Journalism’s Iconoclast: Rosamund Marriott Watson (‘Graham R. Tomson’)

Abstract

As a complex network dependent on the communications circuit identified by Robert Darnton and the ever-shifting concentrations of symbolic capital within the field of cultural production,¹ journalism must be approached in relational terms with due attention to outliers as well as exemplars. Such an approach is particularly needed for one strand within fin-de-siècle print culture, woman-of-letters journalism. As Linda H. Peterson has demonstrated, the proliferating periodical and newspaper outlets of the nineteenth century played a key material and social role for nineteenth-century women writers. With new opportunities to publish art or literary criticism, column-writing, travel and biographical sketches, and essays, more women than ever before entered the field of journalism, a great many of them earning distinction as women of letters.² One exemplar, whom Peterson examines at length, was Alice Meynell. Meynell began as a poet whose aspirations to future achievement were embedded in the title of her debut volume of 1875, Preludes. But upon marrying she diverted her energies from poetry to journalism, collaboratively editing a journal with husband Wilfred Meynell and actively writing literary and art criticism, a domestic model pioneered by William and Mary Howitt. And it served Meynell well. Her essays in the Scots (later National) Observer and in the Pall Mall Gazette’s ‘Wares of Autolycus’, according to Peterson, first won critical acclaim for Meynell as a ‘classic’ writer who memorably summoned wisdom amidst the transient backdrop of journalism.