RSVP at ACCUTE 2026
The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals invites those attending the upcoming 2026 conference of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) to our sponsored panel, “Rethinking the Profession of Journalism and Authorship in/through Periodical Studies” on June 4 at 10:30 a.m. local time.
Recent work on nineteenth-century periodicals (including newspapers and magazines), invites renewed attention to the diverse contributors who shaped periodical print culture and to the varied forms of authorship and journalism that emerged as a result. Periodical contributors challenge the critical and historical conventions of authorship – especially the relation between amateur and professional, labour and status, authority and voice, agency and gender, and celebrity and authenticity.
This panel examines how the varying modes of journalism and authorship functioned as professional practices within the material and serial forms of periodical press. Collectively, the papers enable a re-mapping of authorship and journalism as an historically embedded social practice based on collaboration, contingency, labour, affect, and mediation. Our panelists include:
- Kaitlyn Fralick (Queen’s), “Reconsidering the Female Poet’s Interpretive Labour through Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Literary Annuals”
- Lisa C. Robertson (New Brunswick), “The Prophetic Reviewer: Time and Authorship in Margaret Oliphant’s ‘Modern Light Literature’ Series in Blackwood’s“
- Stephan Pigeon (St. Francis Xavier), “Endless Precarity: Status and Labour in Victorian Journalism”
- Alexis Easley (St. Thomas), “Celebrity Portraiture, Intimacy, and the Mass Media in Late Victorian Britain”
The panel will be chaired by Stephan Pigeon. Abstracts and more information about our panelists are below. We hope you can join us!
About Our Panelists and Their Papers
Kaitlyn Fralock
“Reconsidering the Female Poet’s Interpretive Labour through Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Literary Annuals”
This paper turns to poems published in two illustrated literary annuals—Forget-Me-Not (1822–1847) and The Keepsake (1827–1857)—to reconsider female poetic authorship as a professional role shaped by illustration-led periodical production. In these gift books marketed to young women, poems were often commissioned to accompany pre-chosen engravings, positioning poets within a hierarchy that prioritized visual over textual content. Focusing on the corpus of female-authored poems that accompany engravings in the Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry project, which indexes and identifies 39 such poems in Forget-Me-Not and 54 in The Keepsake, I argue that poets could exhibit authorial agency by directing how illustrations were read by mediating, stabilizing, and/or subtly complicating their meaning.
In pursuit of this argument, I track and trace these poems at scale to identify recurring strategies, particularly in those that supply context or emotional motivation absent from the illustration; I then consider these strategies alongside the editors’ own mediating strategies, turning to the ideological positioning of each annual and the material presentation of each illustrated poem (i.e., whether the illustration was positioned before, after, or mid-poem). When considered at scale, these poems show that female authorship in illustrated annuals depended on responsive interpretive labour, at times reinforcing and at times challenging the annual’s broader ideological purview, despite the poets’ secondary position.
Keywords: nineteenth-century illustrated poetry; female poets; periodical studies.
Kaitlyn Fralick is a Ph.D. Candidate and Teaching Fellow at Queen’s University. She is also a Graduate Research Assistant on Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry at the University of Victoria, where she received her M.A. Her research interests include nineteenth-century literature and culture, the Victorian periodical press, print culture, and the digital humanities.
Lisa C. Robertson
“The Prophetic Reviewer: Time and Authorship in Margaret Oliphant’s ‘Modern Light Literature’ Series in Blackwood’s”
In her review “Sydney Smith”, published March 1856 in Blackwood’s, Margaret Oliphant declares that “the works of the critic are of their nature fugitive and ephemeral; but the same nature gives them innumerable advantages – immediate influence, instant superiority, and a dazzling and unlaborious reputation.”¹ In the nine months preceding this statement, Blackwood’s published Oliphant’s “Modern Light Literature” series: a collection of review essays that consider popular texts that deserve comment but require no “extraordinary penetration” from the
reader.² While Oliphant’s Autobiography expresses uncertainty with respect to her own literary legacy, her understanding of the reviewer’s influence – despite the fugitive and ephemeral nature of their work – suggests their enduring cultural significance. For Frances Power Cobbe, the opportunity of “giving your opinion” through a different but related fugitive form, daily leader-writing, was a privilege for which “prophets and preachers of old would have given a house of silver and gold.”³
This paper examines Blackwood’s “Modern Light Literature” series to explore Oliphant’s use of the prophetic mode as an authorial strategy in review writing. I argue that this mode not only contributes to her distinctive voice as a reviewer, but that it also generates a temporal perspective that is both retrospective and prospective. This strategy of temporal relay, as I describe it, is mirrored by the serial and accumulative form of the periodical itself. Finally, I pose the question of whether temporal relay might create an opportunity to reconsider the cultural and literary legacies left by nineteenth-century reviewers such as Oliphant.
Keywords: Prophecy, Review, Authorship
Lisa C. Robertson is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of New Brunswick. She is the author of Home and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literary London (EUP, 2020) and co-editor, with Flore Janssen, of Margaret Harkness: Writing Social Engagement, 1880-1921 (MUP, 2019).
Stephan Pigeon
“Endless Precarity: Status and Labour in Victorian Journalism”
Astley Henry Baldwin is not a name that scholars of the Victorian nineteenth-century newspaper and periodical press would identify as significant. Nevertheless, he made extensive contributions to the press over his 50-year career. This paper relies on archival evidence from the Royal Literary Fund (RLF) to explore the nature of Baldwin’s contributions and tease out often elusive evidence about payment, standard of living, and the compounding effects of systemic poor
remuneration in journalism. Between 1875 and 1901, Baldwin submitted 10 applications to the RLF for financial assistance as his health, ability to write, and quality of life declined. This evidence, primarily in the form of first-person accounts from Baldwin which detail his journalism career, progressive illness, material privations, and the emotional toll of isolation, form the crux of this paper. These applications reveal the life and existence of a writer who
dedicated his career to producing valuable content until illness rendered him unable to continue.
In examining Baldwin’s RLF applications, this paper takes a fresh approach to this well-investigated collection by considering how the people of the press positioned themselves and their journalism work as a kind of authorship that rose to the level of literary contribution. This paper further argues that the study of the periodical and newspaper press must extend beyond the list of celebrated figures who were also eminent authors of the period. Baldwin, and other contributors like him, were the unseen makers and doers upon which the newspaper and periodical press relied for fresh and relevant print matter.
Keywords: Precarity, Privation, Debt
Stephan Pigeon is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at St. Francis Xavier University where he has worked on a limited term contract since 2023. Prior to this appointment, he was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University, a position he held after completing his Ph.D. at McGill University in 2021.
Alexis Easley
“Celebrity Portraiture, Intimacy, and the Mass Media in Late Victorian Britain”
At the fin de siècle, the British mass media first began to reach readers in the millions. Part of the appeal of mass-market newspapers was the inclusion of images of celebrities’ homes and faces. Celebrity media produced a sense of intimacy between fans and their idols. In this presentation, I explore how weekly newspapers of the fin de siècle such as the Graphic and Sketch pioneered two methods that would later come to be associated with film in the early twentieth century: the close-up and the concept of negative space.
The close-up portrait assumed a larger-than-life scale that softened the line between the world of the celebrity and the world of the reader. Viewing a close-up portrait of a celebrity mimicked readers’ experiences of reading faces within their own domestic circles. In other instances, celebrity media utilized negative space: reproducing images of domestic interiors without representations of the celebrities themselves. These images drew attention to the sense of vacancy produced by the empty chair or the open book, including familiar markers of scale – objects such as teacups and bookshelves – that collapsed the divide between celebrity and fan, creating an uncanny sense of familiarity. Images of celebrity homes in weekly newspapers mirrored readers’ own reading locations as much as they alluded to their idols’ domestic lives.
Close-up portraits and negative space produced a sense of intimacy at the same time that they drew subtle attention to the mediating influence of the editors, writers, and visual artists who shaped readers’ experience of celebrity worship. In this way, they produced brand loyalty as readers consumed newspaper issues from week to week.
Keywords: Celebrity, Victorian Newspapers, Portraiture, Mass Media, Visual Culture
Alexis Easley is Emerita Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas. She has published three monographs, most recently New Media and the Rise of the Popular Woman Writer (EUP 2021). She has edited or co-edited several other books, including British Writers, Popular Literature, and New Media Innovation (EUP 2024).
- Joanne Shattock (ed.), The Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant, Part I, Volume I (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2016), p. 124.
- Margaret Oliphant, “Modern Light Literature—Theology,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, July 1855, p. 74.
- Frances Power Cobbe, The Life of Frances Power Cobbe, Vol. II (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1894), p. 390.
