This book is the first full-length study of one of the most widely read publications of Victorian Britain, the London Journal, inserting the story of this magazine into the wider context of the Victorian mass-market periodical. It draws on traditional modes of scholarship in history, art history, and literature as well as on developments in sociology, psychoanalysis, and cultural theory. However, the author ultimately relies on new and extensive primary research to ground the changing ways in which the reading public became consumers of literary commodities on a scale never before seen. Previous commentators have coded the mass market as somehow always 'feminine', and King offers a genealogy of how such a gender identity came about. Finally, King recontextualizes within the Victorian mass market three key nineteenth-century novels-Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, and Ã0/00mile Zola's The Ladies' Paradise-and in so doing suggests radically new and unexpected meanings.

Dr Andrew King is a senior lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University College, UK.

Contents: Preface; Part 1 Periodical Discourse: Periodical questions; Periodical titles; or, 'The London Journal' as a signifier. Part 2 Periodical Production; 1845-9. Theoretical issues; or, genre, title, network, space; Cultural numerology; or, circulation, demographics, debits and credits; 1849-57. Moving from the miscellany; or, J.F. Smith and after; 1857-62. When is a periodical not itself? or, Mark Lemon and his successors; 1862-83. The secret of success; or, American women and British men; Part 3 Periodical Gender; or, the Metastases of the Reader: 1845-55. Gender and the implied reader; or, the re-gendering of news; 1863. Lady Audley's secret zone; or, is subversion subversive?; 1868-83. Dress, address and the vote; or, the gender of performance; 1883: The revenge of the reader; or, Zola out and in; Appendix; References; Index.