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“A Thousand Tit-Bits”: George Eliot and the New Journalism

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George Eliot

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Abstract

This essay examines intersections between George Eliot’s work and the New Journalistic practice of publishing extracts (or “tit-bits”) from novels in mass-market periodicals and book collections. It investigates the publishing format of Alexander Main’s Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings of George Eliot (1872), and The George Eliot Birthday Book (1878), demonstrating how they represent Eliot and Lewes’s engagement with the popular literary marketplace. These literary experiments to some degree anticipated the excerpting practices of the New Journalism, particularly George Newnes’s journal Tit-Bits, founded in 1881, and his book A Thousand Tit-Bits from a Hundred Authors (1882). Both Newnes and Eliot embraced the tit-bits fad, if for different ends.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of St. Thomas, Saint Paul, MN, USA

    Alexis Easley

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  1. Alexis Easley
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Correspondence to Alexis Easley .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. California State University, San Bernardino, San Bernardino, CA, USA

    Jean Arnold

  2. Central Washington University, Ellensburg, WA, USA

    Lila Marz Harper

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Easley, A. (2019). “A Thousand Tit-Bits”: George Eliot and the New Journalism. In: Arnold, J., Marz Harper, L. (eds) George Eliot. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10626-3_2

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