Professional Networking, Masculine and Feminine

Professional Networking, Masculine and Feminine Joanne Shattock (bio) I want to take as my starting point G. H. Lewes’s article on “The Condition of Authors in England, Germany and France” in Fraser’s Magazine for March 1847 in which he declared, “Literature has become a profession. It is a means of subsistence, almost as certain as the bar or the church.”1 “The real cause,” he argued, was “the excellence and abundance of periodical literature.”2 In England a journalist of “ordinary ability” could hope to earn between £200 and £1000 a year, a sum beyond the expectation of his counterparts in Germany and France where payments for articles were much less and where the range of weekly, monthly, and quarterly publications open to the English journalist did not exist.3 The professional writing life that Lewes heralded, which brought with it social respectability and some financial security, was made possible through intricate networks of writers, editors, publishers, and academics, networks which were always more obvious and public for male writers than for their female counterparts. Male writers met one another at clubs and coffee-rooms as well as at public events, such as lectures and exhibitions. They attended the dinners and other gatherings organized by publishers, often at their premises, which became routine in the 1840s and 1850s. Some had full-time positions in universities or the civil service or held editorial posts with newspapers or periodicals, which brought them regularly into the public arena. They travelled freely—to meet publishers and other writers, to give lectures, to take up literary work wherever it was offered. Women writers, by contrast, were far more constrained. They could not go to university, so one source of contacts was denied them. They worked from home, and if that was outside London, Edinburgh, or a major cultural centre, opportunities for meeting publishers, editors, and other writers were limited. The clubs and public dinners enjoyed by their male colleagues were not open to them. On the other hand, women writers began [End Page 128] to have a public visibility in the 1840s. The young David Masson, visiting London from Aberdeen in 1844, recalled seeing a few “ladies” working in the old reading room of the British Museum, engaged, he assumed, in earning their living. Significantly, he noted a greater proportion of women readers when the new round reading room opened in 1857.4 Those women writers who were brave enough to establish themselves independently in London risked becoming the subject of gossip. Harriet Martineau’s mother strongly opposed her daughter’s moving to London in 1830, under the encouragement of W. J. Fox, the editor of the Monthly Repository, and compromised by allowing her to spend three months a year there, living with family members.5 Eliza Lynn, later Linton (1822–98), and Eliza Meteyard (1816–79) were among a younger generation of women writers who left the family home and moved to London in the 1840s. More affluent women were able to travel, which brought rewards in terms of contacts. Elizabeth Gaskell, having introduced herself to the writer William Howitt by letter in the 1830s, met Mary Howitt and her daughter Anna Maria in Heidelburg, where they coincidentally shared lodgings in 1841. Gaskell’s early publishing career was greatly advanced by both Howitts, particularly through their magazine Howitt’s Journal. Based in Manchester because of her husband’s work, Gaskell was an example of a woman writer who was not unduly disadvantaged by living outside London. Much of her initial success rested on the fact that her first novel, Mary Barton (1848), was accepted by a major fiction house, Chapman and Hall, largely at the instigation of the Howitts. On a triumphal visit to London in 1849, following its publication, she was escorted around by Chapman and Hall’s literary advisor, the gregarious John Forster, through whom she was introduced to Dickens, who in turn extended an all-important invitation to write for his new periodical Household Words the following year. For her less mobile and less well off colleagues, both male and female, establishing a career as a man or woman of letters in the 1840s, whether in London or the...

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