The Victorian Periodical Press

A comprehensive and authoritative overview of the diversity, range and impact of the newspaper and periodical press in nineteenth-century Britain.

This book offers a new interpretation of the place of periodicals in nineteenth-century Ireland. Case studies of representative titles as well as maps and visual material (lithographs, wood engravings, title-pages) illustrate a thriving industry, encouraged, rather than defeated by the political and social upheaval of the century. Titles examined include: The Irish Magazine, and Monthly Asylum for Neglected Biography and The Irish Farmers’ Journal, and Weekly Intelligencer; The Dublin University Magazine; Royal Irish Academy Transactions and Proceedings and The Dublin Penny Journal; The Irish Builder (1859-1979); domestic titles from the publishing firm of James Duffy; Pat and To-Day’s Woman. The Appendix consists of excerpts from a series entitled ‘The Rise and Progress of Printing and Publishing in Ireland’ that appeared in The Irish Builder from July of 1877 to June of 1878. Written in a highly entertaining, anecdotal style, the series provides contemporary information about the Irish publishing industry.

Extending the work of The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, this volume provides a critical introduction and case studies that illustrate cutting-edge approaches to periodicals research, as well as an overview of recent developments in the field. The twelve chapters model diverse approaches and methodologies for research on nineteenth-century periodicals. Each case study is contextualized within one of the following broad areas of research: single periodicals, individual journalists, gender issues, periodical networks, genre, the relationship between periodicals, transnational/transatlantic connections, technologies of printing and illustration, links within a single periodical, topical subjects, science and periodicals, and imperialism and periodicals. Contributors incorporate first-person accounts of how they conducted their research and provide specific examples of how they gained access to primary sources, as well as the methods they used to analyze the materials. The 2018 winner of the Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize. The Committee describes the focus of the book on methodology and case studies as “fresh and original,” and “useful for both experienced scholars and those new to the field.” "Overall. Case Studies suggests new ways of reading canonical authors, new unerstandings of the interprentation of the personal and the public, and an admirable energy in engaging with the structures of national and transnational periodical discourses that are clearly implicated in maintaining soft power within societies" -- Brian Maidment, Liverpool John Moores University

Table of contents

Covering a wide range of magazine work, including editing, illustration, poetry, needlework instruction and typesetting, this book provides fresh insights into the participation of women in the nineteenth-century magazine industry.

The circulation of periodicals and newspapers is thought to have been larger and more influential than that of books in Victorian society. J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel have brought together commissioned bibliographical essays on Victorian periodical literature by some of the world's greatest experts in the field, whose contributions support this view. The essayists guide the reader into avenues for exploring Victorian society and the professions (law, medicine, architecture, the military, science); the arts (music, illustration, theatre, authorship and the book trade); occupations and commerce (transport, finance, trade, advertising, agriculture); popular culture (temperance, sport, comic periodicals); and both lower- and upper-class journals (workers' and university students'). They seek to identify the ways that periodicals informed, instructed, and amused virtually all of the people in the many segments of Victorian life. The periodicals demonstrate the emergence of professionalism in the various areas of human endeavour. Professional societies were formed to regulate each discipline and each had its own journal or journals. The growth of professionalism also dictated a rapid pace of change in Victorian society, and change, in turn, demanded closer and more accurate communication of new ideas through periodical literature.

This book re-imagines nineteenth-century detective fiction as a literary genre that was connected to, and nurtured by, contemporary periodical journalism. Whilst ‘detective fiction’ is almost universally-accepted to have originated in the nineteenth century, a variety of widely-accepted scholarly narratives of the genre’s evolution neglect to connect it with the development of a free press. The volume traces how police officers, detectives, criminals, and the criminal justice system were discussed in the pages of a variety of magazines and journals, and argues that this affected how the wider nineteenth-century society perceived organised law enforcement and detection. This, in turn, helped to shape detective fiction into the genre that we recognise today. The book also explores how periodicals and newspapers contained forgotten, non-canonical examples of ‘detective fiction’, and that these texts can help complicate the narrative of the genre’s evolution across the mid- to late nineteenth century.