Victorian Bolton is a research project led by Dr Kim Edwards Keates at the University of Bolton, focusing on the town’s rich literary heritage and nineteenth-century cultural legacies.
While Bolton’s significant role in the publication of Victorian popular fiction has become a largely forgotten past, English and Creative Writing students on the ‘Future Directions’ work placement module and the specialist final-year ‘Virtual Victorians’ course rediscover notable historical figures and their remarkable literary connections to Bolton. Authors such as Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, Florence Marryat, Thomas Hardy, and Arthur Conan Doyle, were variously linked with the Tillotson Fiction Bureau in Bolton and the Bolton Weekly Journal. Beyond this, the project also seeks to rediscover and celebrate the lives of influential Victorian Boltonians who were of national significance or contributed towards transforming the town, as signposted on our Victorian Bolton Map.
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.
This is where the research for Victorian Bolton begins. English and Creative Writing undergraduates are conducting primary archival research to examine the critical, contemporary reception of the wide-ranging popular fiction serialised in the Bolton Weekly Journal from 1873-1901. In doing so, we aim to:
- Explore the impact and reach of the Tillotson Fiction Bureau on the publication of Victorian popular fiction;
- Reveal the aesthetic, political, and social imperatives that informed Tillotson’s publication and commissioning of literary works;
- Reflect upon the Victorian’s perception of Bolton and its standing in the literary world.
The Victorian Bolton map likewise records the lesser-known narratives of notable nineteenth-century moments, figures, and locations, to reassess perceptions of Bolton and the community.
Bolton, 1894
Compare the 1894 Ordnance Survey map of Bolton to how the town looks today.
Notes & References
[1] Anon. ‘On and After Saturday’, Bolton Evening News, 27 October 1871, p. 3.
[2] Anon. ‘On and After Saturday Next, November 4th, will be published The Bolton Weekly Journal’, Bolton Evening News, 31 October 1871, p. 2.
[3] Anon. ‘New Serial Story’, Bolton Evening News, 4 November 1871, p. 1.
[4] L. Brake and M. Demoor. (eds.) Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain. Gent and London: Academia Press and The British Library, 2009, p. 476.
[5] G. Law, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000, p. 65. Pae’s Jessie Melville was also simultaneously serialised in the Essex Halfpenny Newsman in 1872, advertised in the newspaper, as “a NEW STORY, of great interest” (‘To Our Readers’, 16 December 1871, p. 2). The advert for Pae’s story was notably duplicated across the lower page three times, taking up half the page width. Designed to capture the reader’s attention, the Essex Halfpenny Newsman clearly anticipated that the advertised serialisation of Pae’s novel would be appealing to their intended readership (described by the paper as “Artisans, Agricultural Labourers, Cottagers and Domestic Servants” (‘The Essex Halfpenny Newsman’, 5 February 1870, p. 3)). That this “new story” was in fact a recycled publication was omitted from the newspaper’s publicity. Instead, the editors of the Essex Halfpenny Newsman were utilising the same publication strategies deployed by the Bolton Weekly Journal to boost their readership; the inaugural issue of the Essex Halfpenny Newsman promised that “An additional attractive feature of the Paper will be found in a stirring ORIGINAL TALE, To be continued Weekly” (‘The Essex Halfpenny Newsman’, 5 February 1870, p. 3). Established the previous year in 1870, the Essex Newsman was a relatively ‘young’ publication that had similarly recognised the importance of including serialised popular fiction to ensure the paper’s success. The first work of serialised fiction to appear in the Essex Newsman was Varley Shrubsole: or, The Secret of the Elm Grove (1865-66), which had been previously circulated in the mid-1860s in the Derbyshire Times and Chesterfield Herald, Morpeth Herald, and Cardiff Times.
[6] Anon. ‘Jessie Melville, or, the Double Sacrifice: an Edinburgh Tale’, The Athenaeum, (1501), 2 August 1856, p. 960.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Law, op. cit., p. 66. In an early, large block advertisement promoting the forthcoming serialisation of Braddon’s Taken at the Flood one month ahead of its publication, the Bolton Evening News declared that the Bolton Weekly Journal would soon “contain the opening chapter of an original story by that Greatest Living Novelist Miss Braddon”, pre-emptively assuring readers that the novel “will be one of the best Stories ever written” (‘Taken at the Flood’, 29 July 1873, p. 2). While such hyperbolic advertising strategies were not atypical of the time, the advert continues to candidly explain the financial risk involved in such a venture, indicating that while the paper had “been so fortunate to make [publication arrangements] with the distinguished author, [it] is necessarily accompanied with very great expense, but is an earnest of the determination [sic] to make the Journal in every sense acceptable to its readers” (‘Taken at the Flood’, 29 July 1873, p. 2). The investment in establishing a well-respected literary periodical in anticipation of a loyal readership was explicit: “the Proprietor and Publisher ventures to believe that the Journal will receive such additional support on the part of the public as will amply justify the enterprise” (‘Taken at the Flood’, 29 July 1873, p. 2).
[9] Brake and Demoor. (eds.) op. cit., p. 63.
[10] J. Hatton, Journalistic London: Being a Series of Sketches of Famous Pens and Papers of the Day. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1882, p. 201.
[11] Ibid.
[12] A. Power and K. Smyth, ‘Heritage, Health and place: The legacies of local community-based heritage conservation on social wellbeing’, Health & Place, 39 (2016), 160-167. [Online] Available from: <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2016.04.005> Accessed 20 August 2021.
[13] Ibid.
Bibliography
Anon. ‘New Serial Story’, Bolton Evening News, 4 November 1871, p. 1. [Online] Available from: <https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/BL/0000645/18711104/001/0001> [Accessed 20 May 2021].
Anon. ‘Jessie Melville, or, the Double Sacrifice: an Edinburgh Tale’, The Athenaeum, (1501), 2 August 1856, p. 960. [Online] Available from: < https://www-proquest-com.ezproxy.bolton.ac.uk/britishperiodicals/docview/8826609/466ADA69847B4FF1PQ/1?accountid=9653> [Accessed 20 May 21].
Anon. ‘On and After Saturday, November 4th, 1871, will be published the Bolton Weekly Journal, and District News’. Bolton Evening News, 27 October 1871, p. 3. [Online] Available from: <https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000645/18711027/097/0003> [Accessed 20 May 2021].
Anon. ‘On and After Saturday Next, November 4th, will be published The Bolton Weekly Journal’, Bolton Evening News, 31 October 1871, p. 2. [Online] Available from <https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/BL/0000645/18711031/038/0002> [Accessed 20 May 2021].
Anon. ‘Taken at the Flood’, Bolton Evening News, 29 July 1873, p. 2. [Online] Available from <https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000645/18730729/055/0002> [Accessed 20 August 2021].
Anon. ‘The Essex Halfpenny Newsman’, Essex Halfpenny Newsman, 5 February 1870, p. 3 [Online] Available from: <https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/BL/0000380/18700205/024/0003> [Accessed 23 June 2021].
Anon. ‘To Our Readers’, Essex Halfpenny Newsman, 16 December 1871, p. 2 [Online] Available from: <https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/BL/0000380/18711216/001/0002> [Accessed 21 June 2021].
Brake, L. and M. Demoor. (eds.) Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain. Gent and London: Academia Press and The British Library, 2009.
Hatton, J. Journalistic London: Being a Series of Sketches of Famous Pens and Papers of the Day. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1882.
Law, G. Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000.
Power, A., and K. Smyth, ‘Heritage, Health and place: The legacies of local community-based heritage conservation on social wellbeing’, Health & Place, 39, 2016, 160-167. [Online] Available from: <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2016.04.005> [Accessed 20 August 2021].