London / Calcutta: Literary Gazettes and the Traffic in Poems

Mary Ellis Gibson
University of Glasgow

After taking over the Literary Gazette in 1817, William Jerdan
quickly became the center of a broad London-based network of poets and
reviewers, including the poet Letitia Landon and various members of
her circle. Among these was Emma Roberts, who just at the peak of
Jerdan’s considerable success, became a newspaper editor
herself—not in London, where she had been working with only modest
success, but in Calcutta.
Having accompanied her sister to India in 1829, Roberts wrote
extensively for London periodicals including the Asiatic Journal. In
1831 she took over the editorship of the Calcutta Oriental Observer,
becoming the first woman newspaper editor in India and the first to
support herself by journalism on the subcontinent. Her tenure at the
Oriental Observer, soon called the Calcutta Oriental Observer and
Literary Gazette, was marked by the extension of London literary
connections in India and by a friendly competition with another
journalist, David Lester Richardson, who likewise attempted to foster
a career through London periodicals and newspapers and who edited the
rival Calcutta Literary Gazette. In this paper I show how Emma Roberts
assembled literary networks in India to create a structure of mutual
reference and implication in the pages of the Observer. These
networks, moreover, were complexly linked to metropolitan ones.
Roberts exploited all the usual resources of the newspaper editor and
marshaled an unusual one—the footnote—to create a lively dialogue
within her pages.
As editor of the Observer Roberts entered a crowded field. Mohit
Moitra has shown that in 1830 there were sixteen Bangla (Bengali)
newspapers in Calcutta and nineteen more were started between 1831 and
1833. At the same time there were thirty-three English language
newspapers and periodicals published in Bengal alone. Under Roberts
and especially under her predecessor, the Oriental Observer thrived on
mutual intelligence between the English language press in both India
and Britain and Bangla press. When she took over the Oriental Observer
as editor Roberts—though she did not read and write Bangla—was
nevertheless operating in a doubly intertextual field, with the Bangla
press on the one hand and the British metropolitan press on the other.

Metropolitan literary annuals and newspapers such as Jerdan’s and
colonial newspapers and annuals operated in an intertextual way as
they combined much poetry along with reviews and other belletristic
writing. In Roberts’s hands they relied upon editorial strategies
that created layers of implication, with paratextual elements
sometimes running counter to the ideological purport of the poetic and
belletristic texts themselves. The Oriental Observer, indeed, eschewed
explicit political controversy under Roberts’s editorship, but it
created its own implicitly social and political field. Focusing on the
intertextual relationships between London and Calcutta reveals a
largely ignored dimension of periodical poetry in the second and third
decades of the nineteenth century. Between the tea tables of London
and the printshops of Calcutta poets engaged in a lively exchange, one
that traded upon but also on occasion satirized the very tropes of
orientalism and gentility. Thus my paper will combine a largely
unknown chapter in newspaper history with a close reading of the way
Roberts developed her editorial point of view.

Newspapers and Periodicals in Britain and Ireland from 1800 to 1900