Character Sketches and ‘Middles’ in the <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>

Abstract The Pall Mall Gazette printed several series of character sketches during its first year of publication in 1865, including contributions by George Eliot, Leslie Stephen and Anthony Trollope. This essay examines character sketches published in these early issues for their bibliographical antecedents and rhetorical strategies. It first traces influences on the design of the Pall Mall Gazette to situate this newspaper’s intervention in the nineteenth-century serial market, before close reading sketches by Eliot and Trollope for their social commentary and satire on everyday life. The essay argues that these sketches belonged to a category of newspaper writing Victorian contributors understood as ‘middles’. By exploring the typical features of character sketches and their placement in serial texts, it sheds light on how ‘middles’ worked as a historical genre in the mid-nineteenth century.