The two Tinsley brothers, Edward (1835-1866) and
William (1831-1902) are well known as the founders of the publishing company of
Tinsley Brothers, which they started in 1858. Despite having no previous experience in
the industry, by the 1860s they had prospered, specializing in sensational
popular novels, including the trinity of Wilkie Collins, Mrs Henry Wood and Mary
Elizabeth Braddon. Edward died suddenly in 1866 of a stroke and William
continued alone, much less successfully. He faced bankruptcy three times, and
on the third time in 1887, the publishing company came to an end. For the full
tale of William Tinsley’s colourful career, read his entertaining and quite
self-aware memoirs Random Recollections
of an Old Publisher (in 2 volumes, London, 1900).
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| William Tinsley, Random Recollections of an Old Publisher (London, 1900) |
In 1867, to advertise his authors, to showcase
their work and to cash in on the lucrative periodicals market, William Tinsley
set up Tinsley’s Magazine, with
Edmund Yates as the editor (he previously edited Temple Bar). With William Tinsley’s less than astute financial
management, within two years the magazine was in trouble. Edmund Yates left and
William Tinsley took over the editorship in 1869. The slow downhill continued,
illustrations were dropped as a cost saving exercise in 1874 and in 1878 the
magazine folded. The following year Tinsley re-launched the magazine with
Edmund Downey as its editor. They continued to have editorial disputes, but one
good and profitable idea of Downey’s was the publication of Christmas numbers
from 1880 to 1883, the year Downey left. In 1884, William Tinsley was bankrupt
again. He again resurrected the magazine and managed it until it stopped
publication in 1887.
In this final period, when the writing was
already on the wall, Tinsley published three Christmas numbers with stories by Lily
Tinsley. They were illustrated by Minnie Tinsley.
There is hardly any information available about
Lily and Minnie, the Tinsley sisters. They were two of William Tinsley’s many daughters,
and it is not known how much they contributed to the Tinsley Magazine and helped to run it. http://www.victorianresearch.org
confidently states about Lily that “As a teenager, she assisted her father's
business, including running Tinsley’s
Magazine” And yet, in his memoirs William Tinsley mentions Lily only twice:
in the list of authors he has published (Random
Recollections, p50) and in a “Prefatory Note” to thank her for
proof-reading the work:
Minnie is not mentioned at all. What little information
is available about Lily (or Lilian or Laura, according to some sources) is not
always reliable or verifiable: http://victorianfictionresearchguides.org
mentions Lily as William Tinsley’s sister; The
Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction also associates the name Laura with
her, and http://www.victorianresearch.org
gives Lilian Tinsley as an alternate name for her. The census for 1891 lists
the household of William and Louisa Tinsley (both 60) as Alice (26), ‘Lilly’ (25),
Ada (23) and Ethel (22). ‘Lilly’ is the only daughter with an occupation: “author.”
In the 1881 census, the family also contains Louisa (20) and Minnie (18), two older
girls who by 1891 were no longer in the family home. The census of 1901 lists
only two names in the family: William, aged 70, a retired publisher and ‘Lilian,’
34, author. Lily stayed with her father and never married. She died in 1921 at
the age of fifty-six.
There is nothing further we can say about Minnie,
the older sister, who illustrated Lily’s stories. A little bit more can be pieced
together about Lily Tinsley’s writing career. The stories in the Tinsley’s Magazine Christmas numbers
were At the Cross Roads (1884), Blackwater Towers (1885) and A London Secret (1886).
Her literary output is concentrated in these few
years in the middle of the 1880s. Her novels Cousin Dick and The Wrecker’s
Daughter were serialized in Tinsley’s
Magazine in 1884. In 1885, when she was just 20 years old, Lily published
four novels. A Woman’s Revenge was serialized in England, running from January to April in 1885 – the weekly penny-magazine
that also serialized Wilkie Collins, Charles Reader and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.
Tinsley Brothers published it in two volumes in 1885. Cousin Dick was published by Tinsley Brothers as a book that same
year, as was as a short novel called The Little
Witness. The Christmas story Blackwater
Towers was also published as a single volume (96 pages) by the Tinsley
Brothers in 1885.
The Lion
Queen and In the Ring: A Novel
were serialized in Tinsley’s Magazine
and the latter published in three volumes by Tinsley Brothers in 1886. It was
her novel The Darrel Girls: A Story of Today
that was left unfinished when Tinsley’s Magazine
stopped publication in 1887. In 1895, Lily Tinsley’s Dishonoured appeared as No 7 in Pearson’s
Library.
Lily Tinsley also wrote plays. She co-wrote Devil's
Luck: or, The Man She Loved (1885) with the actor and playwright George
Conquest (1837-1901). There is also Cinders,
a play of one act from 1899, which was never professionally produced (Kerry
Powell. Women and Victorian Theatre,
Cambridge University Press, 1997, p139). More works by Lily Tinsley may yet be
found, but it appears that by the time her father died in 1902 Lily had stopped
writing.
In the 1880s, while Lily Tinsley was writing A Woman’s Revenge and The Little Witness, Sigmund Freud was
working in the Vienna General Hospital. In 1885, he became a lecturer in
neuropathology at the University of Vienna, in October the same year he was in
Paris watching Jean-Martin Charcot experimenting with hypnosis. The following
year, in 1886 he went into private practice specializing in “nervous disorders.”
1880s was the decade when Freud was experimenting with ideas, in the 1890s they
crystallized in his method psychoanalysis. The
Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1899, in this book Freud first
explores the significance of the unconscious and the impact of childhood
experiences on the formation of the individual psyche. Miss Lily Tinsley had reached
this point in her fiction in 1885.
In both A
Woman’s Revenge and The Little
Witness, Tinsley reveals a curiously “Freudian” view of the human mind. The Little Witness includes a scene
where the idea of a dream is used to handle a particularly painful
psychological moment. A Woman’s Revenge
explicitly presents the psychological make-up of its main characters as formed
by their unconscious childhood experiences. They are trapped in their behaviour
by these early experiences and have to learn to manage them in order to succeed
in their endeavours. Lily Tinsley is particularly interesting as an author of Victorian
popular fiction because of the deep interest her
narratives display in the way experiences, especially childhood experiences,
shape the psychology of her characters and thereby have a strong effect on
their motivations and actions. Miss Lily Tinsley appears to have been Freudian
before Freud.
