Lost and Found: Serial Supplements in the Nineteenth Century

This title of this paper is testimony to the elusive aspect of this form in journalism, which always articulates a reference to a prior, primary text to which it is “supplementary,” but not always preserved allied to its host. As for the primary text, its routine conditions of preservation—stripped of wrappers, adverts, and covers—mean that it is not always evident to twenty-first century readers that it was accompanied by a supplement. What Gerard Genette calls “paratextual” portions of issues¹ often advertise as a feature the “generous” provision of the supplement, and may even explain its background. Recent experience with a bound copy of the Quarterly Review is thus typical: without warning from a cover or wrapper, I found references to a supplement of prints embedded in an article on illustration in this text-dominated and rarely illustrated quarterly review.² Nor was the supplement of prints to be found in that copy. It may have been extricated by the publisher for volume publication, or by a reader for a scrapbook or framing. Supplements are frequently lost, and many, perhaps most, remain unpreserved, unrecognized, unrecorded, and uncatalogued.

An example of a supplement that has recently been found is connected with the Northern Star in the same period. In frequency of publication (weekly), its type (a newspaper), and its politics (Chartist), the Northern Star could not be more different from the Quarterly Review, but both supplements consist of images, one to reward subscribers, and the other to enhance an article. Both were subsequently separated from their parent publication, but that in the Quarterly Review was probably bound into the original issue of the journal, whereas the engraved portraits attaching to the newspaper were not. Rather they were distributed to subscribers by newsagents, at different dates in different parts of the country.³ Separately preserved in an art gallery, they have only recently been identified as supplements to the newspaper, and exhibited, separately from it, 175 years after their issue. Last year they were reunited with the Northern Star electronically at www.ncse.ac.uk .

As these examples suggest, the term “supplement” with respect to media has a breadth of identities and meanings, with a noteworthy diversity of form, distribution, and function. I want to consider the term further and spell out aspects of this diversity. Perhaps the dominant meaning of “supplement” at present is the notion of its defining status as Extra, added value, different, and with luck, “free.” It is part of the sales discourse of circulation – of a promise of novelty, and of the “address” of serials to consumer/reader; a lure; a come-on; a bargain; but sometimes, in a sleight of hand, issues with supplements cost more. This may be seen in an early Illustrated London News, a 6d glossy weekly where “With Two Supplements” appears under the price on the masthead, which at 1/- is twice the ordinary cost.⁴ For the duration of the Great Exhibition in 1851, the ILN issued double numbers weekly, which also cost a shilling, and when they ended, the editor informed exhibitors that they could submit drawings of Exhibition items they wished to display (possibly for sale?), previously covered in the weekly letterpress supplement/guides, as paid advertisements, which the editor promised to publish in an advertising supplement.⁵ The “supplement” element of journalism then is a means whereby editors and publishers may produce odd issues of variable sizes and prices in a regular serial; it supplements inflexible elements of serial publication such as length and price that are associated with the “brand” of the title in question. Supplements allow editors and publishers to respond to events (such as war) and seasons that would warrant additional pages, for which readers or advertisers will pay, while some additional production costs such as distribution are zero.⁶ Profits on such supplements are likely to be higher.

Supplements are thus often associated with news and topicality. The guides to the Great Exhibition that the Illustrated London News published mid-century during the Exhibition itself, for example, were issued in conjunction with its regular weekly...