Obituary for Richard D. Altick
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The field of Victorian periodicals research lost one of its oldest and best friends this past year when Richard D. Altick died, on February 7, 2008, at the age of 92. The most profound of Altick's contributions to the field was also among his earliest. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900, appeared in 1957, the fruit of ten years of research. Fifty years later, this pioneering study retains the power to amaze with its sheer plenitude of useful detail, the sureness of its judgments, the clarity of its prose, and the sprawling vitality of its narrative. Nothing like Altick's survey had been seen before, and it remains the most frequently cited source for what the Victorians read and published, and an inspiration to Victorianists and "book historians" alike. Like Walter Houghton's The Victorian Frame of Mind, another masterpiece that appeared that same year, The English Common Reader helped to map the territory that students of Victorian culture have been exploring ever since.
The most prolific Victorian scholar of his generation, "RDA," as he often signed himself, wrote or edited twenty-five books in all, and contributed innumerable articles and reviews for scholarly journals, including the VPR. From 1958, when Walter Houghton first sought his counsel, Altick proved an unfailing source of sensible advice and encouragement to the fledgling enterprise that would at last appear as The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals. But his closest engagement with the subject came near the end of his career as a writer, with a study of one of the most successful and influential periodicals of them all. In Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841-1851 (1997), Altick brought his legendary erudition and peerless powers of scholarly detection to bear upon the task of unpacking the many meanings that Punch's first readers had taken from its pages. The most significant study of the magazine to appear for a hundred years, the book capped a lifetime of scholarship that has left all of us deeply in Richard Altick's debt. [End Page vi]
Patrick Leary has most recently written about Victorian authorship in a chapter (co-written with Andrew Nash) of the forthcoming volume of The Cambridge History of the Book In Britain devoted to the nineteenth century, and currently serves as Vice-President of RSVP. His book on Punch will appear next year.
