Victorian Periodicals Newsletter

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 is a study of the gathering and presentation of news in late 19th-century England, a time when the vote was given to a large section of the working class, when public interest in the British Empire was on the rise, and when technology enabled newspapers to be produced more cheaply, distributed more quickly, and read more widely than ever before. Using manuscript collections and newspaper archives, the author describes the production and readership of newspapers, and the journalists within the industry--how they were recruited, the organization of their work, the ways in which they acquired their information, and their access to people in positions of power. The book moves on to review changes in news presentation in the last decades of Victorian England until the appearance of such papers as the Daily Mail in the 1890s.

`Simply a great work of reference. Future scholars will wonder how anybody managed without the Wellesley Index. It will quietly change the whole nature of Victorian studies.' Christopher Ricks, New Statesman `It is now impossible to think of Victorian literary and historical studies without the benefit of it ... this is a very remarkable achievement indeed ... the complete set will be a monument to the Houghtons foresight, pertinacity and skill.' TLS

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.