A comprehensive and authoritative overview of the diversity, range and impact of the newspaper and periodical press in nineteenth-century Britain.

The 2017 winner of the Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize Providing a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of scholarship on nineteenth-century British periodicals, this volume surveys the current state of research and offers researchers an in-depth examination of contemporary methodologies. The impact of digital media and archives on the field informs all discussions of the print archive. Contributors illustrate their arguments with examples and contextualize their topics within broader areas of study, while also reflecting on how the study of periodicals may evolve in the future. The Handbook will serve as a valuable resource for scholars and students of nineteenth-century culture who are interested in issues of cultural formation, transformation, and transmission in a developing industrial and globalizing age, as well as those whose research focuses on the bibliographical and the micro case study. In addition to rendering a comprehensive review and critique of current research on nineteenth-century British periodicals, the Handbook suggests new avenues for research in the twenty-first century. "This volume's 30 chapters deal with practically every aspect of periodical research and with the specific topics and audiences the 19th-century periodical press addressed. It also covers matters such as digitization that did not exist or were in early development a generation ago. In addition to the essays, readers will find 50 illustrations, 54 pages of bibliography, and a chronology of the periodical press. This book gives seemingly endless insights into the ways periodicals and newspapers influenced and reflected 19th-century culture. It not only makes readers aware of problems involved in interpreting the history of the press but also offers suggestions for ways of untangling them and points the direction for future research. It will be a valuable resource for readers with interests in almost any aspect of 19th-century Britain. Summing Up: Highly recommended" - J. D. Vann, University of North Texas in CHOICE

In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education and research in Britain. It also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture, which served as a significant medium for the dissemination and exchange of medical and literary ideas throughout Britain, the colonies, and beyond. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press explores the relationship between the medical culture of Romantic-era Scotland and the periodical press by examining several medically-trained contributors to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the most influential and innovative literary periodical of the era.

This annotated bibliography of nineteenth-century British periodicals, complete with a detailed subject index, reveals how Victorian commentaries on journalism shaped the discourse on the origins and contemporary character of the domestic, imperial and foreign press. Drawn from a wide range of publications representing diverse political, economic, religious, social and literary views, this book contains over 4,500 entries, and features extracts from over forty nineteenth-century periodicals. The articles cataloged offer a thorough and influential analysis of their journalistic milieu, presenting statistics on sales and descriptions of advertising, passing judgment on space allocations, pinpointing different readerships, and identifying individuals who engaged with the press either exclusively or occasionally. Most importantly, the bibliography demonstrates that columnists routinely articulated ideas about the purpose of the press, yet rarely recognized the illogic of prioritizing public good and private profit simultaneously, thus highlighting implicitly a universal characteristic of journalism: its fractious, ambiguous, conflicting behavior.

This book offers a new interpretation of the place of periodicals in nineteenth-century Ireland. Case studies of representative titles as well as maps and visual material (lithographs, wood engravings, title-pages) illustrate a thriving industry, encouraged, rather than defeated by the political and social upheaval of the century. Titles examined include: The Irish Magazine, and Monthly Asylum for Neglected Biography and The Irish Farmers’ Journal, and Weekly Intelligencer; The Dublin University Magazine; Royal Irish Academy Transactions and Proceedings and The Dublin Penny Journal; The Irish Builder (1859-1979); domestic titles from the publishing firm of James Duffy; Pat and To-Day’s Woman. The Appendix consists of excerpts from a series entitled ‘The Rise and Progress of Printing and Publishing in Ireland’ that appeared in The Irish Builder from July of 1877 to June of 1878. Written in a highly entertaining, anecdotal style, the series provides contemporary information about the Irish publishing industry.

A large-scale reference work covering the journalism industry in 19th-Century Britain.

Periodicals played a vital role in the developments in science and medicine that transformed nineteenth-century Britain. Proliferating from a mere handful to many hundreds of titles, they catered to audiences ranging from gentlemanly members of metropolitan societies to working-class participants in local natural history clubs. In addition to disseminating authorized scientific discovery, they fostered a sense of collective identity among their geographically dispersed and often socially disparate readers by facilitating the reciprocal interchange of ideas and information. As such, they offer privileged access into the workings of scientific communities in the period. The essays in this volume set the historical exploration of the scientific and medical periodicals of the era on a new footing, examining their precise function and role in the making of nineteenth-century science and enhancing our vision of the shifting communities and practices of science in the period. This radical rethinking of the scientific journal offers a new approach to the reconfiguration of the sciences in nineteenth-century Britain and sheds instructive light on contemporary debates about the purpose, practices, and price of scientific journals.

This book re-imagines nineteenth-century detective fiction as a literary genre that was connected to, and nurtured by, contemporary periodical journalism. Whilst ‘detective fiction’ is almost universally-accepted to have originated in the nineteenth century, a variety of widely-accepted scholarly narratives of the genre’s evolution neglect to connect it with the development of a free press. The volume traces how police officers, detectives, criminals, and the criminal justice system were discussed in the pages of a variety of magazines and journals, and argues that this affected how the wider nineteenth-century society perceived organised law enforcement and detection. This, in turn, helped to shape detective fiction into the genre that we recognise today. The book also explores how periodicals and newspapers contained forgotten, non-canonical examples of ‘detective fiction’, and that these texts can help complicate the narrative of the genre’s evolution across the mid- to late nineteenth century.

James Mussell provides an accessible account of the digitization of nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals. As studying this material is essential to understand the period, he argues that we have no choice but to engage with the new digital resources that have transformed how we access the print archive.

This collection of important new research in 19th-century media history represents some salient, recent developments in the field. Taking as its theme, the ways the media serves to define identities - national, ethnic, professional, gender, and textual, the volume addresses serials in the UK, the US, and Australia. High culture rubs shoulders with the popular press, text with image, feminist periodicals and masculine, gay, and domestic serials. Theory and history combine in research by scholars of international repute.