‘In Pitiless Print’: Representing Character from Newspaper to Novel

Abstract

A common trope in the Victorian novel features characters who read about themselves in newspapers, handbills, and advertisements. Many of these characters experience a sense of alienation and marginalization when they see themselves rendered in text for a mass public. With a focus on Wilkie Collins’s 1862 novel, No Name, this paper argues that such scenes are key sites of novelistic theorization, where novelists experiment with methods of characterization and their effects on individual psychology. In No Name, Magdalen Vanstone runs away from home after learning that, as the offspring of an unmarried couple, she legally has “no name” and no right to her family’s inheritance. When Magdalen sees a handbill offering a reward for her recovery, Magdalen is shocked by the appearance of herself in print: “By the last gleam of twilight, she read the lines which set a price on her recovery – which published the description of her in pitiless print, like the description of a strayed dog” (156). Magdalen is forced to confront herself as “a young lady,” who, like a stray dog, must be described in physical detail to be recovered. The text delineates the lines and marks that distinguish Magdalen from others, thereby rendering her body into a flattened text for an unknown public. Although she tears the handbill in fragments and throws them away, she cannot control the countless other printed handbills circulating in the public sphere. No Name dramatizes the psychological effects of mass circulated representations of selfhood. The irony here, of course, is that Magdalen is a character that exists only in print. Similar scenes figure in Anthony Trollope’s The Warden, The Prime Minister, Dr. Whortle’s School, and Phineas Redux. This paper is part of a larger book project, Re-Forming Nation and Newspaper in the Victorian Novel, which argues that Victorian novelists made and re-made novelistic form in response to changes in the nineteenth-century media landscape. Like twenty-first century misgivings about new media, Victorians worried that newspapers would transform society before the end of the century, shortening readers’ attention spans and isolating them from face-to-face interactions. Tapping into this anxiety, novelists made newspapers key actors in their fictional plots and traced how they might shape both individual and social psychology. Fictional representations of newspapers thus became sites of social and formal experimentation, in which writers worked through what distinguished novelistic form from its journalistic competitor. Newspapers were represented as sources of political and social disruption; news often turns out to be wrong, misrepresentative, or even fictional, undermining their structural claims to reality and creating disruptions within the novelistic world. The fictionalized newspapers also exert a centrifugal force on the novels that contain and re-form them. They hijack the novel’s plot and disrupt the imagined social world that the novel has constructed, substituting a mass public for what was before a supposed knowable community. Here the individual shifts from a psychologized self to one who is an exchangeable part of a larger social aggregate. This is best exemplified by Anthony Trollope’s The Warden, in which Mr. Harding finds himself caricatured in a London newspaper and reviled as an example of institutional corruption.