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Eça de Queirós and the Victorian Press

2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.53.4.0805

1528-4212

Bruno Elias Penteado,

Media Studies and Communication

In this judicious study of the journalistic production of celebrated Portuguese writer Eça de Queirós, Teresa Pinto Coelho departs from the canonical views of the writer's French influence, convincingly arguing that his work as the editor of review- and magazine-style periodicals profoundly owes to the late nineteenth-century Victorian press. Focusing on the short-lived Revista de Portugal and Suplemento Literário da Gazeta de Notícias, as well as on Eça's envisaged magazine-style O Serão, she contends that he was a “self-confessed admirer of the giant, diversified and innovative English press of the time,” concluding that “the literary periodicals he edited […] were shaped by the English newspapers, reviews and magazines that he so carefully chose, read, and studied” (4). Relying mainly on archival work, Pinto Coelho aptly argues in favor of an Eça de Queirós who, displeased with Portugal's intellectual paralysis, modeled his periodicals after English reviews and magazines in order to foster an education of the Portuguese reading public.Pinto Coelho's point of departure is an invoice from Librairie Galignani containing a number of English and American periodicals to which the author of nineteenth-century masterpieces such as O Primo Basílio (1878) and Os Maias (1888) subscribed in 1892, some years after his relocation from the Portuguese Consulate in Bristol to Paris. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the publications found in the invoice, such as The Times, the Pall Mall Budget, the Saturday Review, and Longman's Magazine, to name but a few, a strategy that, detailing the scopes and reading publics of these periodicals, sheds light on the type of projects to which Eça was endeavoring to give birth. These periodicals, the author argues, prove that Eça was “familiar with the work of the main Victorian thinkers who published in many of these magazines,” which “helped broaden his cultural background,” allowing him to break free from the “French model” that had deeply influenced his writings, particularly his fictional work (41). She contends that these texts kept Eça in touch with English politics, literature, and culture (he went so far as to state that England was the “leading thinking nation”), making use of this knowledge in the development of his journalistic work and taking it as a model for the Revista de Portugal, O Suplemento Literário, and O Serão (40–44).The remaining chapters focus, respectively, on the aforementioned periodicals. The Revista de Portugal, mainly modeled after the Contemporary Review, started to come to light in 1888, when the author was living in London, and it ran for twenty-four issues from 1889 to 1892. Eça envisaged it to be “a modern, serious, European review which, altogether aspiring to the respectability of the Revue des Deux Mondes, is influenced by the evolution of the English press” (53–54). In Eça's hands, moreover, the publication becomes a “national project, the aim of which is to divulge the best of what is produced in Portugal and make this known to other countries” (55). In a comparative vein, Pinto Coelho demonstrates that the review relied on textual exchange and impeccably traces a number of articles penned by Magalhães Lima that appeared in the Revista de Portugal to the Review of Reviews, which itself presented summaries of texts that had been originally published in the English and at times American presses. She also identifies many of the periodicals that became the sources for the bibliographic bulletin, a section offering reviews of recently published books. Eça, “initiator of a reformist project influenced by the English quality press” (101–102), saw the end of his review in May 1892; Pinto Coelho convincingly argues that its failure would shape the conception of O Serão some years later.The Suplemento Literário was in its turn influenced by Stead's New Journalism, taking inspiration from Victorian magazines targeting lower-middle-class readers. A literary supplement in the Brazilian newspaper Gazeta de Notícias, it ran for only six issues between January and June 1892. It was “light, panoramic and popular in nature,” aimed at “people interested in arts and letters, readers who were looking for short scientific news items, those who wished to acquire information about financial matters, and others who were able to find curious items of all sorts” (112–13). Chapter 3 mainly provides a detailed account of how much Eça relied on English magazines when conceiving the Suplemento, and also analyzes some of his editorials, particularly his portrait of Kaiser Wilhem II. Pinto Coelho also discusses many of the articles on art and science penned by Jaime Batalha Reis and a section of the Suplemento dedicated to newly published European and American books.The last chapter details Eça's efforts to see O Serão, an English-style magazine he planned with Alberto de Oliveira, come to fruition. Though the publication never came to be, Pinto Coelho, making use of Eça's correspondence and the outline of some issues, carefully reconstructs what it would have been like. Following the failure of both the Revista de Portugal and the Suplemento, Eça wanted O Serão to be similar to The Idler (1892–1911); and though it would be “an easy-to-read magazine, Eça still wished to retain sections dedicated to literary, political and economic affairs,” but “in a less serious manner” (163). All things considered, O Serão, drawing from English fin-de-siècle magazines, would be a publication “aimed at the bourgeois family” (173), a quality magazine “performing the task of making European culture better known to the Portuguese, whom he wishes to educate” (174).This brief summary only gives a representative sample of the breadth and richness of Pinto Coelho's monograph. Her accurate research comprises careful analyses of a number of Eça's letters, the programs and outlines of the periodicals he edited, articles and editorials that appeared in these periodicals, and at times takes insight from his fictional work, especially when she makes a claim for the dire cultural state Eça believed Portugal to be. Four useful appendixes offer the reader the contents of each issue of the Revista de Portugal, a reproduction of some of the texts that appeared in the review alongside their sources in the American and English presses, a list of all the books published in English reviewed in it, and a list of the titles published in English announced in the Suplemento. It is regrettable, however, that a great part of the material presented in the appendixes was not translated, which can limit a more in-depth appreciation of these publications to a Lusophone audience only. This reservation aside, readers interested in the European press, particularly the fin-de-siècle English press, will benefit from Pinto Coelho's masterful overview of some of the most popular Victorian periodicals; in this sense, the author pays as much attention to Eça's sources as to his own editorial work.The book certainly welcomes further studies of the possible influence of Victorian works in Eça's literary oeuvre, and it will be essential to specialists and those working in Anglo-Portuguese studies. As Pinto Coelho explains in the afterword, “Eça de Queirós's work—mainly his novels—has traditionally been (and to a large extent still is) studied within the context of French literature and culture” (175). She breaks this pattern with a fine and well-documented book that does justice to the fourteen years Eça lived in England, showcasing how knowledgeable of the country's history, politics, literature, and culture he really was.