An Old Editor Remembers: VPN/VPR at Toronto, 1973–85

In the summer of 1962, I moved from the Durham Colleges in the University of Durham (as they were then called), where I had been working on an M.A. dissertation on the poetry of Coleridge, to University College, London, in order to start on my doctorate. I only had the vaguest idea about what I wanted to do but I was interested in exploring Victorian criticism of contemporary poetry: John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, that kind of thing. I was given Isobel Armstrong, the youngest faculty member in the Department, as my supervisor and I could not have been more fortunate. In the early 1960s Isobel was at the beginning of a very distinguished career: she had already written an attractive little book on the poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough (1962), and she would later publish The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations in 1969 and an anthology of Victorian criticism of poetry, Victorian Scrutinies, in 1972.

At some point, Isobel directed my attention to Victorian periodicals as a largely unexplored resource and she suggested that I write to Professor Walter E. Houghton of Wellesley College for information about authorship of anonymous articles. Walter was initially rather suspicious and was worried that I wanted to appropriate his research, but things were smoothed over and Walter not only gave me what I wanted but asked me to do the section on the British and Foreign Review for the second volume of the Wellesley Index and made me into an assistant editor. I have very fond memories of staying with Walter and Esther in their home in Wellesley and of sipping parfaits on a long summer evening on the terrace of the Wellesley Faculty Club.

The Wellesley Index must have been one of the last scholarly projects of its kind put together without the help of a computer. Walter was no Luddite, but he had taken advice that he would be much better off doing things the old-fashioned way, with hand-written slips. At Wellesley the Houghtons' workroom looked like a giant Victorian post office with a pigeon-hole for each article that was being indexed. But although the project was low-tech, Walter brought a new scholarly rigour to the study of Victorian periodicals. Before Wellesley, scholars would blithely attribute an article to a certain writer on the basis of what they called "internal evidence"–which meant essentially: "It rather sounds like so-and-so." Walter wanted none of this and rarely accepted evidence that fell short of either an author claiming an article as his own or reprinting it in his own name at a later date.

The first volume of the Wellesley Index came out in 1966. Two years later Michael Wolff started the Victorian Periodicals Newsletter which approached the field from a rather different angle. Whereas Wellesley had a selected a number of periodicals (generally the better-known and more prestigious ones, the reason being that it would be easier to collect data on them), VPN took on all periodicals (annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily). Michael's enthusiasm was contagious and we all felt that, once the secret of the periodicals had been unlocked, we would know everything there was to know about the Victorian period.

A few years later, Michael made it known that he was ready to hand over VPN to someone else and I persuaded my friend and colleague, the late and much-missed Peter Morgan, that we should make a bid for it. Since Michael was (and no doubt still is) a very busy man, it was not all that easy to arrange a meeting, but in the end we were able to talk at the Toronto Airport, as Michael was on a stopover on the way from somewhere to somewhere else. At this meeting it turned out that he felt very sad about letting VPN go but in the end we managed to persuade him that it we would give it a good home. So in late 1973 VPN started a new life in Toronto (figs. 1, 2, 3).

We were fortunate in having the support...