This study contributes to current critical discussions about the figure of the Victorian woman journalist. Most previous scholarship on nineteenth-century female journalism has focused either on women's anonymous writings or on their contributions to conventionally feminine genres like serial fiction and prose articles on domesticity and fashion. Although women's campaigning journalism has attracted some attention, especially from historians of feminism, its role in the professionalization of women writers has gone largely unexamined. Consequently, it has been assumed that female journalists did not write on social and political issues, unless they wrote anonymously or as reformers with little interest in developing careers as presswomen. This thesis radically revises this view by showing the mid-century rise of female journalists who wrote on serious social and political topics and earned national and international repute. They broke the codes of anonymity in a number of ways, including signing articles in their own names and developing distinctly female personae. They presented themselves as model middle-class professional authors: knowledgeable, financially independent and vocationally committed. They proved, by example, women's fitness for conventionally masculine lines of journalism. By examining their careers in the periodical press, my thesis offers the first in-depth analysis of 'high-minded' female journalism in Victorian England. Beginning with the 1850s, the thesis is organised around certain key developments in the periodical press, such as the debates about professional authorship, discussions of the plight of single women and the nature of female work, and the advent of signed publication. It examines the rise of prestigious presswork by women through the study of three distinct, yet overlapping models of the female professional journalist: the feminist journalist, the mainstream reform journalist, and the foreign correspondent. It then discusses the representation of women's high-minded journalism in the domain of fiction. The study ends in the 1880s, noting how these mid-Victorian models of women's presswork influenced the discussion and practice of female professional journalism in the 1890s.

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This dissertation analyses the visual representations of the Lower Thames in the years between about 1880 and 1901 to understand the ways in which they reconstructed and projected modern life in London in and through visual forms. Focusing on works which were accessible in the broad middle-class sphere through exhibitions and publications, it sets out to show how non-modernist works of art articulated capitalist modernity in powerful terms. In translating a working port into representations such as exhibition pictures and newspaper illustrations, artists exploited the naturalist aesthetic. They highlighted the dirty, modern, chaotic and even dangerous river, while playing with the distance between that depicted working-class site and the middle-class audience of their work. Examining their subject and means of representation, the dissertation shows how the late Victorian representations of the Port of London illuminated the values of technology, labour, capital and the Empire.

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The thesis investigates the prophetic in Wordsworth's ‘golden decade' (1798-1808). It establishes the following arguments: the prophetic in Wordsworth should not be treated of only incidental interest; it is a mode of his self-fashioning, as well as a mode of his writing, channelling the poet's anxieties about his authorship, readership, reception and posterity. The thesis contains an introduction and a short conclusion, with two main sections amounting to 7 chapters. Chapter 1 to 3 form Part I, focusing on the prophetic as a mode of self-fashioning. Chapter 1 re-examines The Prelude, arguing that self-doubts and struggle are inherent to Wordsworth's prophetic aspirations. Chapter 2 discusses three major reasons that make Wordsworth's self-fashioning as a poet of prophetic quality possible: personal aspirations, knowledge economy, and prophetic discourse of his time. Chapter 3 investigates anxieties generated in self-fashioning: anxiety of influence and anxiety about reception. Chapter 4 to 7 form Part II, exploring the prophetic as a mode of writing. Chapter 4 studies the apocalyptic vision of the rupture in human history in Lyrical Ballads. Chapter 5 looks into Wordsworth's concern with the nation in ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty'. Chapter 6 focuses on the dual prophetic quality of The White Doe of Rylstone and its links to discourse of duty and Catholic Emancipation. Chapter 7 studies the prophet-like speaker and the prophetic nature of the narrative in Peter Bell. It also considers the discrepancy between the poet's ideal reader and his actual reader as the reason why the poem fails to appeal. The claim to innovation in the thesis is that it offers a corrective reading of the prophetic as a mode of self-fashioning and a mode of writing in Wordsworth. It also sheds new light on the poet's acclaimed major works such as Lyrical Ballads, as well as widely criticised minor ones such as Peter Bell.

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When Rudyard Kipling died in January 1936, the resulting national and international mourning indicated the popularity and enormous influence of his life and work. It demonstrated the esteem in which he was still held and the consequent longevity of his literary success. This thesis examines how Kipling established, maintained and protected his reputation, his purpose in doing so and considers if concern about his own ethnic purity was a central motivation for him in this regard. This thesis explores Kipling‟s preoccupation with the reputation of the enlisted man – or „Tommy Atkins‟ figure – and his sympathy with the „underdog‟ and discusses how recuperation of this denigrated image was instrumental in establishing and increasing Kipling‟s poetic and literary success. His intimate personal relationship and fascination with the enlisted man is investigated, especially in terms of Empire and the Great War and juxtaposed with discussion of Kipling‟s numerous elite, establishment military and political connections. His post-war link to the soldier is considered, including the powerful and enduring effects of the death of his son. Exploration of Kipling‟s writing is undertaken using material from the University of Sussex Special Collections Kipling Archive, including Kipling‟s personal papers and correspondence which are referred to throughout and the six volume collection of Kipling‟s correspondence edited and published by Thomas Pinney. Additional, selective close-reading of his verse and prose illustrates arguments in the personal papers and indicates that Kipling‟s literary reputation vindicated both himself and the image of the soldier. Work from poets contemporary with Kipling is used in context, to provide comparison and contrast. In addition to the main thesis, an appendix volume is in place to offer further exploration of the primary archive material.