Victorian Periodicals Review

What we'd like to know is how you began studying periodicals and became a member of RSVP.

I was up at Oxford in the second half of the 1950s. At that time, we did not go beyond the 1830s if we read English. We studied Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, and some people did Old Icelandic. But it was thought that everything published after 1830 we would have read for pleasure anyway.

We did have informal lectures about the nineteenth century and studied some eighteenth-century periodical writing. But my interest in the periodical genre was partially sparked by my desire to write. The university had a couple of people to advise undergraduates on careers. They had a lady (I think she was called Miss Fone) who advised the women. So when I went to see her, I told her that I wanted to be a journalist. I thought I was shy and that this would help me engage with people; others later told me that I was never shy, but that's what I thought at the time. Miss Fone was quite helpful. I started to write for Kemsley's (later Thomson's) Manchester Evening Chronicle, the rival to the Manchester Evening News. I enjoyed that very much, but after three and a half years I became engaged to a journalist who wrote for a morning paper, Kemsley's Sporting Life. Having seen very few women journalists (there were only three other women working on my paper), I started to worry that it might not be a good basis for marriage for my husband and I to work totally different hours.

So I wondered what else I could do. I thought part-time teaching might suit me and later, when teaching, thought I could do a bit of research as well, so I went to see Professor Arthur Pollard at Manchester University, telling him, "I want to work on Mrs. Gaskell." He was at that time preparing an edition of Gaskell's letters with John Chapple based on the manu©2018 The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals [End Page 559] script collection of her correspondence at the Manchester libraries. I then registered for a part-time MA; it was called an MA, but it was more like an MPhil, with a slightly shorter thesis.

My thesis was focused on Mrs. Gaskell's treatment of the social scene in her works. I highlighted the way she used bits of journalism in her novels, for example, a piece advising the wives of wealthy traders on how to manage a dinner party. In front of the building where I worked for the Chronicle, there was a market with second-hand bookstalls where I came across and purchased ten leather-bound volumes of Household Words. Going through these volumes, I found articles by Mrs. Gaskell. I was intrigued, of course. So Mrs. Gaskell was also a journalist! Curiously enough, when I'd gone for a speculative job interview I was asked, "Why do you want to become a journalist? It is not a job I would advise my daughter to go into." Nobody then thought it perfectly normal to be a woman journalist, yet Mrs. Gaskell already was one!

How did your career develop then?

I taught English literature part-time at a convent grammar school, and when we had to move down south after my husband's promotion to a job based at the London office, one of my colleagues suggested that in view of my research project I should consider applying to teach English at a teacher training college. At that time, there was an expansion of those colleges, and sure enough I got a job at a newly established institution, Bulmershe College in Reading, Berkshire. By the late 1980s, however, there were amalgamations, and some colleges, such as the polytechnics, became universities. My institution decided to become part of nearby Reading University. I joined their English department, where I...