Endnotes

VanArsdel Essay Prize

Graduate students are invited to submit essays for the 2011 VanArsdel Prize for the best graduate student essay on, about, or extensively using Victorian periodicals. Manuscripts should be 15–25 pages and should not have appeared in print. Send paper submissions postmarked by 1 April 2011 to Kathryn Ledbetter, Department of English, 601 University Drive, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas 78666-4616. Please include a description of current status in graduate school.

Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Call for Papers, 43rd Annual Conference Canterbury Christ Church University, UK, 22–23 July 2011 “Work and Leisure”

Much of the nineteenth-century press was built on an interdependency of work and leisure. Texts designed for consumption in leisure hours were created by armies of workers: authors, illustrators and editors, of course, but also printers’ devils, water-colourists, photographers, ad agents, newsvendors, street sellers, and a host of others. Who exactly were these labourers and how were they organised?

Then, what was the “leisure” that they promoted, and how different was it from work? Reading the press is obviously an insufficient answer. Reading could be work for teachers, reviewers, proof-readers or those trying to entertain children or colleagues. To what extent, indeed, was leisure a ruse? How far did the Victorian press inscribe women’s domestic labour as a form of leisure, or male work as pleasurable? More generally, how did the press fit into the wider context of the entertainment industry: the theatre, travel, music, exhibitions, sport, and shopping?

Not all of the press was devoted to leisure and its limits. What of that enormous sector that unashamedly named their focus as work-related: the trade and professional press, newspaper pages devoted to the stock market and commodity prices, articles worrying over women in the workplace, over the masculinity of the civil servant, or over the demands of labourers on strike?

Finally, what of the “cultural work” of the nineteenth-century press? What was the function of the press in and on society? How might that cultural work relate to the pleasures of leisure?

Suggested themes include but are not limited to:

• *. Technologies and economies of production, distribution and use

• *. The cultural work of the Victorian press

• *. Trade and professional publications

• *. The nature and locations of labour and leisure

• *. The culture industries, including travel, theatre, concerts, exhibitions, sport

• *. Holiday Supplements

As always, the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals invites proposals for papers that address any aspect of nineteenth-century British magazines or newspapers, although those dealing with the conference theme are particularly welcome.

Please e-mail two-page (maximum) proposals for individual presentations or panels of three to Dr Clare Horrocks (C.L.Horrocks@ljmu.ac.uk) and Dr Andrew King (andrew.king@canterbury.ac.uk). Please include a one-page CV with relevant publications, teaching, and/or coursework. Final papers should take 15 minutes (20 minutes maximum) to present. The deadline for submissions is 1 February 2011.

Dickens Journals Online

The Dickens Journals Online Project, based at the University of Buckingham UK, has reached a major milestone in its aim to provide by February 2012 a free, scholarly, accessible and innovative online edition of Dickens’s weekly magazines. All 43 bi-annual volumes of Household Words and All the Year Round under Dickens’s editorship (1859–70), plus six volumes of the little-known Household Narrative of Current Events, have been uploaded to the site, and can now be consulted.

The project organisers would like to offer subscribers to Victorian Periodicals Review:

• ♦. early access to the “betasite” long before its public launch in 2012. You can read, search, and copy from any issue of Household Words or All the Year Round under Dickens’s editorship

• ♦. the chance to contribute to the overall project, by helping us weed out the very small percentage (on average, less than 1%) of errors caused by computerised transcription.

All you will need is a computer with a good internet connection, and confidence with basic word-processing.

Members should log on at: www.djo.org.uk. Username is VPR.reader and the password is !2012!DJO. Simply follow the instructions...