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I. Why Bother? II. Starting Points for the Study of 19th-Century Periodicals III. Sample Bibliographies of Subjects Reflected in 19th-Century Periodicals IV. Full-Text Sources of 19th-Century Periodicals V. 19th-Century Studies
Reference Stacks World Wide Web Electronic Library Resource (GU only)

 

 

I. Why Bother?

19th-century periodical articles provide a "unique record of contemporary opinion across an enormous span of subject areas," including literature, religion, politics, social science, political economy, women's writing, science, and the arts. Individual periodicals were the forum for debate in a much broader range of disciplines than they are today. (Wellesley Index)

19th-century periodicals were also where major literary works such as Dickens's Oliver Twist were first published. At their height, monthly magazines published some of the best writing of the era, including fiction by Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Eliot, Hardy, and Henry James; poetry by Tennyson and the Brownings; and essays by Arnold, Ruskin, and Pater (Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia 591).

 

II. Starting Points for the Study of 19th-Century Periodicals

1. British Literary Magazines. Ref. PN5124.L6 B74 1983
Detailed descriptions of the content and history of British literary magazines from 1698 to the mid-1980s. Volumes 2 and 3 cover 19th century magazines.

2. Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals. (see #22)
Includes extensive information on the publication history and politics of the 45 periodicals indexed.

3. Victorian Britain: An Encyclopaedia. Ref. Stacks DA550 .V53 1988

4.A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture. Stacks PR461 .C597 1999

5.The Literary Journal in America to 1900: A Guide to Information Sources. Stacks Z6951 .C57

6. Victorian Periodicals Review.  Periodical Stacks
Journal that surveys current scholarship and criticism of the Victorian period.

7. The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States, 1880-1960.  Stacks PN5124.P4 R44 1997

8. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900.  Stacks Z1003 .A57, pp. 318–47.

9. Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research.  Stacks PN5124.P4 V5 1978

10. The periodicals section of Patrick Leary's "Libraries and Bibliographies" page http://www.victorianresearch.org/libraries.html and Rosemary T. VanArsdel's Selected Bibliography http://victorianresearch.org/periodicals.html

Both pages are part of the Victoria Research Web http://victorianresearch.org/ and provide a guide to archives, libraries, journals, bibliographies, discussion lists, and syllabi related to the study of the Victorian period.

 

III. Sample Bibliographies of Subjects Reflected in 19th-Century Periodicals

11. The British Empire in the Victorian Press, 1832–1867: A Bibliography. Stacks Z2021.C7 P32 1987

12. Crime in Victorian Britain: An Annotated Bibliography from Nineteenth-Century British Magazines.  Stacks Z5703.5.G7 P35 1993

 

IV. Full-Text Sources of 19th-Century Periodicals

13. American Periodical Series.
Digital images of historically significant American periodicals from 1740 to 1900, including literary and professional journals, children’s and women’s magazines, and popular magazines. Off-Campus access instructions. Also available from http://www.library.georgetown.edu/advisor/

14. HarpWeek.
Provides full-text electronic access to all issues of Harper's Weekly (including all illustrations and advertisements) published between 1857 (first issue) and 1877, with the capacity to browse or search by date, by literary genre, and by a person's occupation or role in society. Harper's Weekly is a key American primary source for studying the 19th-century. The intent is to provide the full text of the journal's entire run, but for now, coverage includes only 1857–1877.
Also available from http://www.library.georgetown.edu/advisor/

15. Harpweek: The 19th Century World http://www.harpweek.com/
A free Website archiving materials from Harper's Weekly on specific historical topics of the nineteenth century, superbly organized for educational purposes (for research and for teaching primary historical and cultural research to secondary and post-secondary students). Current highlighted collections include Black America; the impeachment of Andrew Johnson; Civil War literature; presidential elections 1860-1884 (including the electoral college issue in the 1876 election); immigrant and ethnic America; the editorial cartoons of Thomas Nast; the American West; and 19th-century advertising. Each topic is introduced with contemporary scholarship.

This free site does not replace HarpWeek. It packages primary documentation only on particular topics (similar to Encyclopaedia Britannica Online's "Spotlights," or homepage feature articles), and it lacks HarpWeek's capacity for searching across all issues of Harper's Weekly. When you recommend HarpWeek, recommend that students check for current topics on the free site.

16. Making of America (MOA).
An extensive, searchable collection of page images from major periodicals and books with 19th century imprints. Created as a collaborative project of Cornell University and the University of Michigan and funded by the Mellon Foundation. Pages appear as graphic images (.pdf files), but you can also view them as text, which allows you to use the Edit/Find in page feature to locate your search word.*

*Word of warning: The text files were created through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) without correction. As a result, a smudge on the page might have caused the OCR to read "slavery" as "slavory," for example, so your search results for "slavery" will not be comprehensive.

     •University of Michigan's Making of America  http://moa.umdl.umich.edu/

This collection currently contains approximately 1,600 books and 10 periodicals (50,000 articles), such as Appleton's, The Southern Literary Messenger, and Vanity Fair.

     •Cornell University's Making of America http://moa.cit.cornell.edu/moa/index.html

A digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. This collection currently contains 24 major periodicals and 114 books (over 100,000 journal articles and 267 monograph volumes). Journals include Putnam's Monthly, Scribner's Magazine, North American Review, and Century.

17. Godey's Lady's Book http://www.uvm.edu/~hag/godey/index.html and http://www.history.rochester.edu/godeys/

This important journal included fashion plates as well as poems, fiction, editorials, literary notices, fashion and needlework patterns, and advice articles. Both websites listed include illustrations.

Godey's Lady's Book, April, 1855: Page 2; Children's Dresses

18. Internet Library of Early Journals http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/
A joint project of the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, and Oxford, this site provides digitized, searchable collections of important 18th- and 19th-century British periodicals. The core collection includes at least 20 consecutive years of three 19th-century periodicals: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Notes & Queries, and The Builder.

19.New York Times (Historical Version).
Complete, fulltext archive of the New York Times, from its first issue on September 18, 1851 through 1999. Off Campus Access Instructions. Also available from http://www.library.georgetown.edu/advisor/

20. Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (SciPer). http://www.sciper.leeds.ac.uk/
This project seeks to trace the representation of science, technology, and medicine across a wide range of 19th-century periodicals.  It is jointly organized by the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies in the Department of English Literature at the University of Sheffield and the Division of History and Philosophy of Science in the School of Philosophy at the University of Leeds. SciPer aims "to identify and analyze the representation of science, technology and medicine, as well as the inter-penetration of science and literature, in the general periodical press in Britain between 1800 and 1900."  It addresses not only the reception of scientific ideas in the general press, but also examines the creation of non-specialist forms of scientific discourse within the periodical format and the ways in which they interact with other kinds of articles found in nineteenth-century periodicals.

21. New Moulton's: Pre-Twentieth Century Criticism of British and American Literature to 1904. Ref. PR 85 .N39 1985
Reprints excerpts of criticism from newspapers, magazines, journals, and book-length studies. Each volume covers a different period, beginning with Medieval–Early Renaissance and ending with Late Victorian–Edwardian. Separate index volume.

 

V. Citation Indexes to 19th-Century Periodicals

22. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900. CD-ROM Network
The online version of a 5-volume print index [Ref Stacks Z2005 .H6]. Widely considered the most important general index to British nineteenth-century periodicals, it indexes 45 of the most important monthly and quarterly periodicals of the period, most of which are not indexed in any other bibliographic reference work. Besides providing a table of contents for the periodicals, the Wellesley index identifies the authorship of the articles indexed and includes proof of their attribution. This is considered to be "one of the 20th century's great feats of collaborative scholarship" (Patrick Leary, http://victorianresearch.org/libraries.html#periodicals), as nearly 95 percent of the articles were written anonymously (unsigned). The online version indexes periodicals that were not included in the print edition and includes all corrections made to the print index. Because it can be searched by article-keyword, the CD is quite a boon to researchers. It includes information on the publication history and politics of each periodical and provides brief biographical information on the contributors. This index is a more specialized reference tool than Poole's. Also available from http://www.library.georgetown.edu/advisor/

23. Periodicals Contents Index (PCI)
An electronic index providing the tables of contents of thousands of international periodicals in the arts, humanities and social sciences since 1770. Indexes both scholarly and popular periodicals. Off Campus Access Instructions. Also available from http://www.library.georgetown.edu/advisor/

24. Historical Newspapers Online
Electronic access to two key primary resources in 19th-century research:

• Palmer's Index to the Times [of London] (1790–1905, with some full-text articles 1785-1870); and
• The Historical Index to the New York Times (1851-1923)

Lauinger owns microfilm copies of both newspapers. Off Campus Access Instructions. Also available from http://www.library.georgetown.edu/advisor/

25.19th Century Masterfile. 1802-early 20th C.
Featuring an integrated and enhanced version of Poole's Index to Periodical Literature (1802-1906) ( Ref. Stacks AI3 .P7) as its centerpiece, 19th Century Masterfile is rounded out by a number of other general and publication-specific indexes to the contents of nineteenth-century journals, newspapers, and books. The focus is on Anglo-American sources. Off Campus Access Instructions. Also available from http://www.library.georgetown.edu/advisor/

26.Reader's Guide Retrospective (1890-1982)
Subject index to articles in general interest periodicals. Includes the Nineteenth Century Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, 1890-1899. Ref. AI3 .R496 Off-Campus access instructions. Also available from http://www.library.georgetown.edu/advisor/

Specialized Indexes

(See the full-text periodicals sources and citation indexes before consulting these.)

27. Literary Reviews in British Periodicals, 1798-1820 and Literary Reviews in British Periodicals, 1821-1826. LAU Ref Stacks Z2013 .W36 1977

28. American Literary and Drama Reviews: An Index to Late Nineteenth Century Periodicals. Ref. PN 62256 .M37 1984

29. A Guide to Critical Reviews of United States Fiction, 1870-1910. LAU Ref. Stacks Z1225 .E35

30. Index to Nineteenth Century American Art Periodicals. Ref. Z 5935 .S36 1999

 

VI. 19th-Century Studies

31. Victorian Britain: An Encyclopaedia. Ref Stacks DA550 .V53 1988

32. A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture. Stacks PR461 .C597 1999

33. Makers of Nineteenth Century Culture, 1800-1914. Ref. Biog. CT119 .M23

34. Nineteenth Century Studies. Stacks CB415 .N56
Interdisciplinary journal published by the Nineteenth Century Studies Association

35. Victorian Database Online http://www.victoriandatabase.com/victoria.html
Indexes books and book chapters, dissertation abstracts, and articles from more than 500 journals published in 1945 and after. The database is part of LITIR's Victorian Studies on the Web at http://www.victoriandatabase.com/index.html, which provides links to recent and award-winning publications and to notable Victorian Web sites.

36.  The Victorian Web http://www.victorianweb.org/
Exceptional comprehensive site for the study of Victorian history, society, and culture in Britain. Covers literature, society, culture, art, politics, economy, religion, philosophy, science, technology, and gender relations. Each area includes biographies, primary texts, analysis, feature articles, and special projects.

37. Victorian Studies. Periodical Stacks (1957- ) and Internet (1999- ).
The leading interdisciplinary scholarly journal in the field.
 

Resources on Patrick Leary's Victoria Research Web http://victorianresearch.org/ were invaluable in creating this guide.

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Content updated: 7/01-jh
Links updated: 08/04, sh