelists responded to the newspapers “both as a means of formal innovation and as a countertext against which to define their own fictional discourse” (12). Reading the history of journalism against Victorian fiction, Rubery demonstrates the points of contact and arenas of dialogue between the two during the era when the newspaper developed many of its modern features and when reading the paper became a daily habit for more and more readers. The etymological doublet of news and novels hints at the plentiful, perhaps even elemental, connections between these twinned institutions of print culture. Cleverly but helpfully, Rubery organizes his argument roughly according to the arrangement of Victorian newspaper, from front to back. By demonstrating the fascination that Victorian readers could find in the shipping intelligence or in the “agony columns” (which consisted not of advice but of personal advertisements, many of which hinted at domestic problems or romantic intrigue), his early chapters on novels and the Victorian newspaper’s front page help tame that forbidding, cluttered space. Indeed, although Rubery does not suggest the connection, in his account the front page’s mosaic of brief news items and micro-texts by divergent voices starts to resemble a social medium like Twitter. The compression and multiplicity of these items enhanced the complex fusion of privacy and publicity on these pages. But engaged readers could follow what amounted to threads and updates, filling terse or apparently impersonal statements with emotion and meaning. As Rubery richly shows, with many brief examples drawn from a variety of fiction, novelists also took full advantage of the opportunity to elaborate the kinds of hints provided by the front page into stories. Yet in these opening chapters, Rubery’s study seems a bit more comfortable with the news than with the novels. Charlotte Yonge’s Heir of Redclyffe (1853), for example, “shows how effective news of a disaster at sea could be in reconciling two wrongfully separated lovers” (35)—as if Yonge’s novel were a factual testament and not a work of the imagination. Rubery’s tendency to slip into the past tense for describing novels and their plots may also be a symptom of the slippage between fact and fiction in this part of his study. Nevertheless, Rubery conveys an exciting sense of the many connections between fiction and journalism. For instance, when it comes to the sensation novel, The Novelty of Newspapers is particularly effective at suggesting how an entire genre might crystallize around a project of exposing the kind of crimes and pathologies that were hinted at by the agony columns but seldom represented in the newspapers’ more respectable regions. In these first chapters, a dizzying multiplicity of literary reference points evokes the multifarious connections between novels and such brief news items, even while replicating the somewhat miscellaneous organization of the front pages themselves. As the readers of Victorian newspapers’ front pages must have found, such a scheme can be exhilarating, but it can also be a challenge for a reader. When Rubery’s study moves forward …