What is a Periodical Editor? Types, Models, Characters, and Women

When we talk about women periodical editors, do we share a conceptual or definitional understanding of what we mean when we say ‘editor’, whatever our language? Does it matter if we leave the label so open that it incorporates as many types of periodical editor as there are periodicals? Can we be more categorical? And, critically, do we need to be more categorical? Accounts of editorial types that exist in the nineteenth-century British context are diverse in terms of descriptors but overwhelmingly male and white as models. Does the rich and extensive recuperation of editorial work by women over the past four decades require shared frames of understanding that counter such gendered models and that work across our different linguistic, ideological, geographical, and social territories? This discussion concludes that models and typologies are too restrictive, exclusive, and confining: they replicate and reinforce sets of privilege. Instead, we might work on developing shared sets of questions that will allow for comparative analysis across our various case studies so that we can debate issues of access, power, and influence, seek common ground, and articulate the reasons for difference.

The May 2019 European Women Editors conference at Ghent University raised a number of questions about how we have come to understand the term 'editor' in the context of periodical print cultures.1 The conference was part of the ERC funded project 'Agents of Change: Women Editors and Socio-Cultural Transformation in Europe, 1710-1920 led by the editor-in-chief of this journal, Marianne Van Remoortel. This project has identified nearly 1,800 European women editors working across 1,700 different periodicals and newspapers.2 It is a model of the collaborative practice that has long been identified as crucial to knowledge generation in periodical studies because the newspaper and periodical corpus is so vast and varied.3 The conference programme revealed rich, scholarly recuperations of women editors from Portugal to Romania, Finland to India, and new angles on those more familiar. Presentations ranged from Estonian writer, journalist, pedagogue, feminist, Lilli Suburg's editorship of the controversial magazine Linda  to the work of women editors in the feminist press in Hungary during the First World War; from Helmina von Chézy's use of emotional networks as editor of Französische Miscellen in Paris (1803-04) to Marica Nadlišek Bartol's cultivation from Trieste of a network of women writers while editing Slovenka (1897)(1898)(1899)(1900), the first Slovenian women's newspaper, at the opposite end of the century. This special issue features ten case studies that expand on work presented at the conference. The plenitude and diversity of the programme provoked questions: why are we talking about these women now? Can our recuperated editors speak to each other across these time periods, languages, regional, and ideological contexts? That is to say, what are our models for comparing these editorial interventions, for understanding the work of these women as agents of change? And most basically: what do we mean when we say that these women are editors?
There is an obvious approach to my first question: this is all part of the recuperative work of feminist scholarship since its foundation, which I see as a type of socio-cultural memory activism, acknowledging the conditions both personal and infrastructural that obtain for such work to get done. These conditions are well summarized by pioneering feminist print culture scholar, Margaret Beetham: 'The "how" of a research method' she tells us, 'depends first on the "why" of the research question, and answering this question is always a complicated mix of personal history, institutional pressures, time, and money, as well as commissions, chance, conversations with other people (oral and written), and what we might broadly call the "state of the discipline".'4 She goes on to surface her drives: 'my lived experience, my other reading, my feminist politics' and notes 'Like the politics of movements by the powerless, the politics of research in its best sense is always concerned with addressing a blind spot, an absence, or a repression '.5 The ethical core of this research must always be reflexive; in researching blind spots, we must acknowledge our own.6 This is a commitment to a politics of knowledge that is decidedly un-egotistical: shared, collaborative, collective, always dialogic.
1 This article is adapted from a keynote lecture delivered at that European Women Editors conference.
I thank the organizers of the conference at Ghent University and conference participants for their feedback, questions, and knowledge shared. 2 For the full description of this project, see https://www.wechanged.ugent.be/ [accessed 7 September 2020]. 3 As Latham and Scholes put it, 'to be as diverse as the objects it examines […] periodical studies should be constructed as a collaborative scholarly enterprise that cannot be confined to one scholar or even a single discipline'. See Sean Latham Ibid.,pp. 146,147. 6 Ibid.,p. 147. The second question asks us to think about how we move from the individual drive that sees us pursuing particular bodies in the archives -and undoubtedly overlooking others -to the situating of those bodies in wider developments in our fields of study in ways that reshape and deepen the conversation. Shared frames of understanding that work across our different linguistic, ideological, geographical, and social territories are required for such communication. From the May 2019 conference, it was evident that conceptual approaches that foregrounded the growth and tracking of networks (social, political, cultural, affective, and material) and theories around the transnational remediation of content are underpinning recent scholarship in ways that allow for such comparative understanding of how women editors operated.7 To the final question then -which just provokes more questions: when we talk about women periodical editors, do we share a conceptual or definitional understanding of what we mean when we say 'editor', whatever our working language? Does it matter if we leave the label so open that it incorporates as many types of periodical editor as there are periodicals? Can we be more categorical? And, critically, do we need to be more categorical?
In the nineteenth-century British context in which I work, informed attempts to address the question 'what is a periodical editor?' comment on how difficult it is to provide a useful answer, so innumerable are the kinds or types of editors. Or they conclude the term 'editor' may not require definition; what we could look to instead are editorial functions or practices. That these functions or practices vary so widely across time and place, and continuously evolve, might suggest we should abandon the falsely cohering term 'editor', or at least be careful to be very specific about what we mean when we use it. Matthew Taunton in his Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism piece on 'Editors' points out that exceptions would always be found that confound any workable definitions. He warns too, however, that '[t]here is nevertheless a damaging tendency to conflate the diverse roles played by editors of various publications at various times under a generic job description that limits our understanding of the social, intellectual and economic functioning of the press'.8 Taunton echoes the conclusion reached by Robert Patten and David Finkelstein in their rightly influential account of mid-nineteenth-century editorial practices in Britain that there are too many types to usefully go beyond describing individual cases. Patten and Finkelstein back away from categorical conclusions; 'circumspect in offering generalizations about the genus of editor' they instead focus on editorial functions, descriptions of editorial collectives, and enough 'exceptions' to every example to suggest the impossibility of establishing useful paradigms. As they explain with winning frankness: 'By "editing" one could mean almost anything.'9 7 For more on these approaches see, for example Charlotte D'Eer, 'Women Editors in the German- This approach has consequences. In her analysis of the careers of two nineteenthcentury British editors, John Morley and James Knowles, Helen Small has argued that intellectual history to date has 'given us only very limited conceptions of the aims and achievements of late nineteenth-century periodical editors' and as a result, key factors that influence the content and development of liberal intellectual journals such as Morley's Fortnightly Review have been overlooked because of an over-emphasis on the periodical's apparent ideological stance (based on published content and identified contributors) and under-emphasis on the confining and impinging factors that shaped each volume, such as cash-flow problems that at times put the purchase of serial fiction out of the journal editor's reach. Clashes with and censorship by editorial boards or magazine owners, financial constraints, and so on indicate that 'the material forms and content of a periodical were not in fact "editorial" choices at all'.10 Marysa Demoor's survey of nineteenth-century British editors' self-descriptions and contemporary representations of the Editor role points up the overwhelming gendered and class biases attached to the term 'Editor', biases that are replicated in scholarly criticism until relatively recently.11 Demoor observes that we need 'to investigate and interrogate' what she terms 'pre-existing narratives of editing' and 'to methodically evaluate the status of individual editors as well as the editorial profession in general'.12 Self-presentation, contemporary judgements by peers, or even individual case studies will not suffice: wider methodological approaches are needed to 'methodically evaluate'.
These issues are not confined to the British context. To take one example: Martyn Cornick, speaking in the context of editors involved in the twentieth-century French literary periodical press anticipates Demoor's conclusions in his call for the need to 'demythologize' acclaimed editorial types deemed central to French literary and intellectual history and critically examine their actual contributions to the field.13 Multilingual scholar Matthew Philpotts shares these concerns, noting even more emphatically that a wider consequence of the apparent hesitation about taking on generalizing approaches or theoretical studies of 'The Editor' is that it leaves us without meaningful comparative frames to allow us to do critical, analytical work. As a result, descriptive, recuperative studies dominate our scholarship on periodical editors. Philpotts, writing in 2012 about twentieth-century French, German, and English editors of literary periodicals (and paraphrasing Nora Tomlinson) observed that 'so lacking is sustained critical analysis of the editorial role that it is difficult even to identify criteria by which success might be judged'.14 If we think it is our business to take success as a reason for why we choose to recuperate or readdress a particular editor's working life, the point stands. And if analysing for 'success' is not our motivation, we are all, of course, compelled to answer, as creatively, conservatively, anarchically, or interestingly as we choose, the 'so what?' question: why do these editors matter now? This is a question that also demands some comparative frames. The collaborative, collective practice exemplified in the WeChangEd project casts a wider linguistic and cultural-historical net. The desire to identify the blind spots, fill the gaps, shine a light on the repressed, right a wronged absence is clear in the title -'Agents of Change' -and the activist motivations of the objects of study are underscored. Many of these women editors were activists too, of various political and ideological persuasions with a myriad of allegiances, identifications, and needs (financial and otherwise) operating transnationally across a variety of literary platforms. As editors, one dimension they share is that they are all intervening in the public sphere, changing an established narrative or enabling its ongoing transmission, disrupting or confirming a status quo. The project, in identifying these women editors, tracing their transnational networks, and in the longer studies associated with the project analysing their interventions in fuller detail, is recuperative, revisionist, and political.16 It is an ongoing collaborative act of cultural memory making, changing the way we remember the past and so defining new futures for media studies and media history in the ways it frames narratives about women as producers of culture and of the public sphere. At its core is a partially crowd sourced, publicly available database of women editors working in different linguistic or national, multi-lingual, and transnational networks. Such an archival project has necessarily ideologically and methodologically self-conscious dimensions. Like any database, infrastructural questions promote reflective practice -the how of the archive build provokes the why, to use Margaret Beetham's terms. How to categorize English language periodicals published in France? German editors working in Paris? Spanish periodicals targeted to Argentinian markets? Anglo-Irish women editors working in London? The questions produced by the recorded data continue to proliferate: how to gauge the influence of a periodical editor whose periodicals last four issues against an editor involved with a periodical for forty years? Where are the edges of the networks being traced? Do multiple contact points within a network imply depth of influence or business need or a connection based on friendship?
Marianne Van Remoortel and Jasper Schelstraete in their overview article on the methodological decisions behind the database, 'Towards a Sustainable and Collaborative Data Model for Periodical Studies', outline how the database speaks to us and across boundaries; how it situates and facilitates collaborative, comparative research through reflective, self-conscious systems build; how data-modelling decisions produce 'ontological insights' that inform our shared scholarly practices.17 The model they produced is sophisticated and enabling. We must generalize and systematize because we cannot talk only to ourselves, and we must situate our work always in conversation. And such conversations need a shared grammar or underlying structure, as is illustrated by the visualisation of their data models as flow charts.18 Subjective and situational drives underpin our work, and the work of the editors we study. Our editors, as well as ourselves have personalities (performative or discursive or lived), a politics, different degrees of privilege and privation. As such, in addition to the bibliographical and network build, we also need to put more body on what we understand by the term 'Periodical Editor' in ways that flesh out such transnational comparison and exchange. But if we accept the arguments, like those made so powerfully by Laurel Brake, for instance, we should also move from our still persistent historical weddedness to singular achievement by singular figures (the Author; the Editor) with their compelling biographical trajectories. Fuller attention might be given to the rhetorical presence of the editor in the 'thing' that is the periodical or newspaper and the many-hands teams that go into producing that 'voice' (whether self-represented as consistently singular or trans-authorial or openly polyphonic). Such teams would include sub-editors, contributors, managers, designers, printers, publishers. The question 'what is a periodical editor' becomes as much or more so about processes, collectives, not individuals, more about 'structures' and economies of the press.19 This is a vital move to ensure that we do not continue to reinforce teleologies of privilege: giving space to the names that always have had that space or platforming another set of names instead in an endless palimpsestic overlaying. Methodological models would have to be flexible enough to avoid doubling down on the marginalization of the individual or social and political groupings (as Brake does in her illuminating work on historical shifts and patterns of change in media history). Without the accumulation of individual examples can we fully draw out the impinging 'forms of finitude' to borrow a phrase from Amanda Anderson -economic, social, racial, psychological, political, to which bodies are subjected to such differing degrees?20 We need to continue to acknowledge the personalized motivations that form our public spheres, historically and in the present moment. In such ways we reinforce the affective dimensions to the work of cultural activism and cultural intervention: ours and those of our women editors, for example, as a way of insisting that the body was always in the picture -just mostly an affective, emotional masculinized and white one. 21 With our case studies, there is always the concern, as Patrick Collier warned in his review of modernist periodical studies, that we accumulate a 'plethora of micro-studies that have incommensurate aims and methods, are not speaking to each other, and thus are not contributing to an overall understanding of how periodicals functioned' within and across cultural fields.22 The value of models should be that they allow for comparative 18 Ibid.,  analyses that enrich and reorient a field, often by demonstrating how those hemming in factors, which seem so personal, so related to the vagaries of an individual life are in fact common cause or interestingly messy in ways that disrupt too comfortable (for some) histories. This is how we make our case for wide understanding and for structural and systemic change -to our historical narratives, our cultural canons (and even the idea of canon), our curricula, our social and political categories, including our reconfiguring of what constitutes the public sphere. As Easley, King, and Morton put it: 'Only by articulating methodological issues clearly can we debate whether we want those pressures and their results to continue, and if not, how an alternative might be imagined and implemented.'23 This is not methodology in service to or privileging established discourses, scholarly approaches, or the reinforcing particular hierarchies or literary and cultural histories to which we must all speak: it is the opposite -the attention to the messy text with half runs and short-lived runs; the editorial collective rather than the singular name; the marginalized and 'minor' that demand attention first and foremost because they exist.
In the nineteenth-century context, the British press had a global circulation and attendant pervasive influence that was supported by an aggressive imperialist agenda. What models of periodical press editorship have been identified historically in this expansive and unstable context? How may have such models limited the longevity or afterlives of women editors? Editors of colour? Editors of more marginalized or oppressed classes or groups? Editors of magazines or periodicals that are focussed on trades, leisure, professional, or popular activities that lack the symbolic capital of the still more celebrated political, cultural, or literary journals? Do the historical models that exist relate to each other and recognize such barriers or capacities? This last question draws on the affective emplotment of lives in a compelling narrative in ways that see an individual editor's career become representative of a 'type'. Do we need new terms, more terms, or perhaps a movement away from labels altogether, such as those historically dominating accounts of the nineteenth-century British press, for instance: the 'inimitable'; the 'gentleman amateur'; the 'showman'; the 'impresario'; the 'celebrity'; the 'bureaucrat'; the 'hack'; the 'distinguished functionary'. These labels emerge from taking case studies as representative without perhaps fully examining the premises for our cultural assumptions about their centrality. The examples are almost always male and always white. What follows is a brief overview of some categorizing approaches that turn on 'types'. I offer them in the knowledge that all are decidedly Anglo-centric. And I hope that this start is an opening out that might help us to come to conclusions about interrogating and investigating the typological approach.

What is a Periodical Editor? The Nineteenth-Century British Context
The difficulty of definition is not new, nor is it an academic problem. Joel Wiener's introduction to Innovators and Preachers (1985), one of the very few scholarly collections dedicated to periodical editors, quotes the nineteenth-century journalist and editor Henry Labouchère to sum up his sense of the impossibility of the task: 'I have now been connected with newspapers over thirty years and I have never yet discovered what an editor is.'24 Wiener goes on to suggest that he hopes Innovators and Preachers will come closer to helping us discover what Labouchère could not. There is no doubt that the collection provides a range of illuminating insights into the work and working conditions of nineteenth-century editors by leading scholars in the field. Wiener acknowledges that there are omissions and hopes the collection will start a conversation that will go on to theorize more fully the work of the periodical editor. The gaps he notes are essays on the 'technical aspect' of editing; on regional differences in Wales, Scotland, Ireland; essays on editors of specialist areas such as sports editors or foreign news editors. He offers a summary of what the volume reveals: In an age characterized by the proliferation of print, the editor acted as a conduit between text and audience. He communicated ideas and values to a multiple readership. He enriched Victorian political and cultural life in diverse ways. And perhaps most importantly, he helped create the modern newspaper and magazine, without which life for our Victorian forebears and ourselves would be considerably duller. In brief, the editor was situated at the nucleus of the Victorian world: He typified both the transformations that were making Britain an urban nation and a stable society.25 Though the collection includes one chapter on the women editors' collective, the Langham Place group (by Sheila Herstein) and includes an account of some of the women editors of the Queen, as is clear from Wiener's summary description, that difficult as it may be to fully encapsulate the work of the nineteenth-century editor, so various the 'genus', the default type is decidedly male. And there is little sense either of how the 'nucleus' of that Victorian world is constructed through and supported by imperialism's violent reach.
Wiener is responding to the narrative of the age in this default categorizing of the editor as male. As Beth Palmer puts it in an important overview of Victorian women editors, unsurprisingly: 'throughout the nineteenth century […] many of the qualities of good editorship were characterized as masculine. Books and articles advising young women journalists how to succeed in the industry almost universally assume that the editor of periodicals (and other publications) will be a man.'26 There have been revealing studies in the past two decades that have changed that narrative. Along with articles recuperating and reassessing the careers of individual women editors, we have seen transforming wider contributions on the work of women editors more broadly such as Jayne Marek's pioneering account of the collaborative and cooperative editorial practices of editors of modernist little magazines, including Harriet Monroe, Jane Heap, Margaret Anderson, and Marianne Moore; Barbara Onslow's more general but equally valuable historical overview of nineteenth-century women editors in Women of the Press and work that has followed these influential studies to expand greatly our understanding of the different ways women carried out editorial roles.27 But even still, almost to this day, it is a matter of comment and controversy when periodicals in existence since the nineteenth century need to acknowledge gender diversity in its editorial boards, as the Lancet (founded in 1824) recently did laying out how many women occupied key editorial roles across their many publications.28 And rarely are these women editors attached to monikers that encapsulate a model to be followed (or even rejected). Nomenclature is a powerful affective force in shaping typologies. The title of Wiener's collection is important in terms of signalling the purchase editors have in shaping the public sphere: they are 'innovators and preachers'. These men are 'Lionhunters' and 'Literary Show men', as Joanne Shattock records of James Knowles, founder editor of the monthly Nineteenth Century. In her survey in Wiener's collection of editorial types of quarterly reviews she notes Francis Jeffrey at the Edinburgh Review, self-describes, jokingly as a 'feudal monarch', and more seriously embodies the 'gentleman amateur', careful to avoid the taint of trade. And though some of the editors operating as effective or discriminating or 'distinguished' functionaries are far from household names, Shattock observes, if she were to generalize, the '"gentlemanliness" of the position is significant' in terms of how the role of mid-century quarterly editors is performed.29 Helen Small further acknowledges the context that allowed Knowles to follow the eighteenth-century model of 'Impresario' (part visionary, part showman, 'man of letters', and part entrepreneur): financial security provided by his career as an architect and back up, if needed, of his father's support, allowed the liberal intellectual the freedom to pay his contributors well and to employ staff to support the running of the journal without being confined by the demands of a board, external investors, or even, initially, a market. The models presume access to public roles, public work, education, and control over finances thereby excluding the vast majority of women and men. Small contrasts Knowles' relative editorial freedom with his contemporary John Morley at the Fortnightly Review. She unpacks Morley's editorial correspondence and the evidence of the journal itself (with its increasingly limited number of pages and articles, and the reduction of fiction on its pages) to suggest what has been attributed to Morley's editorial vision is quite often more prosaically the result of lack of a secure cash flow and editorial independence when answering to a 'hierarchical and complex management structure'.30 Morley, she suggests, is more of that increasingly common later nineteenth-century type, the 'Facilitator'.31 Some other models that reinforce the gendered nature of typologies include W. T. Stead's provocative insistence on personality-oriented journalism, full of missionary zeal or apostolic vision even, so long as editors ensured they did not act as 'eunuchs of  Wiener (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 161-84 (pp. 161, 163, 165, 179). 30 Small,p. 61. 31 Ibid.,p. 62. the craft'.32 The various men of the Blackwood family who edited Blackwood's over its long history offer another much studied model: the proprietor/publisher/editor, where the periodical operates in a symbiotic relationship with a publishing house. In addition to this amalgam cohering around the head of the firm, Patten and Finkelstein nominate two other broad-stroke types of mid-century editor in their account of the House of Blackwood (these are rehearsed again by Taunton in his DNCJ entry). They single out the big name, or celebrity (e.g William M. Thackeray at the Cornhill; Mary Elizabeth Braddon at Belgravia; Ellen Wood at Argosy). Their second broad-stroke type is the 'hands-on' and invested visionary who oversees all aspects of production, exemplified by Charles Dickens at Household Words, with the support of his sub-editor W. H. Wills.33 Dickens is obviously also a big name editor, or celebrity, but 'hands on' because critically invested through substantial part-ownership of the journal. These mid-century modes, Taunton reminds us, are different from the 'bookseller's drudge' of the eighteenth century or the early to mid-nineteenth century gentleman amateur or 'distinguished functionary'. Further, such 'singular types', Taunton notes, are different again from the paid employee, for instance, in enterprises of partisan education or professional advancement such as Knight's Penny Journal, where it is presumed changing editors cycling through employment were not 'agents of change'.
The naming conventions are steeped in a structuring of the public sphere that is unequivocally patriarchal and metropolitan. In contrast, generally, when women editors are mentioned at all they are typically framed in three overarching ways: • covert: the anonymous; pseudonymous; avatar; 'assistant' editor; secret editor; • collaborators/collectives/cooperatives: part of a network; partnership; team; • celebrities: though often, even here, pen names or married names featured strongly.
As professionalization and specialization of the role advance through the nineteenth century, the business of writing and producing periodicals becomes more diversified and competitive. Weekly, fortnightly, and monthly formats multiply to meet and to create new needs for expanding reading audiences. The role of the editor becomes less focused on the individual, on the personality (though of course there are exceptions, such as Stead, and well-known fiction writers or poets). And it is no small coincidence of course, that as the opportunities for women editors to enter the field expand, the emphasis on the ability or personality or individuality of the editor decreases.34 Taunton reminds us too of the 'fake' editors, the fictive front men (usually): expanding the Tatler and Idler models from the eighteenth century; we witness the attention that accrues around Mr Punch or Oliver Yorke at Fraser's Magazine, aggregated avatars (proto-cyborgs) that are clearly defined by gender and class. Such avatars are different again from the 'character of editress' as George Eliot describes herself -veiled, anonymous, driving the day-to-day work of the Westminster Review at mid-century while the periodical's owner and co-editor, John Chapman, presented as the man in charge. A new category is needed for her, as for so many of our women editors since, as I have argued elsewhere, her interventions in the layout, design, commissioning of work, editing of copy, vision for the Westminster Review, as well as attention to its commercial reach are far from 'facilitator'. Evans's wrote to Chapman about the job in arresting terms that expose naming tensions: With regard to the secret of the Editorship, it will perhaps be the best plan for you to state, that for the present you are to be regarded as the responsible person, but that you employ an Editor in whose literary and general ability you confide.35 This joint editorship model ('responsible person' plus 'Editor' with a telling capitalized 'E') is common too amongst husband/wife editorial partnerships. Such joint and collaborative ventures disrupt the self-actualizing visionary mode of the man of genius, the man of business, the man of influence, as do close editor/sub-editor pairings such as Dickens and Wills. As Melisa Klimaszewski has shown of Dickens's collaborative editing of the 'Christmas numbers' of Household Words and All the Year Round, when we interrogate the persuasive and affective emplotment of Dickens's singular editorial career -the 'Conductor', as he self-described and printed on the pages of his magazines -the editor emerges through the evidence of these annual publications as less singularly 'in charge', more open to contradiction, persuasion, and cooperation, and the publications, as a result, more evidently displaying polyvocality and dissensus.36 Beth Palmer has demonstrated how Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat, celebrated sensation novelists who performed a variety of public personae as editors to navigate a male-dominated press, exercised greater autonomy in the shaping of their careers. The author-editor role, of necessity 'public and interactive', as Palmer puts it, gave women 'control over the dissemination of their work; it provided status, contacts and remuneration; and the performative strategies it fostered could also be carried over to activities outside of the press'.37 Palmer's analysis of performativity as an editorial strategy offers a valuable contribution to the theorization of the role of editor as does her tracing of editorial models that created the conditions by which these sensation writing women editors created their public platforms.38 Matthew Philpotts's account of early twentieth-century literary editors offers perhaps the fullest attempt to theorize 'the editor'. Philpotts sets out to offer 'an explicitly comparative and typological approach to the role performed by the editors of literary periodicals' conceptualized through Bourdieu's theory of habitus.39 He draws on Bourdieu's understanding of cultural figures that operate as 'double personages' navigating both intellectual and economic 'dispositions' and identifies 'three broad typological species of editorship' that correspond to particular positions occupied by both the individual editor (his 'personal habitus') and the periodical in the field of cultural production.40 Philpotts's analysis offers a subtle and discriminating illustration of the various advantages and disadvantages and overlapping expressions of these types. The first, 'charismatic editorship', is defined by the singular figure who establishes an 35 Gordon Haight, ed., George Eliot Letters, 9 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) Philpotts,p. 42. 40 Ibid.,pp. 42,43. innovative or original position in the field, characterized in Philpott's analysis by Ford Maddox Ford's initially 'successful' editorship of the English Review and the editorial achievements of his contemporary John Middleton Murry. Their 'success' is measured in terms of influence on the development of literary modernism. Their effectiveness is based on personal connections (Bourdieu's symbolic capital), the further cultivation of personal networks, and personal traits that include, in Philpott's example, 'spellbinding' charisma, 'genuine sensitivity and kindness', 'altruism' essential in the cultivation of new talent', 'generosity of spirit', 'keenest of literary judgement', 'openness and carefree sociability'.41 The editor role, in this conception, 'is in no small measure a social one'.42 But these glowing advantages have their flip side that explains the short-lived nature of a journal under such editorship: lack of financial assiduity, carelessness in the day-to-day tasks of running a business, over-dependence on a singular figure and, with all that personality -the tendency for personal relationships to explode in blazing rows and highly personalized disputes that never mended. Such traits compromise longevity, as was the case with Ford Maddox Ford's English Review. 43 The second model, the 'bureaucratic' mode of editorship stands in marked contrast to the singular vision of charismatic editorship, as evident in its 'reliance on a welldeveloped managerial infrastructure', which Philpotts observes means it is more likely to be associated with long-standing review journals.44 A 'collective endeavour', which can include a 'charismatic' figure (such as Gide at the Nouvelle Revue Française) is defined more by the pragmatic leadership that ensures the 'essential mundane work that sustains a literary review' is carried out effectively (such as Jacques Rivière's 'bureaucratic' leadership at the NRF).45 It includes the adoption of 'more active entrepreneurial strategies' to secure the publication's longevity and dominance.46 This type of editorship is less innovative and more risk averse but also less vulnerable to the whims and flares and failings of individual personalities. As Philpotts puts it 'whereas the charismatic form of editorship privileges autonomous poetic dispositions on the part of the post-holder, the bureaucratic form places a particular emphasis on the "heteronomous" dimension of the editorial role, that is on the professional, administrative and commercial competences', which Philpotts suggests, 'originate outside the internal logic of the literary field itself '.47 This assumption is based on a very narrow definition of what constitutes 'the literary field' and as Philpotts acknowledges, typologies inflected by sociological models similarly struggle to accommodate the 'frequently dissonant cultural practices of a single individual' that make those distinctions outlined so much more porous.48 This means the third type of Editor is a rare thing. The 'mediating editorship' occupies the 'multiple habitus', exemplified in Philpotts's model by the poet and editor who also worked in a bank, T. S. Eliot.49 He navigates between the first two types and brings both symbolic and economic capital to offer the most ideal form of editorship which is summarized as a 'diverse range of often conflicting dispositions: intellectual and literary, economic and managerial; social and personal'. 50 Philpotts concludes,that '[t]he ideal editor is not only a poet and a professional, but also a politician and a profiteer and a publicist; less a double personage than a multiple personage'.51 This is surely ideal indeed. And again, this is a model of editorship that is premised on privilege on a number of different levels and one that in itself privileges the literary periodical.
So There are labels here, historical types, and categorizing models. And they exclude as many as they include, even within these geographically narrow (predominantly British), chronologically limited (predominantly nineteenth-century) parameters I have sketched here. We could keep adding ad infinitum. I agree with Maria DiCenzo and Patrick Collier's suggestions that we look for more pluralist approaches to navigating between the case study and the need for shared methodologies. As Collier puts it, 'the dream of a totalizing understanding is a chimera' and case studies or empirical studies 'if they place themselves in dialogue with larger categories in the field' can 'ultimately become the material on which larger synoptic hypotheses are built' while having the 'salutary effect of disrupting large and inevitably reductive historical narratives by insisting on the intransigent complexity of the particular'.52 So should we ask not what is an editor but what does an editor do? The approach has the positive advantage of placing emphasis on enacting, on purposeful construction of material object, of audience, of ideological remit. It also helps us to avoid symptomatic readings of what Nathan Hensley has described in another context as the 'exhumation' approach: the later critic taking the (superior) role of exhuming the political unconscious of a previous era.53 Marysa Demoor's lively overview of nineteenth-century British periodical editors takes this questioning line: 'What did nineteenth-century editors do and why did they pursue this line of work? How were they chosen to serve in editorial roles and what was expected of them?'54 These questions expand on the pragmatic list provided by Patten and Finkelstein, who summarize some of the types noted above as representative of historically recognized editorial modes but argue more strongly for attending rather to editorial functions. 'How does one begin to quantify and speculate on the variety of functions editors of periodicals served in nineteenth-century Britain?', they ask: So often we refer to someone as 'editing' a magazine, without much thought about what such duties entail. (Usually the reference is made to indicate that the 'editor' 'approved' of the contents of the issue.) How did those duties differ at different magazines and at different times? How has the 'editor function' been obscured by the 'cult of authorship' and its recent deconstruction? What might constitute the editor's role at various points along a spectrum of possibilities?55 They provide the follow examples of such functions: • overseeing finance and administration; • promoting ideology; • commissioning contributors; • arranging and perfecting copy; • buying and selling advertising; • supervising quality • and 'above all, giving the periodical a distinctive character'.56 Each of these functions opens up sets of comparative points that turn on the questions: why, when, what, where, and how? To take just two: commissioning contributors is a crucial editorial function, but your geographic location inflects how this commissioning functions (your where); as does your gender or your race -a where and when issue since mobility, reach, and networks are all circumscribed by politics that provide very different living experiences in time and place. Another crucial matter is your purpose in commissioning (the why): does 'promoting ideology' include the desire to make money for instance or the pressing need to make money to survive? The ability and the desire to 'give' a periodical a distinctive character depends on so many factors outside of the personality and prowess of the individual editor, such as access to technology, finances, and a network of contributors as well as ideological and political liberty. We most certainly need to move away from historical labels and types as a start point and to incorporate an historically alert reading of their compact power and the processes by which such 'types' are institutionalized. Such approaches could move to sets of more open questions around a series of frames. These questions ask us to work through the intersecting dimensions of the work of editing and thus help to shape our definitions of periodical editors. One benefit of this approach, as Laurel Brake has argued, is that a move to considering the 'rhetoric' of on 'editorial stance' rather a top 53 Nathan Hensley, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 210. 54 Demoor,p. 89. 55 Patten and Finkelstein,p. 148. 56 Ibid.,p. 152. down model of Editorship, will ensure the thing itself, the periodical, is not rendered invisible in our media histories.57 It is an approach that challenges us to consider networks of privilege and exclusion. It pushes for more nuanced understanding of the work of sub-editors, assistant editors, managing editors; of the distinctions that pertain between an indie editor working at her kitchen table and promoting a particular affective aesthetic and an editor of a global commercial brand.58 It asks us to attend more fully to why and how periodicals recirculate or recycle or remediate material (images; scissors and paste copy; multiple transnational versions of Punch, for example).59 It allows us to draw out more fully networked models of editorship, collaborative and competitive, based on geographical proximity, for example, as Mary Shannon has so effectively demonstrated; or activist network models based not on geographical proximity but on practical imperatives and personal commitment.60 Caroline Bressey, for instance has detailed Catherine Impey's modelling of Anti-Caste on the scissors-and-paste technique of the Temperance movement and the Black American press as well as her counter-intuitive but pragmatic decision to model the physical form of her antisegregation journal on The Southern Letter, edited by Booker T. Washington, whose views on segregated education she opposed. The four-page model was affordable and doable from her home-based production and distribution centre. 61 The production of meaning through collaborative models of editorship is an increasingly dominant feature of feminist studies of the press. Such models can tell us more too about how we might explore other versions of co-editing arrangements, and joint editing arrangements, including where paired editors were responsible for different parts of a periodical, such as Thornton Hunt's 'editing' of the political content of the Leader, and G. H. Lewes's responsibility for the literature pages. Table 1 offers a snapshot of the kinds of questions that can recognize individual influence while allowing for critical and qualitative analysis of the editorial activity.
Any such tabulation would have to continuously evolve as the work of recuperation and shared conversation continues. The growing body of scholarship on women editors is changing the way we think about editorship, editorial models, and editorial functions. I have been suggesting that we move away from calcifying 'types' while finding ways to work relationally so that we can trace patterns of solidarity for instance, reversals and innovations. I think that we need more comparative studies of 'Leaders' or 'Editorials', of 'Correspondence pages', and of types of editorial interventions in periodical texts if we are to understand more fully the rhetorical stance of the woman editor in her various iterations. Or so we can better understand the tension between what Dallas Liddle describes as the lived experience of the individual engaged in editing work and the 'discursive' construction of the Editor.62 The challenge is maintaining a tension between generalizing frames or syncretic categories and the need to be dynamic, flexible, imperial; cosmopolitan; counterpublics; production of