This chapter explores the range of essayistic writing in nineteenth-century newspapers: leaders (political and topical in focus and the principal genre of the Victorian daily and weekly press), middles (a shorter version of the leader and characteristic of some weeklies), correspondence columns from journalists at home and abroad, and reviews of both books and theatre. It charts the expansion of the press at mid-century following the abolition of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ and an influx of literary talent that raised the quality of newspapers, and it notes the transformation of newspapers at the end of the century with the creation of literary pages, supplements, and special features (following the demise of many quarterly reviews and monthly magazines). The second half of the chapter examines the newspaper writing of John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, and argues that each made a unique contribution to the newspapers of their day.

That advice, given in 1825 to John Gibson Lockhart, who was tossing up between two editorial posts he had been offered, summed up a commonly held view of the relative positions of the newspaper as distinct from the periodical press in the first half of the nineteenth century. The publisher John Murray had plans to launch a newspaper, the Representative, while at the same time looking for a successor to John Taylor Coleridge, the current editor of his successful Quarterly Review (1809–1967). Lockhart's credentials for both posts were strong. As one of two young writers who, along with the publisher William Blackwood, were primarily responsible for the success of the pugnacious and high-spirited Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine ( 1817–1980), he had had nearly a decade of experience as a journalist. He appeared to relish the controversies, both literary and political, into which he and his colleague John Wilson, better known as ‘Christopher North’, had plunged Blackwood’s, and he had demonstrated an ability to turn out a prodigious amount of copy quickly.

The advice given by Murray's solicitor that the Quarterly Review was better suited to Lockhart's social position was endorsed by his fatherin-law, Sir Walter Scott, who was adamant that the editorship of a newspaper was not a desirable position for a member of the family. In the end Lockhart accepted Murray's invitation to edit the Quarterly, and the editorship of the ill-fated Representative went to the ambitious young Benjamin Disraeli.

ON THE MORNING of her death on 16 February 1895, the journalist and novelist Camilla Crosland (1812–95) received an early copy of Chambers's Edinburgh Journal for 23 February containing her essay on ‘politeness.’ It was her last contribution to the famous weekly, ending an association that had begun in 1841. According to her autobiography, Landmarks of a Literary Life 1820–1892 (1893), Crosland's writing career, like that of many of her female contemporaries, began out of necessity. Born into the ‘cultivated middle classes,’ as she described them (Crosland 1893: 17), her education was cut short by her father's sudden death, when she was required to find a means of supporting herself and her mother. Having tried ‘governessing,’ she then turned to writing. A poem she published in Bentley's Miscellany caught the eye of Robert Chambers, of the Edinburgh publishing firm, and led to an invitation to write for the Journal and to a lifelong friendship with the Chambers brothers. The Countess of Blessington was another patron, offering her opportunities to write for the annual Book of Beauty and later to the Keepsake. Leitch Ritchie, editor of Friendship's Offering, appointed her to the unofficial post of subeditor in the early 1840s, for which she was remunerated.

Crosland was advantaged by having been born and based in London. Landmarks of a Literary Life recounts the literary parties and receptions to which she was invited, the most enjoyable of which were the ‘at homes’ of the novelist and editor Anna Maria Hall and her husband Samuel Carter Hall at their cottage ‘the Rosery’ in old Brompton, where writers, artists, and publishers crowded into the small rooms on Thursday afternoons. Writers’ knowledge of one another did not depend solely on these social occasions, as Crosland emphasised: ‘It must be remembered that literary people, of whatever grade, who know each other through the pen, never do meet as strangers’ (1893: 153). Her memoir illustrates the intimate world of literary London of the 1840s and 1850s, and the ease with which writers and artists of different backgrounds and degrees of seniority mingled. It also illustrates the ready acceptance of women writers in these circles.