The Wellesley Index Forty Years Later (1966-2006)

Long before there was a journal or a society devoted to nineteenth-cen-tury British periodical literature there was a Walter Houghton who, in 1958, embarked on a project to be called The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900. Under his leadership it was destined to become one of the twentieth century's great and enduring feats of collaborative scholarship.¹

Houghton's brilliance lay in recognizing what a vast unexplored territory nineteenth-century journalism offered to a scholar interested in exploring Victorian cultural and intellectual life. Until this time the great body of Victorian periodicals had lain dormant and mostly ignored by the scholarly community. No one had estimated the numbers of journals which had existed (later found by the Waterloo Directory to exceed 125,000 titles); no one had taken note of the fact that nearly every major Victorian prose author had published in periodicals at one time or another; no one had attempted to chart the proliferation of periodicals as the reading public grew after the 1870 Education Act; no one had recognized that specialist periodicals were addressed to all levels of society, from the lady's maid to Members of Parliament. Nor had anyone attempted to trace the enormous influence which periodicals had on the Victorian public in general. Furthermore, the Victorian convention of publishing anonymously (or pseudonomously) left the public quite unaware of who was writing in the journals they were reading. It was Houghton's theory that identifying contributors would be the first step toward unlocking some of the secrets of serial publication.

Two circumstances brought Houghton to this work: first, he tells us charmingly, was a small boy of six in 1910, "who kept an index of all the fires in Stamford, Connecticut – time, place, and estimated damage – which required some research in the local newspaper." So a taste for indexing and cataloging was born. The second event was his discovery during the years 1948–1955, while researching for his landmark book, The Victorian Frame of Mind (1957) that articles in journals he was consulting were largely unsigned, and that there were no published lists of contributors. Houghton maintained that he needed to know authorship in order to identify any personal bias of opinion: "An anonymous paper attacking the Thirty-nine Articles . . . would mean one thing if it were written by T. H. Huxley and something quite different if the author was the Bishop of London."²

It is difficult for today's investigator to realize what a wasteland Victorian periodicals scholarship was only two generations ago. Aside from The British Library General Catalogue of Printed Books (which also listed periodical holdings) and The British Union Catalogue of Printed Books, almost no major references were available to guide the potential researcher. Even the Catalogue of the Newspaper Library, Colindale was not available in print version until 1975.³ To be sure, a few brave scholars had produced monographs dealing with periodical literature: Hill and Helen Shine in The Quarterly Under Gifford (1949), but only to 1824, and A. L. Strout's Bibliography of Articles in Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. I through Vol. xviii, 1817 to 1825 (1959), but again only to 1825.

Perhaps the closest effort at analyzing periodical titles came from Professor Emory Neff at Columbia University who during the l930s and early 40s had quietly directed a series of PhD dissertations dealing with individual periodicals, namely the Saturday Review, Fortnightly Review, Athenaeum, Monthly Repository, Westminster Review, and Fraser's Magazine. ⁴ These early studies were limited in scope, addressing only portions of the journals, not complete runs, and were tailored to suit requirements of the time that all dissertations must finally be published by a legitimate publisher in order for the degree to be granted. Because the world of academe ignored periodical literature these studies were decidedly tentative in tone, as if the authors were not certain of the lasting value of their work and worried that the choice of such esoteric topics might possibly imperil future decisions about tenure and promotion. Later much of this pioneering work was shown to be inaccurate or incomplete...