Charting Rocks in the Golden Stream: Or, Why Textual Ornaments Matter to Victorian Periodicals Studies

This paper argues that textual ornaments are constitutive features of Victorian periodicals and should inform both our critical examination of their architecture and our current remediation of their contents. In making this argument, I apply recent architectural theory on the digital Gothic to the Victorian periodical page. Like the ornaments of Gothic architecture, the ornaments of Victorian periodicals are basic to their journalistic structures of design and use—in effect, their program and codes. This essay claims the digital as a useful framework for understanding the fundamentally Gothic architecture of Victorian illustrated periodicals.