The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction After the Invention of the News

The Novelty of Newspapers explains why the Victorian novel is best understood alongside the simultaneous development of the news as a commercial commodity read by up to a million readers per day. This study focuses on five of the most important of these narrative conventions-the shipping intelligence, personal advertisement, leading article, interview, and foreign correspondence-in order to show how concretely journalism influenced the novel at this time. Drawing on examples of periodicals from the period, Matthew Rubery reveals how the commercial press arising in nineteenth-century Britain profoundly influenced Mary Braddon, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Anthony Trollope, and many other novelists who all used narrative conventions derived from the press in their fiction.