Educating the proper woman reader: Victorian family literary magazines and the professionalization of literary criticism

In nineteenth-century Britain and America, the popularity of novels and periodicals grew at a staggering rate as more and more readers gained access to a wide variety of inexpensive reading material. The critical response to this unprecedented abundance of print culture was to initiate a discourse that called for the regulation of women's reading in order to ensure the morality of the primary literacy educators of the family, elevate the literary taste of the middle class, and preserve the nation's culture. Many critics---who printed their work in elite literary reviews that catered to a predominantly male audience---saw women as the most susceptible victims of the "disease of reading" that was believed to be a threat to the entire social fabric of the nation. While these critics defined women readers as inherently uncritical and held them responsible for the vulgarization of the nation's literary culture, family literary magazines---commonly referred to as shilling monthlies---emerged in opposition to this criticism to provide an alternative program for the definition of culture and taste aimed at a wider, less educated audience predominantly figured as female. These magazines thereby established a culture of reading designed to educate rather than exclude women readers.;This project examines the relationship between the debate over women readers in nineteenth-century periodicals and the establishment of the profession of literary criticism by looking at how four family literary magazines--- Harper's, the Cornhill, Belgravia, and Victoria---define the proper woman reader. I illustrate how the concept of the woman reader served as a major defining force behind the divisions between high and low culture, the definitions of literary forms such as realism and sensationalism, and the development of the literary canon. I also uncover the ways in which literary critics elevated their work to the status of a scholarly profession and laid the foundation for twentieth-century critical traditions through their various attempts to dismiss, protect, or educate the woman reader. Thus, this inquiry reveals a vital and heretofore overlooked aspect of Anglo-American literary history that moves women from the margins to the center of nineteenth-century literary culture.