"The newspapers and periodicals occupy an unrivalled position as repositories of the general life of Victorian England. They represent the complete national range and they represent it on every imaginable topic. Their growth during the century is a direct response to demands for information, for discourse, for instruction, for propaganda, for entertainment, for platforms, each demand corresponding to a new facet of national life. One might almost claim that an attitude, an opinion, an idea, did not exist until it had registered itself in the press, and that an interest group, a sect, a profession, came of age when it inaugurated its journal. The years that we call Victorian are best mirrored in the serial publications — literature, argument, the tastes and preoccupations of just about every level and sort of society, all display themselves in the newspapers and journals.... There is an extraordinary outburst in education and entertainment which expressed itself naturally in journalism." — Michael Wolff, p. 26
Left: The Fraserians, an etching by Daniel Maclise (1806-1870) in Fraser's Magazine, January 1835. Right: Regina's Maids of Honour, an etching by Maclise (1806-1870) in the same magazine, in January 1836.
Editors
- Mary Braddon (1835-1915), editor of Temple Bar and Belgravia
- Shirley Brooks (1816-1874), editor of Punch
- Eneas Sweetland Dallas (1827-1879), editor of Once A Week
- Charles Dickens (1812-1870), editor of Bentley's Miscellany, Household Words and All the Year Round
- Emily Faithfull (1835-1895), closely involved in the periodical publications of her Victoria Press, particularly the Englishwoman's Journal and Victoria Magazine
- Louis Jennings (1836-1893), Editor-in-Chief of the New York Times
- William Jerdan (1782-1869), editor of the Sun and then the Literary Gazette
- Douglas Jerrold (1803-1857), prolific journalist and editor of Lloyd's Weekly Magazine
- Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), briefly editor of Fraser' Magazie and contributor to Politics for the People, the Christian Socialist, Macmillan's Magazine, etc.
- Percival Leigh (1813-1889), staff-writer on Household Words, who adapted Michael Faraday's lectures for a popular readership
- William James Linton (1812-1897), involved with various publishing initiatives, e.g. The English Republic and The Illuminated Magazine
- William Maginn (1794-1842), editor of the Standard
- William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919), art critic and editor of The Germ
- Tom Taylor (1817-1880), editor of Punch
- William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), editor of the short-lived National Standard, contributor to Fraser's Magazine, The Morning Chronicle, and, most important, Punch.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), editor of Women's World
Contributors / Reviewers
- Francis Power Cobbe (1822-1904), leader writer for the evening Echo, and prolific contributor to many periodicals
- John Wilson Croker (1780-1857), writer for the Quarterly Review
- George Eliot (1819-1880), contributor to the Coventry Herald and assistant editor and writer for the Westminster Review
- Hannah Lawrance (1795-1895), staff writer on the Athenaeum and contributor to Household Words
- Elizabeth Lynn Linton (1822-1898), writer for the Morning Chronicle and many others
- Harriet Martineau (1828-1897), editorial writer for the Daily News
- Margaret Oliphant (1828-1897), contributions to Blackwood's
- F.G. Stephens, art critic and writer for the Athenaeum, The Germ, the Critic, the London Review, Macmillan's Magazine, etc
Links to Related Material
- Open Access Nineteenth-Century Periodicals
- Eneas Sweetland Dallas on the rise of the periodical press
- The Power of the Press and Victorian Art Criticism
Bibliography
Note: Assembled with grateful acknowledgement to the useful and wide-ranging "Works Cited" at the end of Sally Mitchell's "Victorian Journalism in Plenty" (319-21) with several omissions and some more recent additions.
Ashton, Rosemary. 142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London. London: Chatto & Windus, 2006.
Brake, Laurel, and Julie Codell, eds. Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors, Authors, Readers. New York: Palgrave, 2005.
Brake, Laurel, Aled Jones and Lionel Madden, ed. Investigating Victorian Journalism. London: Macmillan, 1990.
Cantor, Geoffrey, and Sally Shuttleworth, eds. Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.
Clarke, Bob. From Grub Street to Fleet Street: An Illustrated History of English Newspapers to 1899. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.
Dabby, Benjamin. Women as Public Moralists in Britain: From the Bluestockings to Virginia Woolf. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Royal Historical Society / The Boydell Press, 2017.
Demoor, Marysa. Their Fair Share: Women, Power, and Criticism in the Athenaeum, from Millicent Garrett Fawcett to Katherine Mansfield, 1870–1920. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.
Brake, Laurel, and Marsya Demoor, editors. Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism. London: British Library and Ghent: Academia P, [2008].
Easley, Alexis. First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–1870. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.
Finkelstein, David, ed. Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition, 1805–1930. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
Fraser, Hilary, Stephanie Green and Judith Johnston. Gender and the Victorian Periodical. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Hewitt, Martin. The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain: The End of the "Taxes on Knowledge," 1849-1869. London: Bloomsbury. 2014.
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Korte, Barbara. Travel in Victorian Periodicals, 1850-1900: Media Logic and Cultural Work. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature (Palgrave Macmillan), 2024.
Law, Graham. The Periodical Press Revolution: E. S. Dallas and the 19th-Century British Media System. London: Routledge, 2023. [Review by Martin Hewitt].
_____. Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press. London: Macmillan, 2000.
Ledbetter, Kathryn. British Victorian Women's Periodicals: Beauty, Civilization, Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 [Review by Kimberly J. Stern].
Liddle, Dallas. The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain. London and Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009 [Review by Katherine M. Miller].
Mitchell, Sally. Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, and Reformer. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004.
_____. "Victorian Journalism in Plenty." Victorian Literature and Culture 37 (2009): 311–321. Institutional access: JSTOR https://www.jstor.org/stable/40347229.
Morton, Peter. The Busiest Man in England: Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875–1900. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Mussell, James. Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Movable Types. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.
Mutch, Deborah. English Socialist Periodicals 1880–1900: A Reference Source. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.
Onslow, Barbara. Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000.
Phegley, Jennifer. Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004.
Plunkett, John. Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.
Slater, Michael. Douglas Jerrold: 1803–1857. London: Duckworth, 2002.
Tusan, Michelle Elizabeth. Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005.
Victorian Periodicals Review (can be searched on JSTOR. Institutional access: https://www.jstor.org/journal/victperiodrev).
Wolff, Michael. "Charting the Golden Stream: Thoughts on a Directory of Victorian Periodicals. Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, 4(13): 23-38. JSTOR. Institutional access: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20084906.
Created 10 December 2024