Finding Louisa

Following on from finding that one of Louisa Crow’s stories was republished in the New York Times, I thought I’d do a very simple search of Trove, Papers Past NZ, and Welsh Newspapers Online to see if her stories were also being republished elsewhere.

As I said, it’s strange how someone who, while a popular hack novelist of her time, seems to have completely dropped out of the canon of nineteenth century novelists.

There’s nothing particularly remarkable in her writing serial stories for magazines, quite a few of her peers did the same thing, only to have their serials republished as a three decker. Dickens, did the same, as did Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

And newspapers, especially the weekly papers, and papers in rural areas liked to have a serialised novel, if only to attract repeat purchases of the paper. The social historian David Kerr Cameron has recorded the importance of the Friday or Saturday paper in rural Scotland in the nineteenth century, where often the weekly newspaper was the only reading matter in a croft, other than the Bible.

The literary historian Katherine Bode has investigated a similar phenomenon in rural Australia, and has uncovered lost novels which only appear to have been published as newspaper serials.

So, to the search.

Trove and PapersPast NZ differentiate between newspapers and magazines. In both cases I searched for the occurrences of the string Louisa Crow - this reliably brought up mentions of her. Searching for Mrs L Crow did not improve the results, suggesting that she was principally known as Louisa Crow.

A search of Welsh Newspapers online shows frequent mentions in book reviews and in advertising for new books and issues of the Quiver suggesting some popularity. She does not appear to be credited for any serialised novels - I’m not sure why - it could be that she simply wasn’t particularly popular in English speaking Wales.

On the other hand a search of Trove shows that her stories were reprinted in various country newspapers of the time in Australia and she was thought worthy of mention in various booksellers adverts, and strangely one of her stories was reprinted in the Presbyterian calendar of 1893 - a church annual magazine.

As in Wales, she seems to have been less popular in New Zealand, with very few hits in Papers Past. As in the case of Wales I can only wave my hands, I don’t know enough about nineteenth century newspaper publishing in New Zealand to speculate meaningfully.

So, where does this leave us?

Well, Louisa Crow was well enough known to be mentioned in the Times of London of 01 January 1896 in their list of significant personages who had died in the previous year, as well as earning a couple of obituaries in literary periodicals of the time.

However, as I’ve said, she seems to have almost completely dropped out of the literary canon since her death, which I guess simply shows just how fleeting fame can be...