Finding and Defining the Victorian Supplement

An advertisement in the 1 May 1897 issue of the weekly Academy encourages potential readers to look inside its pages, proclaiming that “A Portrait Supplement of unique interest is given with each issue of The Academy.” A reader, even in the present day, will undoubtedly search for a pictorial item only to find that the supplement is not a visual portrait at all, but a discursive one. The “portrait” of Andrew Marvell featured in that issue is one of a list of such items, described as supplements to the usual fare offered to the Academy reader. This was only one of many supplement types which editor Charles Lewis Hind introduced and used to enhance his journal.

From 1896 onwards, when Hind became its editor, the Academy displays an interesting variety of supplements. The Academy “Spring Announcement Supplement,” the Academy “Summer Announcement Supplement,”¹ and the Academy “Educational Supplement”² are merely disguised adverts for free supplementary material to the parent journal. Indeed, there were also the Portrait Supplements and the Academy “colour supplement” (a set of coloured illustrations).³ According to Chris Kent, the appointment of Hind as the new editor in 1896 turned the Academy into “Britain’s liveliest literary journal.”⁴ The use of supplements to achieve that position has gone hitherto unnoticed, as supplements and their uses in general have been, up to now.

In fact, few nineteenth-century periodicals did not include a supplement or an appendage that could be considered as such, at any time in the course of its run. Yet these paratexts have not been studied or recognized as very special, possibly separate types of publications before the Ghent Supplements Project at the University of Ghent, Belgium, began focusing its research on the supplement. Since its start in 2006 the Ghent Supplements Project has published a number of articles on Victorian periodicals and their supplements. Kate Macdonald and Marysa Demoor analysed the life or lives of a women’s penny fiction weekly titled the Dorothy and its supplements.⁵ Koenraad Claes is working on 1890s “little magazines” and their supplements.⁶ Jolein De Ridder and Marianne Van Remoortel are researching the Ladies’ Treasury and its elusive supplement, the Treasury of Literature.⁷ The first investigations of this team were hesitant; the blurred contours of the term “supplement” and the sheer abundance of material warranted a cautious approach. But the goal remains clear: the team wants to put the supplement as a genre on the research agenda for Victorian periodicals studies. This special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review offers a starting point and an opportunity to present some of the team’s work alongside papers by eminent researchers in the field in the pursuit of that goal.

It should be noted that supplements have occasionally caught the attention of researchers in the past. A supplement called “The Vatican” briefly caught Joseph Altholz’s attention in his article on the Tablet.⁸ In 1979 J. O. Baylen pointed out how W. T. Stead wanted to launch a monthly supplement to the Pall Mall Gazette in an attempt to make it financially more viable.⁹ In 1978 Gerald Wayne Olsen referred to another use of the Victorian supplement in the context of the inaugural meeting of the new Church of England Temperance Society. The response to this meeting in the press was such that the Church of England Temperance Chronicle had to publish a supplement collecting all the press reactions.¹⁰ Further brief but interesting comments have been made by a number of scholars. Brian Maidment, in 1984, indicated how supplements sometimes targeted different audiences: Charles Fleming’s essay (1850) about the artisan writer, for example, was published in the supplement to the Working Man’s Friend because this was aimed specifically at a working-class reading public.¹¹ Graham Law noted how the creation of a supplement to the People’s Journal eventually turned it into the independent journal, the People’s Friend.¹² Ann Parry, in an analysis of the National Review, refers to a more topical and ad hoc need of supplements when that review decided to...