Members of the Media and Epidemics Research Network provide three vignettes illustrating the different ways ‘Russian Flu’ was reflected in media and literary culture.
Epidemics provide significant opportunities to reflect on the ways in which media, technology, and society are co-constituted. As medical and social phenomena, epidemics are highly mediatised events, whereby mass media influences and shapes their reception. The limits and local inflections of such mediatisation are yet to receive critical attention. As the Covid-19 pandemic reminded us; outbreaks of infectious diseases represent a veritable test for a country’s underlying socio-economic and political structures. This includes the ability to harness technologies and infrastructures of communication to overcome public health crises, by implementing population surveillance measures, communicating with broader publics, coordinating epidemic responses, or devising strategies of preparedness against future outbreaks.
The Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe (CHANSE) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)-funded Media and Epidemics project is an interdisciplinary team of researchers across Australia, the UK, Poland, and Romania, seeking to document, from historical and contemporary as well as trans-disciplinary and trans-regional perspectives, the role of media and communication technologies in the making and management of epidemics.
For six weeks in early 2025, three students from the University of Queensland joined the Media and Epidemics research network as part of the UQ’s Summer Research Scholarship Program. Research was divided into three projects, the first using realist fiction, the second using children’s periodicals, and the third looking at science fiction. Each area exposed the ways in which pandemics are imagined, distorted, and even invented in/through cultural discourse.
”The Prevailing Epidemic.” Cartoon from ”Punch” (1891)
The Flu and British Healthcare
New Grub Street (1892) and ‘The Tyrant’s Apology’ (1895) are works by George Gissing. Gissing, born 1857, was an English novelist, known for his portrayal of Victorian life (Delaney, 2022). The role of influenza in both texts is used to construct an understanding of the virus amidst multiple aspects of Victorian life, from healthcare to work-related fatigue. These woven strands form a class-specific examination on the fin de siècle (the end of the 19th century).
Both narratives involve a couple, made up of a well-to-do woman and a working-class man, who are experiencing financial tensions; the latter succumbs to illness as he struggles with his employment. Financial qualms existed before his illness, but influenza escalates the severity of his situation, highlighting his inability to work.
In the texts, influenza literally and figuratively signifies exhaustion (Chan, 2025). It takes a toll on the body: the physical weariness of illness is added to the physical accumulation of months of starvation and overwork. The main character of ‘The Tyrant’s Apology’ remarks that “[t]he results of that influenza hung about me, and I didn’t feel at all like myself,” (Gissing [1895] 1927, 251), while in New Grub Street, it manifests in Edwin (the main character) forcing himself to work through illness and starvation (Gissing [1892] 2016, 116), resulting in rapid aging – “at thirty-three he would generally have been taken for forty” (Gissing [1892] 2016, 168).
Edwin of New Grub Street could not have taken sick leave because he simply could not afford to. This reflects scholarship showing Victorian workers just “‘carried on’ [during periods of pandemic and illness] for fear of losing their wages”, with the majority of workers having no sick pay (Smith 1997, 59). Edwin needed to support his family, with this outweighing his health; such stress provides immense mental baggage, illustrating it as beyond being just a virus, but rather something affecting multiple aspects of one’s existence.
The medical system in Victorian Britain was largely decentralized, with separate institutions catering to separate social classes with incredibly varied quality (Hollingsworth 1980, 1). In this context, Edwin struggles to receive proper healthcare; healthcare and financial burden heavily contributing to his exhaustion as he attempts to avoid poverty.
The psychological impact of poverty is woven throughout the texts, with arguments between married couples. Amy, who wants to indulge in a lifestyle beyond her and Edwin’s means, pushes her husband to continue his failing writing career, while Edwin understand this pursuit of high society is ultimately unattainable. Influenza generates a persistent tension between decadence and illness, glamour and decay, which wears down the protagonists in their pursuit of financial stability. The novel constructs an image of the overworked professional, burdened by social and monetary constraints, whose weariness characterises the fin de siècle.
Sickness Discourse in Youth Magazines
During the early period of the Russian Flu epidemic (1889-1891), references to influenza in two magazines- The Boy’s Own Paper (B.O.P.) and The Girl’s Own Paper (G.O.P.)- are not marked by any significance. This is particularly true for B.O.P., where influenza is discussed casually alongside other prevalent infectious diseases like measles and whooping cough. In the adventure-romance serials that populates the magazine’s pages, influenza is all but absent: the sensational nature of these tales predisposes their rugged heroes to suffer from exotic malarial fevers as opposed to the common flu. G.O.P., with its articles and serials centred around domestic affairs, featured influenza regularly and regarded it with a little more concern. Yet, G.O.P. offers few examples that consider influenza as a major threat to public health during the initial epidemic years.
It is not until 1896 that influenza is given explicit attention in health advice columns. Advice for dealing with sickness is uniform across the magazines, with a morning bath, good exercise and diet, and purity in thought and deeds being recommended. Both B.O.P. and G.O.P. discuss medicine with some misgivings, advising that it is only a short-term supplement for long-term goals of clean and healthy living. One reader is chastised by the editors for regularly using medicine as a preventative against sickness, which they say “is about as logical as…wear[ing] a crutch as a preventative against breaking your leg” (The Girl’s Own Paper 1898, 599).
The role of Dr. Gordon Stables (working under the pseudonym “Medicus” in the G.O.P.), who is the provider of much of this advice in both Papers is crucial. In both magazines it is overwhelmingly Stables’ own understanding of microbes, transmission, and the role of environmental factors such as frost or stagnant water that are published. In fact, a variation in popular thought is glimpsed when “The New Doctor” in the G.O.P. (writing in Stables’ absence) presents slightly differing views regarding environmental factors and the importance of microbes. He observes that, whenever blaming the weather for feeling poorly, what we really mean is “climate together with an unknown factor caused that illness” (“The New Doctor” 1897, 190). This ‘unknown factor’ as an agent of illness appears at odds with Stables’ own discussion on microbes in a March edition of the same volume (“Medicus” 1897, 361). Young readers attempting to gain some certainty around the spread of invisible killers like influenza would find conflicting accounts, with one doctor promoting germ theory, and the other still hesitant to endorse this new field of scientific thought.
Anarchical Depictions of Bacteriologists
In the science fiction of 1895-1905, there is an interesting connection made by several authors between British fears of the developing French anarchist movements and public opinion on the foreign infiltration of infectious diseases. Undoubtably, this connection is caused by rising geopolitical tensions that resulted from the spread of the Russian Flu, and the rising xenophobic responses to ‘foreign infection’ that can be found across various primary medical sources of the time.
William Livingstone Alden (W. L. Alden) was an American writer and the author of the now little-known science fiction short story ‘The Purple Death’, in which the narrator befriends his neighbour, a retired German physician (Professor Schwartz), and discovers that he is creating deadly, infectious diseases in his laboratory, with the intention of releasing a strain in London that would eliminate two-thirds of the working class. This ‘Purple Death’ is the perfected form of anarchy, Schwartz claims, and should be the weapon of the misguided French anarchists, a nascent, and widely worrying, movement at the time. This story was published in 1895, meaning it was written after Alden stayed in Paris (1890 to 1893), and after he moved to London (1893), indicating he is drawing upon tensions witnessed in both countries.
An examination of the works of H. G. Wells that mention influenza, such as ‘The Stolen Bacillus’ (1895), further illustrate the British preoccupation with French anarchy. In this short story, the narrator, a bacteriologist, is teaching a visitor about his work, specifically showing him a live sample of a ‘bacillus of cholera’. When the bacteriologist leaves the room, the guest steals the vial, revealing his identity as a French anarchist, and his intention to release the bacillus into London’s water sources. After a dramatic chase, and the anarchist accidentally infecting himself, it is eventually revealed that the strain is not cholera, but an infection that turns fur blue on animals. This text presents an explicit connection between bacteriologists, the creation of deadly contagions, and the French anarchist movement. With both texts published in the same year, and both containing such explicit connections between French anarchy and the Russian flu, they are evidently representing the prominent social, xenophobic fears of the time
Conclusion
Together, these three projects offer a multi-faceted view of how the Russian Flu was imagined and mediated in late nineteenth-century Britain, exposing the layered cultural work that epidemic illness performed across different kinds of texts and audiences. The analysis of George Gissing’s New Grub Street and ‘The Tyrant’s Apology’ reveals how influenza became a symbol of classed exhaustion and social precarity, weaving together economic hardship, overwork, and physical decline into a portrait of fin-de-siècle malaise. The study of The Boy’s Own Paper and The Girl’s Own Paper highlights how youth magazines presented influenza to young readers through the lens of health advice, moral discipline, and self-improvement, showing both the normalisation of epidemic illness and the tensions within popular medical discourse at a time of shifting scientific understanding. Furthermore, the exploration of science fiction and political thrillers, through texts by W. L. Alden, H. G. Wells, uncover anxieties about the invisible forces of contagion and the links between bacteriology, anarchism, and fears of social and political destabilisation.
By drawing on a range of cultural texts, the project sheds light on how epidemic illness intersected with contemporary anxieties about class, gender, science, and empire, offering valuable historical perspectives on the entanglements of media, medicine, and society that continue to shape our responses to public health crises today.
About the authors
Melissa Dickson is a Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of Queensland, where she teaches across the long nineteenth century and researches the relationships between Victorian literature, science, and medicine. She is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, and PI of the UK team within the Media and Epidemics Project. Her most recent monograph is Acoustics in Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science (2025).
Lily Burke is an undergraduate student at the University of Queensland, completing her fourth and final year in a Bachelor of Advanced Humanities. In 2025, she is undertaking her honours project for her extended major in Western Civilisation, with a focus on feminist retellings of Greek Mythology, specifically those in the Trojan Cycle.
Ching Chi Chan is a third-year undergraduate student at The University of Queensland, where she is completing a Bachelor of Advanced Humanities with an extended major in English Literature, along with studies in French, Japanese, and Russian. Her current projects include researching 19th century Australian women writers at the Fryer Library, as well as writing her honours thesis in 2027.
Susan Sudbury is in her fifth year at the University of Queensland, where she is studying a Bachelor of Advanced Humanities with an extended major in English Literature. She is commencing an honours project in 2025, where she aims to examine representations of bankruptcy and criminality in selected works by Charles Dickens.
References
Anon., “Correspondence.” 1898. The Girl’s Own Paper, May 28.https://archive.org/details/gop-1898/page/559/mode/1up?view=theater.
Anon., “Medicus.” 1897. “Quiet Hints for Spring and Early Summer.” The Girl’s Own Paper, March 6. https://archive.org/details/gop-1897/page/361/mode/2up.
Anon., “The New Doctor.” 1897. “Our Climate.” The Girl’s Own Paper, December 18.https://archive.org/details/gop-1898/page/190/mode/1up?view=theater.
Chan, Ching Chi. 2025. “George Gissing, the Fin de Siècle, and Social Change: Understandings of the ‘Russian Influenza’.” MEDEP (blog). 7 March, 2025. https://mediaepidemics.com/2025/03/07/george-gissing-the-fin-de-siecle-and-social-change-understandings-of-the-russian-influenza/.
Gissing, George. (1891) 2016. New Grub Street. Edited by Katherine Mullin. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gissing, George. (1895) 1927. “The Tyrant’s Apology.” In A Victim of Circumstance and Other Stories, 243-254. New York : Houghton Mifflin Company.
Hollingsworth, Rogers. 1980. The Delivery of Medical Care in England and Wales, 1890-1910. Madison: Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Smith, F.B. 1995. ” The Russian Influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889–1894.” Social History of Medicine 8 (1): 55-73. https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/8.1.55.
Verne, Jules. 1890. “Barbicane & Co.; Or, The Purchase of the Pole.” The Boy’s Own Paper, March 8. https://archive.org/details/the-boys-own-annual-the-boys-own-paper-12.1889-90/page/360/mode/2up. von Bothman, A. 1890. “The Empress Augusta: A Sketch of Her Life and Work.” The Girl’s Own Paper, March 29. https://archive.org/details/gop-1890/page/401/mode/2up.
