Eliza Orme’s Leader-Writing: A Challenge to Periodical Studies
RSVP’s Digital Events is pleased to welcome Leslie Howsam who will speak on “Eliza Orme’s Leader-Writing: a Challenge to Periodical Studies” on October 11, 2024 at 8 a.m. PT / 11 a.m. ET / 4 p.m. BT / 5 p.m. CET.
Leslie Howsam will build on the work of her new book, Eliza Orme’s Ambitions: Politics and the Law in Victorian London (Open Book, 2024) to discuss Britain’s first woman lawyer in the context of her signed and anonymous contributions to periodicals, especially leading articles in a “Radical” Liberal newspaper. Leslie will draw on the collective expertise of participants to consider how best to understand this kind of occasional political journalism, asking questions such as:
- In the absence of a marked set of the Weekly Dispatch, where her leaders appeared, how can we discover which contributions were Orme’s, which editor W. A. Hunter’s, which from others’ pens?
- Does attribution matter when leader-writers expressed their politics in the “voice” of the paper’s editorial stance?
- How should scholars characterize the periodical contributions of people whose ambitions were focused on other walks of life?
- We are confronted by a vast quantity of text, while at the same time hampered by a desperate scarcity of evidence about editors and contributors, about attribution and genre. How might periodical scholarship fruitfully highlight this dilemma?
- More broadly, how should we address the challenge to periodical studies raised by this example?
We hope to see you there! For background, read Chapter 6, “Journalism and Authorship,” in Eliza Orme’s Ambitions: Politics and the Law in Victorian London (pp. 105-118) if you have time!
About Our Speaker
Leslie Howsam is based in Toronto where she holds a senior research fellowship in the Centre for Digital Humanities at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is Professor Emerita in the University of Windsor, Department of History, and Past-President of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP). Leslie has served RSVP in various capacities, including the Planning and Curran Index Advisory Committees and has two articles published in the Victorian Periodicals Review (including the recent “Eliza Orme and the Women’s Gazette and Weekly News: Editing the Organ of a Fractious Federation, 1888–92,” VPR 55:1, Spring 2022, 100-124). In addition to Eliza Orme’s Ambitions, Leslie’s books include the Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (2015), Past into Print: The Publishing of History in Britain 1850-1950 (2009), and Old Books & New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book & Print Culture (2006).