Bibliographic Databases and “The Golden Stream”: Constructing the Periodical Poetry Index

For many years, scholars researching poetry published in Victorian periodicals have had limited tools available to assist in those studies.¹ The bibliographic projects begun in the 1960s that have become standard resources for periodical research, such as the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900, omitted poetry for various reasons, mostly due to the sheer quantity of poetry published in nineteenth-century periodicals. The Periodical Poetry Index makes visible the abundance of Victorian poetry published in periodicals and thereby provides a resource for scholars interested in both Victorian poetry and periodical culture.² Our bibliographic research database of poetry published in nineteenth-century periodicals includes texts by nineteenth-century British and American poets, poets from earlier periods, and poems in English translation.

This project builds on and responds to the digitization of nineteenth-century magazines and newspapers and to the increasing number of digital poetry projects, both archival and bibliographic. Google Books and the HathiTrust Digital Library have made nineteenth-century periodicals more widely available to scholars who do not have access to either hard copies or full-text subscription research databases such as ProQuest’s British Periodicals I and II or Gale’s Nineteenth Century Collections Online.³ In recent years, several important digital-archive projects on nineteenth-century poetry, including the Rossetti Archive and the Walt Whitman Archive, have recovered the importance of periodical publication for major poets.⁴ New digital tools and methods of access continue to transform scholarship in nineteenth-century literature by making available the full text of certain periodicals (Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition), addressing the work of specific groups of authors (The Poetess Archive), exploring certain topics or genres (Victorian Poetry Network and Science in the Ninetheenth-Century Periodical), and creating new software tools for analysis (nines).⁵ Our project contributes a genre-specific research bibliography for nineteenth-century poetry that is grounded in material culture.

The word index in our project’s title gestures at the long history of bibliographic research tools such as the index and the concordance, including the Wellesley Index, tools that provide scholars with multiple entry points into textual culture. Like those indices, our project offers scholars a reference tool with which to access information about poems published in nineteenth-century periodicals. However, our project is not bounded by that heritage, as it consists of a relational database. A database not only provides access to bibliographic citations for poems published in nineteenth-century periodicals but also goes beyond the chronological or alphabetically organized citation list of a static bibliography to allow users to ask different questions about the data. Digital projects such as ours thus embrace older models of bibliographic research even as they look forward toward computational analysis. This essay will place the Periodical Poetry Index within the larger field of periodical studies, describe the design and goals of our project, demonstrate how our editorial decisions constitute critical acts, and highlight the new knowledge created through building this project.⁶

Our approach to the creation of the Periodical Poetry Index has been informed by the theoretical concerns and interdisciplinarity of nineteenth-century periodical studies.⁷ Operating at the intersection of literary studies, historical scholarship, and digital media studies, periodical studies grounds itself in the examination of what Mark Turner calls “a wider, more complicated media and communications network of literary, and often visual, texts” (309). Nineteenth-century periodicals can thus be studied not only as containers for texts of different genres but also as economic institutions, social organizations, and distribution mechanisms for cultural value.

The field of periodical studies has long been faced with two key concerns: access to nineteenth-century journals and newspapers and the need for bibliographic tools to systematize periodical research. Michael Wolff argues in “Charting the Golden Stream: Thoughts on a Directory of Victorian Periodicals” that one of the aims of the Victorian Periodicals Newsletter and the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (rsvp) was “to indicate some way in which we might go about making the newspapers and periodicals not only physically more available, that is, more readily...