Introduction: Borders and Border Crossings in the Victorian Periodical Press

A study of Victorian periodicals underscores the heuristic currency that the concept of "borders," along with related concepts like "boundaries," "margins," "limits," and "liminalities," has had in cultural analysis for some time. Borders serve to establish national and cultural as well as personal identities. Stable borders promise stability and security. However, borders can also be limiting, and border crossings—both in the literal and the figurative sense—include an element of liberation as well as destabilization.

When the first volume of the New English Dictionary became available in 1888, covering the first two letters of the alphabet, its first users would have found the following definitions for "border," all of which were current during the second half of the nineteenth century:

1. 1. A side, edge, brink, or margin; a limit, or boundary; the part of anything lying along its boundary or outline.

2. 2. The district lying along the edge of a country or territory, a frontier. …

3. 5. A defined edging, of distinct material, colour, shape, pattern, or ornamentation, made or fixed along the margin of anything. (With many specific applications in arts and manufactures.) …

4. 10. fig. A limit, boundary, "verge." (Transferred from place to time and abstract things.)

The rich semantics of the word explains the wide thematic range of papers held at the 2017 annual RSVP Conference on "Borders and Border Crossings in Victorian Periodicals." It took place in Freiburg, a city in the border country of Germany, France, and Switzerland, and at a time when borders, and the question whether and by whom they should be crossed or not, had just gained new political significance—so much so, in fact, that in some countries the conference website was blocked while it used the official conference title.

This special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review addresses the diversity of Victorian encounters with borders and border crossings, investigating how they represented and negotiated these encounters in a medium that was deeply embedded in their lives. The contributions assembled here show how borders were perceived as permeable or closed, how they provoked comparison, drew attention to differences and similarities, and pointed to contact zones and fault lines. And, as this issue demonstrates, there is not only the cultural angle to consider. Several articles explore the concept of the border as inherent to the medium of the periodical press itself, whose production and consumption was structured by borders and crossings of different kinds.

Borders and Mediality

In many ways, the periodical is a publication form that crosses borders by definition, as Margaret Beetham and James Mussell have outlined.¹ Forced to be topical, periodicals are closely interwoven with the everyday and thus cross the border between print culture and daily living more persistently than, for instance, more artistically self-conscious "literary" print products. Periodicals are polyphonous: assembling different authors and topics within one issue, sometimes on the same page, creating a space that puts the factual in dialogue with the fictional or combines the practical with the entertaining. Further, the single voice of the individual contribution tends to be interrupted, as longer items have to be serialized across several issues of the periodical. The periodicity and seriality that characterize the periodical press confronted Victorian readers with borders in terms of structure and materiality: the limits and layout of the page, the issue, the volume, the boundaries of letterpress and image as well as borders in the ornamental sense. "Physical boundaries are hard to define," Margaret Beetham points out, as the periodical enters the world without hard covers but is stored in libraries in bound volumes that put several issues together or sees its serials re-enter the market in the form of a book.²

New opportunities in print technology, particularly the development of the woodcut, also opened up possibilities in layout that created fluid borders between the visual and the verbal and, in fact, partly did away with a strict separation between those two forms of communication. Periodicals typically made their readers criss-cross between different article types, as well as between letterpress and images. And finally, articles and images themselves often...