"The Great Unexplored Continent of 19th-Century Studies": Victorian Periodicals (David De Laura, 1968)

To assist in that "exploration" the Victorian Periodicals Newsletter was founded in 1968 on the principle of the "need to know," and its mission was to inform, to share with pioneer periodicals scholars the world over, news of on-going, but unreported, research. It is difficult for today's younger scholars, surrounded as they are by every manner of technological and bibliographic resource, to understand what a wasteland periodicals scholarship was forty years ago. PMLA, the leading scholarly journal in the Humanities, had never published an article dealing with periodicals scholarship, (nor has it to this day). Victorian Studies, though slightly more enlightened because of its editor, was still focused on more traditional literary studies and less on periodicals. The genre was considered peripheral, questionable, and unnecessary, although later research would identify over 125,000 titles published during the Victorian era, and directed to every level of society, from noble ladies to ladies' maids.¹ With major scholarly journals closed to them, how were scholars to communicate, to share ideas, to benefit from the work of others? And yet there was a small scattering of determined individuals across the continents and across the disciplines who insisted that nineteenth-century periodicals offered a unique and important window into Victorian culture.²

The journal began life modestly as a "newsletter," and at first its contents were restricted to notes and miscellaneous news from far parts of the academic world (fig 1). Scholars who had been working as solitary researchers rejoiced at the new opportunity to share their work and exchange knowledge about remote resources. It is instructive to flip through the pages of the first issues of VPN to understand the early struggles to create a new publication and to survive. It was fortunate that the first editor, Michael Wolff, who was then also editor of the journal Victorian Studies, was able to tap into its subscriber list for an initial mailing to introduce the new publication. As a result a great deal of correspondence, and some subscriptions, were secured. He also had received small grants from the Chapelbrook Foundation, from the Council on Library Resources, and from Indiana University, which provided funds for early operations.

Figure 1.

Original cover of VPN 1 (Jan 1968)

Early issues are peppered with organizational details, such as free distribution of the first two issues, developing a subscriber list, and early editorial plans for a "contents" format. Most important, however, were extensive "Reports and Proposals with Editorial Comment" submitted by researchers in the field. So pervasive were these queries that William E. Fredeman, the Pre-Raphaelite scholar and early leader in the periodicals movement, protested that "too many scholars wanted to know too many things . . . yesterday." Two of the most important and most lasting discussions concerned William F. Scheuerle's "Victorian Periodicals Project #3" which was to be a "systematic listing taken from the Dictionary of National Biography of Persons Connected with Victorian periodicals": in other words, the first attempt at a biographical dictionary of persons connected with periodicals in any capacity.³ The second project was Michael Wolff's "Victorian Periodicals Project," which, after many incarnations, would ultimately provide the impetus for launching the much more massive endeavor, the Waterloo Directory.

The Newsletter also offered to Walter Houghton a valuable opportunity to report to far-flung periodicals scholars about his problems and his progress as he continued to produce the several volumes of his Wellesley Index, and also to enlist help from those who might have information to share about anonymous contributors to Victorian periodicals (fig. 2).⁴

Finally, as the single voice for periodical scholarship, the Newsletter played a major role in the founding and maturation of a new scholarly society, the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP). Through the years, and to this day, the two groups have supported and promoted one another as two members of a happy family.

In the beginning there were hard times for VPN, when finances were uncertain, when manpower was scarce, when subscriptions were few, when...