Established in 1871 by W.F. Tillotson following the successful formation of the Bolton Evening News in 1867, the Bolton Weekly Journal sought to “as far as possible, meet the wants of all classes […] acceptable to […] the Politician, the General Reader, and the Home Circle”, within the “thousands of Homes in the Town and District around Bolton [who] are not reached by any Local or National Journal”.[1] An early advertisement for this new periodical indicated that “A Special Feature of the Journal will consist of Serial Stories and judicious selections from current Literature, thus supplying amusing and instructive reading along with a weekly record of the news of the world”.[2] The first of these ‘Serial Stories’ to be published in the Journal was David Pae’s unsigned novel, Jessie Melville; or the Double Sacrifice, billed by the Bolton Evening News as “a singularly-interesting plot, in which many thrilling scenes are depicted, and many varied and attractive characters introduced”.[3] First serialised in 1855 in the North Briton, Jessie Melville was one of Pae’s earliest successful works.[4] As Graham Law suggests in his seminal study, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press, W.F. Tillotson “decided to include from the opening issue a serial novel of proven worth” which “was presumably successful in helping to get the new paper off the ground, since Jessie was followed by three further full-length second-hand Pae serials […] running continuously in the Bolton Weekly Journal until mid-December 1873”.[5] However, while Jessie proved to be a popular serialisation, it was not critically well received. Reviewing the novel in 1856, The Athenaeum declared it to be “a weak and absurd story” of marital intrigue, protesting that the novel suggests “it is the duty of every Christian to sacrifice his own inclinations to the good of others!”.[6] Considering the fifteen year passage of time between the initial popular and critical reception of Jessie, Tillotson’s decision to nonetheless launch the Bolton Weekly with Pae’s evangelical melodrama clearly demonstrated astute awareness of his readership; the novel’s wide-ranging appeal emerging in the balance between the “thrilling scenes” of thwarted love and the sentimental “high virtue” conservatism.[7] This supplied the “amusing and instructive reading” the Journal had promised.

By August 1873, the Bolton Weekly Journal had begun serialising Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s bigamy novel, Taken at the Flood, and as Law indicates, “four new Lancashire Journals were being set up on the back of the publicity created”.[8] The Tillotson Fiction Bureau was quickly established to commission new writing to be published in the Bolton Weekly Journal while also innovatively syndicated – often simultaneously – across multiple periodical publications around Britain (and later, worldwide), radically altering the landscape of publishing fiction by extending the literary market. As Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor note in the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, “after the Bolton firm entered the fiction syndication business, the Journals were among the most innovative venues for serial novels in the last quarter of the nineteenth century […] they achieved a collective weekly circulation [of] over 100,000 copies”.[9]

The impact of Bolton’s Tillotson Bureau on the publishing world was recognised and held in high esteem by Tillotson’s contemporaries. Writing in 1882 about “London Newspapers” and the “foremost men connected with the Metropolitan press” Joseph Hatton remarked that “[t]imes have changed wonderfully within the past few years. Some of the best known novels of the present day have made their first appearance in the columns of provincial newspapers”.[10] Notably, Hatton credited the Bolton connection as responsible for this enriching shift in the publication and mass consumption of literary writing. In a footnote, Hatton further explained that it is “Chiefly through the enterprise of Mr. Tillotson, of Bolton, ‘purveyor of fiction’ to the provincial press, hardly a weekly paper appears in the country that has not among its general contents a continuous story, written by popular authors”.[11] Tillotson’s influence on the publication and consumption of serialised popular fiction was firmly established within the first decade of the Bolton Weekly Journal’s formation.

A key feature of the Victorian Bolton project involves historical research to discover and retell the stories of influential figures who informed, or originated from, the Bolton area. In doing so, students engage in local heritage conservation, revealing hidden or forgotten narratives pertinent to understanding the history of Bolton; such work is crucial to promoting a greater sense of appreciation and pride in place. In an essay that explores the impact of ‘local community-based heritage conservation on social wellbeing’, Andrew Power and Karen Smyth suggest that local heritage research ‘implicitly involves developing a closer relationship with one’s local area’ while the nature and scope of the work notably brings ‘people together’.[12] As part of the research into Bolton’s Victorian legacies, particular attention is paid to physically (and digitally) revisiting local heritage sites (such as blue plaque buildings and ‘green spaces’ including Rivington Terraced Gardens) to photograph, preserve, and reimagine the lives and stories behind the locations. By self-consciously traversing the same areas inhabited by notable nineteenth-century figures, a firmer degree of connection to the past, and value of the locale in the present, is often established. Indeed, Power and Smyth’s work investigated ‘the specific role of space and place in […] heritage project[s]’, quoting from Doreen Massey’s 2005 definition that “whereas space is abstract, place is concrete”, with Power and Smyth concluding that ‘“public space” […] only becomes a place when it is locally differentiated and endowed with a particular value and meaning’.[13] Exploring heritage spaces both physically, intellectually, and imaginatively, to then collaboratively co-produce a series of interactive blog posts – as is the case with the Victorian Bolton project – necessarily requires an additional degree of investment from students that endows further ‘value and meaning’ to perceptions of Bolton’s cultural significance. These Victorian heritage locations are tangibly recorded by students as places of historical importance on our multi-pinpoint map.

For more on Bolton’s exciting culture of contemporary writing, visit the English and Creative Writing’s literature map, Writing Bolton.