Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900

Robert Merrett was Professor of English at the University of Alberta.

This is the fourth and last research volume of a bibliography which identifies 11,500 contributors to 43 British nineteenth-century monthlies and quarterlies. If changing editorial procedures and space restrict this volume to dealing with only eight periodicals, it endeavours to continue the aim of the series to represent the diverse purposes and content of British periodicals within the period. Sixty pages are taken up with emendations and additions to the first three volumes. Space is also taken up by the necessarily length discussion of internal, stylistic evidence. While the initial editorial goal was an attribution rate of 80 per cent, volume four achieves a rate of 73 per cent. The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals will be indexing the twenty periodicals not covered by the series. Besides trying to identify the authors of all items printed, the volume provides introductory essays for the periodicals. These essays, as well as giving publishing and production histories, offer fine accounts of the various literary, political, social, religious, and commercial motivations that governed each publication. An excellent aspect of these essays is their concern with the interrelations of economics, editorial policies, and readership.

Most periodicals, whether popular or sectarian, commercial or literary, were subject to disputes between editors and publishers. Dickens’s editorship of Bentley’s Miscellany (1837-1868) is described in this regard. Although this periodical quickly succeeded through its publication of serialized novels and short fiction, its editors never got free of a dictatorial publisher. The British Quarterly Review (1845-1886), a Congregationalist publication, despite its editor’s high-minded, non-sectarian principles, was unable to free itself from evangelical factionalism. Its varying fortunes serve as an index of the changing cultural status of Victorian non-conformism. The success or failure of the periodicals says a lot about literary culture. Despite publishing the aesthetic works of such writers as Morris and Swinburne, the editor of The Dark Blue (1871-1873) had no intellectual or moral standards. Eager only to make money, he lacked economic sense and his periodical soon got a bad name for non-payment of contributors. The Dublin University Magazine (1833-1877), while illustrating how a conservative periodical flourished by advancing the career of novelists such as Charles Lever, evidences the cultural imperialism of England: this magazine’s need to appeal to an English audience and the subsequent economic power of that audience with the eventual take-over of the magazine and the boss of its Irish character makes informative if sad reading. The fate of The London Quarterly Review (1853-1900) is similarly informative. Founded by a group of Wesleyans to prove the sect’s general cultural literacy, it experienced chronic financial troubles. These troubles aggravated the conflict of whether it should remain at arm’s length from the Church. It did become an official organ of the Methodist Church, thus having its original mandate reversed. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (1832-1855) is interesting since it went through four distinct editorial phases. First concerned with pushing for political reform, it then became a literary journal under a women editor. Its third phase saw it dropping Scottish concerns and focusing on elitist and centralist issues. The fourth editor’s narrow theological interests sent the journal to oblivion. The introductory essays contain stimulating comparative remarks and, read in the context of the contributors’ bibliographies, they give vital information about journalistic networks in the Victorian age.