SAVING, SPENDING AND SERVING

Abstract

The Dorothy Novelette and its supplements were part of a sub-genre of weekly penny periodicals which were dominant in British publishing in the last 25 years of the nineteenth century. The evolution of the Dorothy from a ‘complete story’ novelette into an early modern women's magazine during the 1890s resulted as its features changed to attract readers and keep up sales. Examining the depiction of time as a locus of this perpetual change in the Dorothy reveals its evolution by its reflection of these wider perceptual changes. We show that in the Dorothy's reiteration of its readers' needs to control as well as succumb to time, and in its presentation of an opportunity of serialized reading, there was an inherent dichotomy in the Dorothy's attitudes towards time during its 10 years of life, in its mixture of fiction and fact, parent periodical and supplementary addenda.

Keywords:

• periodical
• supplement
• Victorian
• women's reading
• time
• magazine

Notes

1. Horace Marshall and Sons were heavily involved in publishing William Stead's publications at this time, including the Review of Reviews, and the Dorothy may have been an anomalous title they would have been happy to sell.

2. The term ‘novelette’ changed its definition in the twentieth century. In 1915 John Buchan (a writer who grew up in the Victorian age) used the term ‘penny novelette’ in The Thirty-Nine Steps to refer merely to a far-fetched story (Chapter 7). Q.D. Leavis referred to the penny novelette as a single story serialized in periodicals like Reynolds’ Miscellany, but she used the term in a broader sense than the more specialized form used by the publishers and editors of the novelette sub-genre itself (Leavis 176). Lise Shapiro Sanders has noted the confusion between ‘novelette’, ‘serial’ and the ‘complete story’ (127–29). See also Macdonald and Demoor ‘Borrowing’.

3. All issues of the Dorothy held by the British Library were examined, constituting a near-continuous run over 10 years (very few issues were missing). The methodology used was to note all authors and titles of fiction in a database of authorship, and to note information about the Dorothy's readership and how it was addressed editorially. Additional information concerning developments and change in the magazine's content, layout, editorial stance and, for example, articles about the New Woman and technological change, were also noted. Information about supplements was recorded from any surviving examples, advertisements and mentions in editorial material.

4. The Dorothy's Monthly Supplement ran for four issues, and then transmogrified into the Ladies Home Journal. However, no copies of this periodical at this date have been found, and it was not advertised for more than a few issues in early 1894. It is ironic that, at the end of the 1890s, the Dorothy ended its life as a supplement itself, to The Family Novelist, also published by William Lucas (see Macdonald and Demoor ‘Borrowing’).

5. ‘What is this life if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare?’, W.H. Davies ‘Leisure’ (Gardner 836).

6. This idea was advocated by Sarah Ellis in the 1840s, and was furiously rejected by Florence Nightingale in the early 1850s. In 1870 a (female) Blackwood's reviewer called women ‘desultory, restless, incorrigible interrupters, incapable of amusing themselves or of being amused by the same thing for five minutes together’ (Fraser, Green and Johnson 52).

7. These changes happened in the April (issue 30) and October (issue 56) Fashion Supplements of the Dorothy Novelette.

8. See, for example, Emily's wardrobe difficulties in Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Making of a Marchioness (1901).

9. For instance, in issue 222 (1893), issue 275 (1894), and in issues 439 and 442 (1898).