What Happened to the Periodical?

Over the past fifty years, literary and cultural historians have been portraying lively worlds in which circulating periodicals did important cultural work, revealing how this print medium made possible an early-modern public sphere or radical counter-public spheres, how it articulated rich and diverse forms of Romantic writing while it organized British audiences or gendered reading publics. Yet the same scholars have rarely if ever encountered—let alone been able to study—the original single issues we were writing about. Rather we have needed to construe our cultural scenarios from the bound periodical volumes in the print archive that we have held in our hands. It would be something of a scandal if historians of the codex were found never to have read the first publication of the books they studied, yet this has been the condition of doing periodicals research of any kind in the past. The single issues have either been lost or altered to fit the bound volumes we now read—or we might suspect, having occasionally encountered them by happenstance, that such issues still live among the uncatalogued paper creatures of the archival deep. Yet bibliographical data has proven largely useless to locate them, and the best-informed of our archivists tell us they have little or no paper trail to follow.

Today our databases expose this problem in the way they transmit those bound volumes into the digital archive. One thing such databases suggest is why it may have worked so well for us to use bound print volumes to picture scenes of circulating periodical issues in the past. In those volumes we have been reading the same paper, the same inks, the same page layouts, the same dates of publication as appeared in the original issues. More important, we have been able to do with those volumes what readers of the past did with their weekly or monthly journals—browse them, open them anywhere, thumb around, flip pages backwards and forwards, then pause and go high focus on a page or article, then travel again, not always following pages in order, but recombining them to suit the reader’s wish or the researcher’s aim. This mode of interactivity is what the current databases inhibit or block for so browse-worthy a medium as the periodical. Sequential page turning on databases like Eighteenth Century Collections Online or PDF scrolling in the HathiTrust Digital Library or on Google Books has changed our mode of access to what the print volumes had encouraged us to do in the past. Some databases, like ProQuest’s British Periodicals, have tried to circumvent the digitized bound volumes by extracting articles from them and arranging them in a row of files, as if they could simulate a single issue. Yet both the volume-centered and the issue-centered database portals to the digital archive have failed to grasp what the periodical issue was—more than a stack of articles, and something other than the chapter of a book.¹

In this light, I want to ask of the periodical the kinds of question Jerome McGann has been pressing for almost twenty years, most recently in A New Republic of Letters. How does the digital archive alter the relation between the object of study and the methods of study as they had worked in the print library? How can the print objects now digitized, whether they are books, or in this case bound periodicals, be studied in such a way as to reveal how they “carry the evidence of ‘the history of their own making’”?² In the present case: what happened to periodicals when they were bound into volumes in the first place? What did the resulting relation between issues and volumes mean to their makers or users, and what do they mean to us now in the digital archive?

Such bound volumes were not afterthoughts to circulating periodical numbers, nor were they simply archival impositions. Rather, in what I will call their “media design,” single issues were strategically linked to the volumes since the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This design formed a pattern that...