Perceptions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals: A Bibliography by E. M Palmegiano (review)

Almost anyone seriously interested in the nineteenth-century press will find this book useful. It provides an annotated bibliography of articles about the press from forty-eight nineteenth-century British journals that date from the 1820s through the 1890s. Palmegiano organizes the bibliography alphabetically by journal although the entries for each journal are chronological. The forty-eight entries begin with Ainsworth’s Magazine (1842–54) and end with the Westminster Review (1824–1900). Each is introduced with a brief description of the periodical’s editors, owners, audience, and themes, as well as other pertinent information.

The volume also includes a brief preface in which Palmegiano describes the project and explains her choice of journals. She notes that “they embodied sundry political, economic, religious, social, and literary perspectives, and most lacked subject indexes,” which of course could also be said of the titles she did not include (viii). But we all know that there were hundreds, even thousands, of titles produced during the century. I am not going to quibble about what she left out, especially since in her fifty-three- page subject index some of the journals and editors that are not part of the forty-eight do turn up. For example, she does not include Reynolds’s Miscellany (nor the Penny Magazine, the London Journal, or Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper) in the forty-eight, but those journals, as well as journalists Edward Lloyd and G. W. M. Reynolds, are included in the subject index.

The book’s brief preface is followed by a six-page introduction indicating some of the conclusions Palmegiano has drawn from the bibliographic entries organized under the headings “The Impact of Government,” “Reviews and Magazines,” “Journalists,” “Readers,” and “The Press around the World.” The introduction concludes with the assertion that, based on the 4,500 articles included in the bibliography, the nineteenth-century press “crafted a record of its origins and had linked it to its kin across the planet,” mainly in France and the United States (6). This “self-study” was generally favorable, but “it failed to resolve a crucial issue, namely how a free press functions when entry to a forum is easy but entrants may not have the wisdom to separate use and abuse of it” (6).

Following the bibliography are two very useful author and subject indexes. Palmegiano has gone to some lengths to identify the authors through the Wellesley Index, the “Curran Index,” indexes of articles in Dickens’s journals, and her own research. The author index also includes pseudonyms with cross-references to actual authors but not their initials. The subject index is worthy of study on its own, with its seven columns on France and its dozens of references to the Edinburgh Review. There are ten entries for “George Eliot,” nine for George Henry Lewes, and forty-six for Dickens. Given the limited number of journals included in this book, it is hard to draw any definitive conclusions from these numbers; indeed, in her introduction, Palmegiano acknowledges that there was no consensus and draws only a few general conclusions.

However entertaining it is to parse the subject index in this way, the value of this welcome volume is its bibliography and two indexes, which are thoroughly professional and well presented. Every research library should have a copy of this book in its reference collection.