19th c english periodicals

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The Newberry Library Bulletin,SecondSeries, No.9, May, 1952

..----l NIN~!,~~~!H~~_E.~!URY ENGLISH PERIODICALS

BY RICHARD D. ALTICK

THE men of 19th-cen tury England often spoke of themselvesas living in an "age of Periodicals." Whether or not this was aphrase of self-congratulation depended on the speaker and onthe time. It might signify one's satisfaction at the broad dif-fusion of knowledge that the spectacular increase of periodicalliterature represented, or it might express the despair of thefastidious at tha t other signal accomplishment of periodicals,the debasement and vulgarization of contemporary culture.Whatever the tone of voice in which the phrase was uttered,there can be no doubt that in retrospect it sums up the mostimportant tendencies of the era. Periodicals were, indeed, the19th century's most chat:'!..


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channels of distribution, the periodical achieved a place inthe 19th-century social scene which is no more than matched.certainly not surpassed, by its omnipresence in our own.

The importance of a research library's collection of 19 th.cen tury English periodicals is growing rapidly, for several rea,s o n s .One is that that century, and more especially the Victo-rian age, isone of the conspicuously "coming" fields of l iteraryresearch and crit ical interpretat ion. Another is that periodicalsthemselv~~J1_ay'eof late ,become recognized as legitimate objectsof study, chiefly because they-reflect-,vl th'unlque hil l ness a n ddadty the social a n dcultural--trend~~f their time, and be~cause so much of the great literary work of the 19t1;'~~;:m;n:-fifSnfj>pearedill1flem ' andwasvit~lIi~~fft:~-ted by the exige~,

iles- of seria-rpublicafiOil. Ulere have already been a nilITlUer

of valuable books on individual periodicals such as the For/,nightly, the Monthly Repository, the Westminster, the Athe-naeum, Fraser'S, and the Pall Mall Gazet te , and more are tocome. And the fact that there are now two separate informalnews-sheets iil the field, the Periodical Post-Boy and the Co-ran to, sugges ts how many American scholars are working thishitherto overlooked lode. Finally, one of the major develop'ments in literary study recently has been the tendency of schol-ars to seek in social or popular cultural history the answers toproblems which previously were formulated-and answered-in exclusively literary terms. In the case of the 19th century.one cannot po~~~~!L..understa~ age withoutbeing_sa~~rated!.d!h the spirit of it$,.p.~:r:.~dicals. -- --

' -The Newberry Library is in excellent s h a p eto meet the re-quirements of scholars affected by these new trends. Less news-worthy than some of the unique or near-unique items I shallmention in a moment, but at least as important, is the nucleusof the periodical collection, the long filesof those reviews andmagazines which were of sufficient distinction and influencein their time to merit mention in the general accounts of Eng-lish cultural and literary history. In this category of indispen-sable "standard" periodicals, in which I should include somethirty or forty titles , the Newberry compares well with the best

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university libraries in the country, which is to say that it isvirtually complete. It ~~!.f(!cLfiles..of.the .Edin~u.rghandthe Quarterly, and of the WestTlJ.ins.ter~ the Contemporary, theNineteenth Century,the Fortnightly, and the rest. Among theliterary weeklies, _ t h eA tJieiia_~T!J:; h e Speciator,andtlle Acad-emy are'represented by complete'>fites;while the Literary Ga-

zette ispreseIlt , fQr, its ~arJiet :J .and_ much more important, pe-ri~~:.A.llot!!ts_~!1J mag


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The comprehensiveness of the collection enables the readerto study su ite intensively v irtually any of the chief subjects in.vo lv ing peri()d icals . For example, one of the most significantphenomena in the history of 19th-century English popular cut.tiIre w as diedevelopmem of the cheap press. The Newberry

prov1Qe~abunaarit materia l for the study of this tendency. ItllaSalireof J6i'n Limbird's Mirror (1822-44), the first low-priced literary periodical to survi ve for more than a season ortwo. Of even greater interest is the rare file of The CheapMagazine; or Poor Man's Fireside Companion, published in1813 by George Miller and Son. Haddington, a forty.eight.page monthly magazine, selling for fourpence, which had forits avowed purpose the diverting of the dangerous energies ofthe northern peasant and laborer into peaceful, moral chan.nels. Careful browsing in the Newberry stacks will reveal anumber of other periodicals, priced at a penny or two, which

had the same laudable aim but were regrettably in advance oftheir time. The first triumphs of the cheap-periodical move.ment may be studied in the Library's files of Charles Knight'sPenny Magazine, Chambers' Journal ( the most successful andinfluential of all the low-priced weeklies), and the SaturdavMagazine, published by the Society for the Propagation ofChristian Knowledge. These three periodicals together, bythe ir unprecedentedly wide circulation, proved the ex is tenceof a vast public hungry for simple and edify ing reading matter;and in their wake (and often in their image) came hundredsof other cheap periodicals, some of which were doomed tobrief lives, while others enjoyed considerable prosperity. Inthe Newberry one may examine diverse samples of both types:among the former, the Halfpenny Magazine ( 1840-:-.P: aunique file) and the Farthing Journal, a Pearl of Small Price(1841); and among the latter, the extensive files of Cassell'sFamily Newspaper, Leisure Hour, and that classic solace of theVictorian servant-girl, the Family Herald, all of which achievedimmense circulation in their time. As illustrations of thedawn of the age of the picture paper, which extended thepower of the press to those countless thousands una ble or dis-

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inclined to read more than captions. the library provides filesof the Graphic, the I llustrated Times, and the IllustratedLondon News. Finally, there is a one-volume collection ofcertain London weeklies issued between 1848 and 1850: TheTown, Peeping Tom, Paul Pry, Cheap John, and The FastMan, of interest to historians dfc liitUres ince it should serve toremove the stigma of excessive prudery which is customarilyattached to the Victorian era.

Since no effort has bee-r made to acquireanyparticulargenres of perlodlcais to the neglect o fothers, the lib rary's col-lection offers an accurate cross-section ofi '9th-cemury Englishjouinalism~ A i l C ione of the aspects of t.hat journalism, whichesp~i:lanY-impressesev'enaspecIaHstas h e'goes through--theN~:ber~~~lye!i. j5.J .he. high.incidence-ofcomic and .satiricalweeklie_sJIJlmt!l~h.~!:lning2f the cen tury to the end . A num-~~ecent writers, attacking th~still current noilorithat theVictorians were deficient in humor, have reminded us of therich comic heritage they have left us, above all, so far as peri-odicals are concerned, in Punch. But Punch was merely the onespectacular success in a genre which numbers literally hun-dreds of titles. from the New Wit's Magazine , and EccentricCalendar (1805), the Satirist or :Monthly Meteor (1807-09),and the Spy (1810-11) to George Augustus Sala's Banter(1867-68) and Zoz (Dublin, 1876-79), a journal of morethan ordinary interest because of the able drawings of its staffartist. "Spex," and because it was produced, not from types

and engraved blocks, but by lithography. The very titles ofsome of the comic papers in the library are testimony to theall-powerful name of Punch: Judy (itself a success, with a runof twenty years), Punchinello, PuppetShow .... The futureauthority on Victorian humor and satire could do far worsethan immure himself for several months in the Newberry's pe-riodical stacks.

From Punch on down to the most humble and/or scurrilousfly.by-~nlg11t-paper,the spiiifill:if.iiif()rmsj9th:cem~iy Englis,hc0fi-ii~_p~riodic~ls is.~n_~_~f_,~opi~~}!, n~'!l:>


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politics so seriously that they seemingly never tired of laugh-ing at them under the auspices of their comic weeklies. Hut thepolitical events of the day were responsible for another kind ofjournalism, a kind which, indeed, bulks quantitatively aslarge as the comic. Had it not been for the newly rediscoveredpower of the press-em ployed in this period as it had not beensince the Commonwealth-the political history of the 19

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century would have been very different. The Newberry col.lection of poli tical papers. in conjunc~ion'_~\, lth the f . n ) . ~ a r y ' snneasseiiibTage of pamphlets and other materialrelatin', tot1ieraaicarmovements of the firs t half of the century, i~~hherd for speCIalized investIgation. The reader of, for u.:amplc:tlie works orr.-r.:andBarbara Hammond may turn directlyto the slender files of many of the periodicals there alluded to.

In these papers there is little of the laughter 'which perrne.ates the comic journals; if there is h umor at all, it is the unsmil.ing laughter of social indignation, of passionate hatred of the

political and economic inequities which made life hell formillions of the downtrodden. But there is variety, if not oftone, at least of point of view. From the first decades of thecentury we have, at one extreme, the essentially reactionaryradicalism of Cobbett, with his Political Register and Two.penny Trash (the Newberry file is one of only two in theUnited States) and The Poor Man's Friend, and at the otherextreme, but with very different programs, William Hone'sReformists' Register, Robert Owen's Crisis, '''ooler's BlackDwarf, and the Paineian fervor of such crudelyprinted penn\'sheets as the Medusa, or Penny Poli tician, papers which thegovernment went to all possible measures to suppress andwhich are, in consequence, very difficult to find today.

The discontent of the' 30'S and '40's is mirrored in such pa.pers as the Chartist Circular, Richard Oastler's Fleet Papers,and ,Heywood's Herald O f the Future-the last-named beingfound in only one other American library. The most memo.rable journalistic product of the Chartist crisis of 18 48 was theshortlived Politics for the People, a weekly issued by the grouparound Charles Kingsley which advocated reasonable, peace-

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ful measures in the struggle to achieve the Chartists' just de-mands. The Newberry copy of the paper was owned by Pris-cilla H. Maurice, sister of one of the chief contributors, whoannotated the margins with the names of the authors of vir-tuallyall the articles and poems.

In the latter half of the centurytherewere, rather surpris-ingly, re\ ijperioaitals dedicatedto the serious, nonpoli tical dis-cussion of 'he mulfifafioiissocialproblems left over from thetime when they were lumped together as "lhEl Condition' ofEngland question" The shilling quarterly,lIfciiom, was 'one-of those few, because, despite the editors' partiality to tem-perance propaganda, it was primarily an organ of general so-cial improvement. An even more valuable source is the New-berry' s complete file of the Transactions of the National As-sociation for the Promotion of Soc ial Science, in whose thickvolumes are collected the papers read at the annual "SocialScience Congresses" during the mid-Victorian decades. Thesepapers present a wealth of data on contemporary legal, edu-cational, social. economic, and "sanitary" problems, as well asa wide spectrum of proposals for their solution.

The taste of the Victorians has more often been the occasionof laughter than of sympathetic study, but there are signs thatthe tide is turning and that in the near future Yictorian fineart, architecture. decoration, and music will be examined withsdlOlarly objectIvity: TIie"Newberry possesses a number of theperiodicals essential to such study: the Art Journal, a long-lived mirror of contemporary taste and practice in the-graphic

arts; the Builder, which documents the dismal preferences ofthe age III theconstruction of villas for the nouveaux riches,railway termini, and Albert Halls; the Ecclesiologist, withoutwhich it is impossible to understaridIlie aesthetiC'and reli-gious rationale that lay behind the emergence of "VictorianGothic"; and the Musical Times, established in the age ofClara Novello and Jenny Lind and still current. which is. asPercy Scholes has demonstrated, the most comprehensive rec-ord of Victorian musical activit ies. Fashions in female costumeare chronicled in a series of periodicals for the elegant lady,

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beginning with the important Belle Assemblee with i ts hand-colored drawings, and continuing through the Lady's Maga-Zflle and similar journals. Theevolution of the illustrator'sart may be studied in a'great manyof the p~~iodicals . especial lyfnl~~_gi!!siii1as_~:1l~mb~Es5\'~~~h_~~~re.sopoPI11ar in the mid-

dle decades, but special mention must be made of the New-"herry 's temark"able coiiect ion ofgift-books and annuals , a chieft e a t ' i i r e - o twliichwas, of course, the engravings that to manyjlldg-esrepresentthe-nadlr-ofroman-dc expression,

'The 19th century was not distinguished for the quality ofits dramatic literature, but, despite the obstacles imposed bythe London monopoly and the opposition to drama in manyinfluenti al quarters, it was an age of continuous interest so faras actual performances were concerned. The historian of theEnglish t~eater in th~_c_e_~~l~!-y as at his command a wealth ofreminiscences in book form by the great and sub-great per-

formers, managers, and playgoers of the age, but he needs tofill out his data with the more minute details available-'onlyin contemporaryperlodlcals . -There was no single theatricalpaper which had thesucress that the Musical Times had, forinstance, in i ts sphere. Instead, there was a host of ephemeralpapers whose evidence must be painstakingly pieced together.Here again the Newberry collection can be of substantial as-sis tance. nTpplnglnto the card-catalogue, we find the Dramatic'Censor (1800), the Dramatic and Literary Censor (1801), theTheatrical Recorder (1805-06), the Dramatic Censor (1811-the name was a popular one), Drama, or the Theatr ical Pocket

Magazine (1821-23), the Theatrical Looker-on (Birmingham,1822- 2 3) , the Dramatic Magazine (1829-30), the TheatricalJournal (1839-40), the Dramatic and Musical Review (1842),the Dramatic Times (1846-51), the - Dramatic Regis ter(1851-53), and the Theatre (1855-97). Fi les of most of theseare found in less than ten libraries in the United States.

The Newberry is fortunate in possessing a fine variety ofreliglO~e;-iodic~iTS,tiomihL serious organ addressed to theclergy and -upper-


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19th c english periodicals

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