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Notes Prologue 1. John Hartley notes in Popular Reality that most academic courses on journalism remainpreprofessionalinfocusratherthananalyticalorscholarly.“Rarelydojournalism courses ask their students to consider the conditions for journalism’s existence: where it comes from, what it is for, and how it works, in the context of modernity. Students are simply asked to do it without understanding it” (35). Michael Schudson’s diagnosis of the research climate in academic journalism is bleaker still: “Journalism schools have not to this day nurtured a substantial research tradition; near the bottom of the academic pecking order at most institutions (Missouriand Northwestern are notable exceptions), their university colleagues do not expect or demand much from them” (“News, Public, Nation” 481). 2. The little rigorous scholarship done on the genres used in earlier periodicals has been produced mostly in the last decade. In his 2002 review article in American Historical Review, Schudson praises Jean Chalaby for the innovative “genuine contribution” his Invention of Journalism (1998) makes in simply “locating media history at the level of genres, texts and literary forms” (488). Schudson’s own pioneering study on the history of the news “interview” genre is in Power of News (1995). I made a first attempt to trace the origins of the British newspaper editorial in “Who Invented the ‘Leading Article’?” Media History 5.1 (1999): 5–18. One index of the amount of work remaining in this area, however,isthatevenmodernjournalism’smost-usedgenreform,the“invertedpyramid,” has only recently begun to have its generic history traced by scholars. For a debunking of the long-standing myth of the U.S. Civil War genesis of the genre, see Errico. For a tracing of its modern appearance in journalism pedagogy, see Vos. 3. Major review essays on periodicals studies have recently appeared in the two most significant journals for Victorianists. Kay Boardman’s “‘Charting the Golden Stream’: Recent Work on Victorian Periodicals” appeared in the Spring 2006 Victorian Studies, and Sean Latham and Robert Scholes’s “The Rise of Periodical Studies” in the March 2006 PMLA. 4. Successful recent examples include Marysa Demoor’s Their Fair Share (2000), a survey of the writing careers of female contributors to the later Athenaeum, and Alexis Easley’s First-Person Anonymous (2004), which studies the periodical writing of Harriet 188 Notes to Pages 3–5 Martineau, Christian Isobel Johnstone, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Christina Rossetti. 5. Beetham’s essay “Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre” and Pykett’s “Reading the Periodical Press: Text and Context” have been handily reprinted in Brake, Jones, and Madden’s Investigating Victorian Journalism. 6. B. E. Maidment noted his “overwhelming sense . . . that there is almost no attentionpaidtoVictorianperiodicalsinthemselves ,thoughmanyarticlesandessaysdepend on evidence drawn from periodicals to substantiate, illustrate, or reinforce arguments constructed out of other kinds of scholarly evidence” (143). 7. One of the few points of agreement in periodicals studies is that this scholarly subfield has as yet no agreed-upon methodology. Laurel Brake astutely observes that the problem stems partly from the difficulty of the material itself, but also partly from the historical effects of so many diverse disciplines trying to use periodical texts as primary sources: “Methodology is the problem that haunts study of the press: it is a practical problem that never goes away because the form is so ungainly—single units that are infinitely continuous, but the text of the press is also the site where the multidisciplinary origins of those in the field are most visible and in struggle” (“Production of Meaning” 166). Lyn Pykett has written similarly that “students of the Victorian periodical press have persistently confronted the double problem of defining the object of study, and devisinganappropriate methodologicalframeworkwithinwhichto conductthat study” (3–4), and Ann Parry has observed that “study of the periodical press is, and has been bedeviled, by the lack of generally accepted investigative procedures that satisfactorily connect institutional studies with social and political structures” (18). 8. The claim that Victorian periodicals can provide modern scholars transparent access to their original writers’ thoughts may have reached its zenith in a recent advertisement for a microfilm collection of major Victorian magazines and reviews. The ad, which ran in several scholarly journals, was illustrated with a phrenological skull and promised that purchasers would “read the minds of those who lived in the nineteenth century.” 9. After John Holloway made the first (and still almost sole) successful attempt to reconstruct the worldview and conventions of a specific Victorian discourse genre through close readings of its actual texts in his landmark...

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