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W.E.H. Wellesley College August 29, 1965 Introduction
The importance of Victorian periodicals to modern scholars can scarcely be exaggerated. In scores of journals and thousands of articles there is a remarkable record of contemporary thought in every field, with a full range of opinion on every major question — a range exceeding what could be found, in many cases, in such books as were devoted to the topic being investigated. Indeed, there are aspects of Victorian culture, minor ones, no doubt, but parts of the total picture, which simply do not exist in published books, or if they do, are entirely hidden because there is no subject index to Victorian ideas and attitudes. (The only approximation to one, it turns out, is an index to periodical literature.) Also, because reviews and magazines reflect the current situation, they are indispensable for the study of opinion at a given moment or in a short span of years.This and four other paragraphs below have been adopted with revisions from my "British Periodicals of the Victorian Age: Bibliographies and Indexes," Library Trends, 7 (April, 1959), 554-565, by kind permission of the University of Illinois Library School.
A similar appraisal, from a contemporary standpoint, was made by W. F. Poole in 1882: "The best writers and the great statesmen of the world," he said, "where they formerly wrote a book or pamphlet, now contribute an article to a leading review or magazine, and it is read before the month is ended in every country in Europe. ... Every question in literature, religion, politics, social science, political economy ... finds its latest and freshest interpretation in the current periodicals." This was written for the introduction to Poole's Index to Periodical Literature. It is because the major journals are so important, historically and intrinsically, that the scholar requires a complete guide into their rich and complex resources. He must have an index or indexes to subjects, book reviews, and authors, and needs tables of contents readily at hand.
Something approaching this goal — without tables of contents — was the aim of the Nineteenth Century Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, edited by Helen G. Cushing and Adah V. Morris. The plan was to move backward from 1900 by decades, but after the first two volumes appeared in 1944, covering 1890-1899, the project was dropped. And in any event, the limited number of English journals that were included (only thirteen) and the reliance for the identification of anonymous authors almost wholly on the few publishers' lists available would have made this work, even if completed, somewhat short of ideal.
The great index, of course, is Poole's; and it commands the admiration and respect of anyone who can remotely imagine the work required to produce a subject index to ninety British periodicals from 1802 to 1900. It has its limitations: the year is not given, only the volume number; the pagination is not inclusive; the choice of subject headings is sometimes capricious (French painting is indexed partly under "Art — in France" and partly under "Painting — French"), and sometimes too broad (an essay on Musset can be entered, not under his name, but under "French Literature Today" — and so be buried). Moreover, a number of important journals were not included: The British Critic, to which Newman, Keble, Pusey, and other High Churchmen contributed; W. J. Fox's Unitarian Monthly Repository, which published articles by J. S. Mill and Harriet Martineau; Meliora, the first journal of sociology; and the Roman Catholic Rambler are among the dozen or so periodicals one wishes were here. Poole must be expanded and redone by bibliographers who have not only mastered the art of subject indexing but who are also prepared at least to skim every article. For the time being, however, used with patience and ingenuity, it will do well enough.
A book review index would be welcome. Here Poole is hopelessly limited. All short notices are omitted, and reviews of books are normally placed under the supposed subject and not the author, or under some general heading like "Recent Books." Poole does not mention a single review of Barchester Towers by title: one or two may be hidden under "Trollope, Novels." Here too the indexer will have to look at the text, for in the quarterlies some of the books named at the head of an article are, in fact, never discussed, and others may be mentioned only briefly in passing. Distinctions, therefore, would need to be made between listings, references, and actual reviews. In the meanwhile, the index volumes to some of the journals, notably those to the Edinburgh and the Quarterly, are available, and the Wellesley Index can be useful.There are 6 volumes of indexes to the Edinburgh, 1802-1889; 10 to the Quarterly, 1809-1904; 2 to the Westminster, 1824-1840; 1 to Blackwood's, 1817-1841. See D. C. Haskell, A Check List of Cumulative Indexes to Individual Periodicals in the New York Public Library, New York, 1942, for other periodicals. For the use of the Wellesley Index to locate book reviews, see below, [p. xx in print edition].
There has been no author index. This deficiency might be rectified without much trouble, except for one enormous obstacle: most articles and stories in the Victorian periodicals were anonymous or pseudonymous — before 1870 about 97 per cent, for the whole period probably 90 per cent. It is this phenomenon which makes an author index, in the double sense of an index to the authorship of anonymous and pseudonymous articles and stories, and an index to the articles and stories written by each contributor, so important — and so difficult to produce, since it can only be done by an immense effort. Even the writer of a paper that is signed may not be identified by his signature. For who is "A. J. Smith" or "Canon Faber"? Which of half-a-dozen John Browns writing at the time is this one? Is an article signed "John Chester" really by a John Chester or by John Something-or-other, Bishop of Chester? Is "Gosford" a pseudonym or a nobleman? And while Richard Simpson, writing in the Rambler, is obviously the well-known Catholic critic, is Richard Sampson a real person or the pen name of somebody else? Small wonder that as an author index Poole is totally inadequate. His few attributions are largely signed articles; and in any case he gives no evidence, so that one cannot check the reliability of his claims or the validity of his reasoning. The Reader's Guide used publishers' lists, but only for two British reviews, the Edinburgh and the Quarterly, and two British magazines, Blackwood's and the Cornhill; and only for ten years, 1890-1899. And that, outside of some works on individual journals where the attributions are limited in time or in subject, is all we have had before the Wellesley Index.The articles are listed in my "Reflections on Indexing Victorian Periodicals," Victorian Studies, 7 (Dec., 1963), 192-196, from which I have borrowed a few sentences in this paragraph.
Someone will say, "What does it matter whether or not we know the author of an article on Athenian architecture in the Edinburgh Review for April 1852? All that matters is the essay itself as a reflection of contemporary opinion." But this is not true. In the case of essays on controversial subjects, which means most Victorian essays, an intelligent interpretation often depends on knowing the author's position or his other works. An anonymous paper attacking the Thirty-nine Articles would mean one thing if it were written by T. H. Huxley and something quite different if the author were the Bishop of London. Moreover, the context in which one discusses an essay, and therefore its place in a work of scholarship, can sometimes depend on knowing the contributor and therefore the group he speaks for. Or again, a scholar working on a particular writer has a special need to learn who wrote the principal criticisms of his work; or, writing on a subject like architecture or China, to learn which Victorians were "doing" the articles he finds listed in Poole. Still further, the history of the Victorian short story, which is still to be written, must depend heavily on knowing the authors of a large number of anonymous specimens. And finally, an author index in the sense of a bibliography of writings by each contributor must be built, of course, on thousands of individual identifications. If in some respects it is not important to know that the article on Athenian architecture in the Edinburgh was written by Coventry Patmore, it is important to know that Coventry Patmore wrote an article on Athenian architecture and where it may be read.
Though anonymity now seems strange, it was natural to the Victorians because it had been customary from the beginning of periodical publication (the anonymity of newspapers was extended to magazines and reviews), and because its advantages were well argued.For a full discussion, to which I am indebted, see the article by Oscar Maurer, "Anonymity vs. Signature," cited below, [p. xxiii in the print edition]. The reviewer who need not sign his name may, of course, be irresponsible, but he may be more honest. He is automatically saved from the bias of personal ambition or personal fear; and since his praise or criticism is freed, for the most part, of selfish motivation, he can speak the truth as he sees it. Moreover, in some cases he could not speak at all without the protection of concealment. We have anonymity to thank for many a critical article on the army and the navy, or on foreign policy, or the London School Board, written from the inside. Even non-controversial articles written by women and a good deal of feminine fiction would never have been published, under Victorian mores, had signatures been required. It is also true that some writers prefer anonymity because they gain assurance by speaking in the name of a national review. Cardinal Wiseman, long the editor of the Dublin, testified to the fact that one could "speak with a confidence, and sometimes with a boldness, from which he would shrink, if he spoke in his own person, and not as the representative of certain principles, embodied in a collective responsibility." Preface to Essays on Various Subjects (3 vols., London, 1853), I, v.
The similar advantage to the review is a further argument, for there is no doubt that once a periodical has established itself as a voice of authority, whether of Catholicism or Dissent or Conservatism, an anonymous article carries a force which it could not possibly attain, except in very special cases, if it were signed. "An ordinary reader," wrote Trollope, "would not care to have his books recommended to him by Jones; but the recommendation of the great unknown comes to him with all the weight of the Times, the Spectator, or the Saturday." Autobiography, written 1875-1876 (London, 1923), p. 175. One may compare the Times Literary Supplement today [ie in 1965], where the practice of anonymity survives. Many scholars and librarians will give a review in the T.L.S. an automatic respect they would not think of giving one anywhere else, for everywhere else they would judge by the writer's reputation or remember that a review is simply one man's opinion. The semi-oracular authority of the unsigned article had another source in the mystery it invoked: it piqued the curiosity and set the imagination soaring. Punch advised the editor of the Contemporary Review to be sure that the outpourings of an unrecognized genius were anonymous because "this adds to the mystery. It may only be poor old Professor Fitz-Boodle, of Stoke-Poges University; but, if no name is mentioned, rumour will ascribe the article ... to the Marquis of Salisbury, or Mr. Gladstone, or Professor Huxley." Issue for Mar. 24, 1883, p. 141. Cf. George Saintsbury, "The Charm of Journalism," A Scrap Book (London, 1922), p. 11: "The strongest arguments against it [the signed article] may be derived, first from the amount of semi-oracular authority that it takes away from the article, and secondly from the necessary disappearance of mystery." He goes on to mention an anonymous article of his which for twenty-four hours was thought to be by Lord Salisbury.
Finally, a policy of anonymity provided the editor with welcome flexibility. He could, if he wished, publish two, three, four, and even five or six articles by the same person in a single issue; or two or three each by two or three people. Brougham, for example, said he wrote 98 reviews for the first 25 numbers of the Edinburgh; and to one number he contributed 6. Such a procedure would have been impossible under a system of signature: a review would have seemed the mouthpiece of a single man or a small clique.
But almost from the beginning there had been grumblings and occasional exceptions, and in the 1860's signed articles and stories began to appear in the new journals — Macmillan's Magazine (1859), the Fortnightly Review (1865), the Contemporary Review (1866), and the Nineteenth Century (1877). None of these periodicals was completely signed, except the Nineteenth Century; and the Edinburgh and Quarterly kept on their anonymous way. But the public had come to realize that malice and sycophancy were not necessarily prevented by anonymity; indeed, were often encouraged and protected by it. Moreover, the growing spirit of individualism as it challenged the sectarian authority of the traditional reviews made signature appropriate; The cultural shift is documented by Arnold in Culture and Anarchy, 1869; he describes the sectarian character of the traditional journals in "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," 1864. W. G. Blaikie, who edited the North British Review, 1860-1863, wrote in his Autobiography (London, 1901), p. 147: "One can see now that the old practice [of anonymity] was characteristic of an age when authority was in the ascendant; the present is more like the state of things in Israel when every man did that which was right in his own eyes. There was more then of the spirit of monarchy; there is more of the republican element now." The new development with its "open platform" is described in the introduction to the Contemporary Review below. and if the name were famous enough, made it the more profitable to writer and publisher.
The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900, as its broad title would suggest, was conceived as a single, multi-volumed work that would provide students of the age with a new and better subject index, a book review index, and an author index. An initial date in the mid-twenties was chosen because the age seems to begin with the recognition, patent in the early essays of Carlyle, Macaulay, and Mill, that radical changes in politics and religion were on the horizon. The particular year, 1824, marked the founding of a major vehicle of new ideas, the Westminster Review.
We have begun with the author index as the most badly needed, and started with monthlies and quarterlies because the number of articles in the weeklies is so great as to make the extended solution of anonymity impossible where there is not a publisher's file or an editorial list. The present volume, covering eight journals of outstanding quality and influence, will be followed in several years' time by a second, indexing thirty more. In one case, that of the Edinburgh Review, we have gone back of 1824 to include an earlier period, from its beginning in 1802 to 1823, because there is no author index to this major periodical. The authorship of articles in the Quarterly to 1824 and in Blackwood's to 1825 has been the subject of able monographs by Hill and Helen Shine and by A. L. Strout, respectively. For those journals we automatically pick up almost where they leave off. But the gap for the Edinburgh before 1824 seemed to demand filling.
The Index has two unique features. The first is the tabular view of the contents, issue by issue — with the exception of poetry, which is not included. This provides a student with the contents of a journal not available in a particular library, and in any case in a form much easier to use; and when the contents of a number of journals are examined together, it becomes a record of the subjects being discussed in a given year, or during a given period of time, like 1860-1865. The subjects of articles whose titles are unclear have been indicated in square brackets: e.g., "The Congress [of Berlin]," or "A romantic poet [Shelley]." The tabular view will also serve the purpose, to some extent, of a book review index; for once the date of publication is known, one can skim the tables of contents for that year and the next. If the book is not named in the article's title, it is usually supplied, for major works, in square brackets: e.g., "Rationalism [Lecky's History of Rationalism]."
The second special feature of the Index is the citation of evidence in support of the attributions of authorship. This appears mainly in Part A (the tabular view) immediately following the writer's name; but the entry in Part B (the bibliography of articles arranged under the contributors' names) should also be consulted, since the contributor's vocation or some fact of his biography mentioned there may be a link in the chain of evidence. In every instance it should be possible for a scholar to trace the grounds of the attribution, if he wishes, in the manuscripts and printed books we refer to. (We summarize what is said in a manuscript, but cite only volume and page for a book, which presumably can be got hold of more easily.) In many cases we have accepted the word of modern authorities because we have not had time to verify it, or have been unable to find primary sources of our own. This is especially true of bibliographies and of the Dictionary of National Biography. Consequently, we do not guarantee that an attribution is right, but only that the evidence cited is sufficient to lead to that conclusion.
Whenever feasible, we have given the title of a volume where the story or the article is reprinted, whether exactly or substantially. Sometimes this is done in order to identify the author. But even where an article or story is signed, or other good evidence is available, the reprint is mentioned so that the person using the Index may read it, at least in revised form, in a library which does not own the periodical but has the volume in which it was republished.For a more detailed description of the Index, see the Editor's Note describing the structure of Part A below in this introductory material to Volume I and 785-786.
In making the identifications, we have not relied on stylistic characteristics, except to help resolve conflicting claims or to support more objective evidence that is inconclusive. Such a method could hardly be employed for thousands of contributors. Internal evidence of an autobiographical nature has been used wherever needed. But primary reliance has been placed on external evidence: on passages in published biographies and letters, collections of essays which are reprints of anonymous articles, marked files of the periodicals, publishers' lists and account books, and the correspondence of editors and leading contributors in British archives. For the full identification of names, or the pinpointing of a common name like "S. Ferguson," a large battery of biographical dictionaries and catalogues of printed books has been brought into play.
A rough attempt has been made to weigh the evidence. A "prob." or a "?" may follow an attribution; and where there is greater doubt, we have introduced the formula: "Unidentified. Perhaps J. S. Knowles, 1784-1862, in DNB, who wrote on this subject in an earlier issue." These distinctions, however, are fairly subjective. They should be taken simply as warning that the attribution is uncertain.
The following table gives the record for this volume:
Thus, for 97 per cent of the articles and stories we either supply the name of the author or suggest a probable or possible one.
In Part B these articles and stories are arranged under their authors' names, the total number of which, for the eight journals, is 4780. When Volume II is published with its Part B, the Index will contain bibliographies of over 7000 Victorian writers in about 40 major periodicals. Nothing like this has been available before. The relatively few bibliographies that exist rarely go beyond books, and those that do are never, apparently, complete. Here for the first time, we believe, the student will find bibliographies of articles by Edward Dicey, David Masson, W. R. Greg, Charles Merivale, John Morley, Richard Whately, J. A. Froude, Abraham Hayward, and Goldwin Smith, to name but a few. Moreover, as one would expect, the piercing of anonymity has uncovered what appear to be "new" articles and stories by well-known writers. Though no one can be sure of what has been mentioned in the vast mass of Victorian scholarship, we think that scholars will find titles they had not heard of before in the bibliographies of E. S. Dallas, A. V. Dicey, A. C. Fraser, Charles Kingsley, St. George Mivart, Herman Merivale, Coventry Patmore, Alexander Smith, Leslie Stephen, John Tulloch — and a great many in those of Greg, Masson, and Morley. Still another use of Part B is the location of the original date and place of periodical publication of a novel, or of an article or story found in a volume of collected writings.
Part C is the first index of pseudonyms for English periodicals. (Halkett and Laing's Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature covers only books and pamphlets.) We have included the pseudonyms that are still unbroken [for practical reasons these do not appear in the electronic edition, where we have used the combined Part C of the solved pseudonyms from Volume V; for suggestions on how to find unbroken pseudonyms in the electronic edition, please see Help], along with those that have been solved, so that future investigators who find that so-and-so used such-and-such a pseudonym will be able — given similarities in date and subject matter — to locate articles or stories of his that previously were concealed by the pseudonym.
A NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY
So far as the periodicals themselves are concerned, the scholar has nearly all he could wish. In the Union List of Serials in Libraries of the United States and Canada (2nd ed., 1943, with supplements to 1949) and the fine British Union-Catalogue of Periodicals ... in British Libraries (4 vols., 1955-1958), he has a fairly complete bibliography, as well as full information on the location of files. The arrangement in both is alphabetical. The Tercentenary Handlist of English & Welsh Newspapers, Magazines, & Reviews by J. G. Muddiman, published in 1920 by The Times, has the advantage of not being "controlled" by library holdings, and of an arrangement by initial date of publication, which shows what new journals were appearing in any year or span of years. But as the title indicates, Scottish and Irish periodicals are not included. W. S. Ward's Index and Finding List of Serials Published in the British Isles, 1789-1832 (1953), is more complete than anything else, but its terminal date limits its value for Victorian studies. Finally, there are the sections called "The Weekly Papers," "Magazines and Reviews," and "School and University Journalism" written by H. G. Pollard for Volume III of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. In this extensive list, covering all the periodicals a scholar would ordinarily need, changes of title and series are noted, and for many journals the names of successive editors are given. It is now being revised and expanded by Henry and Sheila Rosenberg for the new edition, under the editorship of George Watson, to be published in 1966.
Books and articles about the eight periodicals in this volume of the Index are listed below at the close of their respective introductions. For other journals the extension of Pollard's section in the supplementary volume of the Cambridge Bibliography (1957), written by R. D. Altick, is valuable for modern research, and will be brought up to date by Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg in the new edition.
On periodical literature in general the standard introduction is Walter Graham's English Literary Periodicals, 1930, where chapters viii-x are devoted to Victorian reviews and magazines. The inclusion of scores of journals makes the treatment superficial, and the method is entirely descriptive. The early period, 1800-1832, has been studied by many scholars, notably by Oliver Elton, A Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830 (2 vols., London, 1912), II, 386-420; Arthur R. D. Elliott [editor of the Edinburgh Review] "Reviews and Magazines in the Early Years of the Nineteenth Century," in the Cambridge History of English Literature, XII (1917), 154-180, with a bibliography by G. A. Brown, pp. 468-474; A. S. Collins, The Profession of Letters (London, 1828), pp. 203-228; R. G. Cox, "The Great Reviews," Scrutiny, 6 (June and Sept., 1937), 2-20, 155-175; and Ian Jack, English Literature, 1815-1832 (Oxford, 1963), pp. 8-38, with a bibliography on pp. 470-473. By comparison, the Victorian period proper has been neglected. The best critical essays are Denys Thompson's "A Hundred Years of the Higher Journalism," Scrutiny, 4 (June, 1935), 25-34, and R. G. Cox, "The Reviews and Magazines," in From Dickens to Hardy, ed. Boris Ford (Penguin Books, 1958), pp. 188-204, which combines brief accounts of the major journals with an analysis of their literary criticism. E. E. Kellett's sections in "The Press," Early Victorian England, ed. G. M. Young (2 vols., London, 1834), Vol. II, are more historical: see "The Power of the Press," pp. 3-6, "The Magazines," pp. 59-77, and "The Religious Press," pp. 81-86. The opening pages of an article of mine, mentioned in note 1 above, explore some cultural factors that lay behind the extraordinary flowering of periodical literature in the nineteenth century. Michael Wolff has made a perceptive analysis of reviewing in "Victorian Reviewers and Cultural Responsibility," 1859: Entering an Age of Crisis (Bloomington, Indiana, 1959), pp. 269-289. Frank Fetter, in a recent paper, "Economic Controversy in the British Reviews, 1802-1850," Economica, 32 (Nov., 1965), 424-437, has emphasized the value of the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, Blackwood's, and the Westminster to the economic historian.
For the study of anonymity, Oscar Maurer's "Anonymity vs. Signature in Victorian Reviewing," The University of Texas Studies in English, 27 (June, 1948), 1-27, is indispensable, both for its marshalling of history and its documentation of primary sources. On the elusive subject of circulation figures, the best account is by Alvar Ellegård, "The Readership of the Periodical Press in Mid-Victorian England," Göteborgs Universitets årsskrift, 63 (1957), No. 3. An appendix to R. D. Altick's English Common Reader (Chicago, 1957) called "Periodical and Newspaper Circulation" should also be consulted. The two chapters on periodicals in Altick's book, as his title would imply, deal with cheaper and more popular journals than those we are indexing, but his bibliography, pp. 399-409, contains relevant material.
There is no bibliography of nineteenth-century commentary. The following list, arranged in alphabetical order, is a selection of general essays or of chapters in literary histories which seem especially valuable: Arnold, Matthew, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1864), Essays in Criticism, 1865, and later editions. Bagehot, Walter, "The First Edinburgh Reviewers" (1855), Literary Studies, 1879, and later editions. [Dallas, Eneas Sweetland], "Popular Literature — the Periodical Press," Blackwood's, 85 (Jan. and Feb. 1859), 96-112, 180-195. For the attribution consult the entry in Part A below (nos. 3724 and 3729). [Espinasse, Francis], "The Periodical and Newspaper Press," The Critic, 10 (1851), 251-253, 299-300, 371-372, 427-428; 11 (1852), 113-114, 200-201. The articles are signed "Herodotus Smith," a pseudonym acknowledged by Espinasse in his Literary Recollections (1893), p. 368. Grant, James, "Periodical Literature — The Quarterly Reviews" and "Periodical Literature — The Monthlies," in his The Great Metropolis (2 vols., London, 1836), chaps. vi and vii. "Journals and Reviews," London Review, 1 (1829), 1-9. Probably by the editor, Joseph Blanco White. Mill, James, "Periodical Literature," Westminster Review, 1 (1824), 206-249. The opening pages are on the general subject, the remainder on the Edinburgh Review. Morley, John, "Anonymous Journalism," Fortnightly Review, 8 o.s., 2 n.s. (Sept. 1867), 287-292. An attack on anonymity. Newman, John Henry, The Idea of a University, last three paragraphs of the Preface, dated Nov. 1852. [Oakeley, Frederick], "Cardinal Wiseman's Essays — Periodical Literature," Dublin Review, 34 (June, 1853), 541-566. This important article, in which pp. 541-553 are devoted to the general subject, is attributed to Oakeley by H. R. Bagshawe, the sub-editor; see Matthew Russell, "The Early Dublin Reviewers," Irish Monthly, 21 (1893), 90. Saintsbury, George, "The Development of Periodicals" and "Later Journalism and Criticism in Art and Letters," in his History of Nineteenth Century Literature (N.Y. and London, 1896), chaps. iv and ix. See also pp. 449-451 in chap. xii. Stephen, Leslie, "The First Edinburgh Reviewers" (1878), Hours in a Library (1874-1879), and later editions. Sterling, John, "The English Periodical Press" (1828), Essays and Tales (2 vols., London, 1848), II, 45-55. Trail, H. D., "The Anonymous Critic," Nineteenth Century, 34 (Dec. 1893), 932-943. A defence of anonymity. [Wilson, John], in "Noctes Ambrosianae, No. XLII," Blackwood's Magazine, 25 (April, 1829), 542-543.
A NOTE TO THE READER
In bibliographical and biographical research on this scale, the possibility of error is a certainty. To mention only one hazard, there are over 300,000 numbers in this volume. We can hope that most errors will be numerical, but some will be of omission (for example, in the correlation of Part A with Parts B and C), and others, alas, of commission. Readers are urged to send corrections and additions to the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, as detailed above in the Introduction to the Electronic Edition. They will appear, with grateful acknowledgment, in a future list of emendations.
Editor's Note
The standard entry is in three units separated by periods: title and pagination, authorship, and evidence (see Blackwood's, item no. 2). Where the article is signed with a pseudonym or with the title of a peer or bishop, this extra unit follows the first, beginning "Signed:" (see Bk, no. 1). In the case of translations, the translator's name, when known, together with the source of this knowlege, follows the evidence of authorship in a separate unit (see Bk, no. 1864). In a final unit, within parentheses, appear any notes, letters, or later articles bearing directly upon the article in question (see Bk, no. 5). This means that the notes and letters are not given separate entries in our tables of contents even though they may be listed in that way in the periodicals. Where they have an independent character, however, they are entered individually or in a department called "Correspondence." Different pieces of evidence are separated by semi-colons (see Bk, no. 22).
Although they do not profess to duplicate typography, the titles are usually complete. The only exceptions are superfluous subtitles like "a lecture" or "a letter to the editor," and in the case of serials all subtitles after the first entry: e.g., "The four Georges; sketches of manners, morals, court and town life" for No. I, but simply "The four Georges" for the later numbers. Where an article has no title, as in the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, the running title has been adopted. If the title is the title of a book being reviewed, it may or may not be italicized, depending on whether the focus is on the book or on the subject. "The Life of Richard Whately" would deal primarily with the work of the biographer, "The life of Richard Whately" with the man himself. But in practice this distinction has proved difficult to maintain, since both emphases are often made; it should not be relied upon. Where approximate titles or English translations of foreign titles are used as running titles, they have normally been adopted: Kinglake's History of the War in the Crimea, for example, is allowed to stand as the title of his Invasion of the Crimea.
All serials are numbered in parentheses after the title, whether or not the numbers are given in the text. They appear as "chaps." or "no." or "part." "Part" indicates an integral section of an article too long to publish in one issue; "no." indicates one of a series of discrete essays that might be terminated at any point.
Square brackets are inserted in or after the title to give the author of the book being reviewed (though only important authors are entered), or to indicate the subject if the title conceals it (see Bk nos. 10 and 6). Obscure titles that are unexplained are probably short stories.
After the author's name, life-dates are added if there is another contributor with the same or a very similar name. In cases where we are not sure that the attribution is firm, the degree of doubt has been roughly indicated in three descending steps: by the addition of "prob." after the name; by a "?"; or by the word "unidentified" followed by a "perhaps" or "possibly" John Doe, with an explanation of what is simply an educated guess. Even where none of these qualifications appears, the identification is not necessarily certain. The evidence must be scrutinized. If it begins with an "attr." (for "attributed"), its reliability is the reliability of the man or book making the attribution: "Attr. DNB" means precisely that, no more, no less. The evidence that an article was reprinted in such-and-such a volume of essays by the author is first-rate if the collection was published in the author's lifetime and in Great Britain; posthumous and foreign reprints must be viewed with less confidence. The word "repr." is used loosely: it means reprinted either exactly or substantially. For us to have determined the precise degree of reproduction of all reprints would have required a prohibitive number of collations.
In many cases, especially in the later decades of the century, the evidence is "signed" or "signature." The two words carry distinct and arbitrary meanings which must be kept in mind. "Signed" signifies that the name of the author appears in the text exactly as we give it, though there may also be a title or an address that we have omitted. An article signed "T. H. Huxley" or "Professor T. H. Huxley" will be entered in the Index as: "T. H. Huxley. Signed." "Signature" means that the evidence for the authorship was the signature used, and, given the definition of "signed," indicates that the name we print was not precisely the name in the text. An article signed "Professor Huxley" will appear as: "T. H. Huxley. Signature." In the latter case, wherever the jump from the signature to the name is not obvious, the link between the two is provided. An essay in Macmillan's for Oct. 1881 on lyrical poetry of modern Greece signed "E. M. Edmonds" is recorded: "Elizabeth Mayhew Edmonds. Signature; BMCat.," indicating that the books listed by the woman cited in the British Museum: Catalogue of Printed Books will show her interest in modern Greek literature (in point of fact one book is a translation of modern Greek poetry called Greek Lays, Idylls, Legends, &c., published three years later). Even with "signed" as evidence, a further word is sometimes added in order to pinpoint the particular man: e.g., "A. M. Sullivan. Signed; called M. P. in Table of Contents"; or, "W. C. Williamson. Signed, with address, `Owens College'." Here and elsewhere the full name, if known, will be found in Part B. All articles not marked "signed" or "signature" are anonymous.
In many instances the grounds on which a precise identification was made are revealed only by taking account of the entry in Part B. The author of a paper in the Contemporary for Oct. 1900, "The South African Settlement," is given simply as, "J. B. Robinson. Signed." In Part B one finds this entered under Sir Joseph Benjamin Robinson, 1840-1929, a South African mine owner. Occasionally, in order to save space and expense, we have simply cited the biographical source where the clinching fact is recorded, as in the case of another article in the same periodical, for May 1898, by another Robinson. "The slave trade in the West African hinterland," signed "C. H. Robinson," is credited in Part B to Charles Henry Robinson, 1861-1925, canon of Ripon, with a reference to WWW. This has to mean that the ultimate clue to the attribution is in the biography in Who Was Who — where one duly discovers that Canon Robinson was an African explorer.
In the evidence for authorship, initials and single word citations for books, articles, and manuscripts are explained in the Short Title list at the end of the volume. If the evidence is "See no. 000" or "Cf. no. 000," this normally means that the evidence given for the entry referred to is precisely the same as that which applies to the present case; but in some instances the intention is to point to the same subject indicated by the two titles. Whenever there could be any uncertainty, the specific meaning of the cross-reference is set down.
The identifications for Blackwood's, the Cornhill, the Edinburgh (from 1847 to 1900), Macmillan's (from 1885 to 1900), the North British (from 1863 to 1871), and the Quarterly are largely based on publishers' lists or account books. (For details see the introductions to these periodicals.) Only three of these lists are cited for every article they cover (those for the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, and, except for the De Quincey items, Blackwood's). For the others, when any evidence that is as good or better is available — a signature or a British reprint during the author's lifetime — the list is ignored. We do not promise that the names are reproduced exactly. If A. P. Stanley is called "Dean of Westminster," as he is on the Longmans list, this is noted on its first appearance; thereafter, we simply record: "A. P. Stanley. Longmans." This procedure is especially common in the case of women, where the lists normally omit Christian names. When the Blackwood list gives "Mrs. Oliphant," we write: "Margaret Oliphant. Blackwood." Whenever the jump from list to attribution is not obvious, an explanation is provided: e.g., if the Macmillan list attributes an article to "Capt. Erroll, R.N.," we write: "George H. R. Erroll. Macmillan gives `Capt. Erroll, R.N.'; see Navy List /87 under retired officers."
The format for articles signed with either pseudonyms or titles is: Signed: T. Buddle; or Bute; or Harvey Carlisle. The author's name then follows in boldface: James White; J. P. C. Stuart, Marquis of Bute; Harvey Goodwin, Bishop of Carlisle. The evidence for a pseudonym is added, but nothing more is thought necessary for peers or bishops. They may be found in Burke's Peerage.
The short reviews appearing in departments entitled "Recent Publications," "Books of the Month," etc., are not entered individually unless we have identified the author or authors. The arrangement is alphabetical by authors' names. See Contemporary Review, no. 280, for illustration.
Volume II Preface
Though many members of both the staff and the board of editors worked on the twelve periodicals in this volume, those who were primarily responsible for preparing the texts of each, including the introductions, were the following: for Bentley's Quarterly Review, the Editor; for the Dublin Review, John A. Lester, Jr. and Esther Rhoads Houghton, assisted by Lady Nancy Houghton Cumming; for the Foreign Quarterly Review, Eileen Curran; for the Fortnightly Review, Esther Rhoads Houghton; for Fraser's Magazine, the Editor, assisted by Patricia Crunden and Mary Ruth Hiller; for the London Review (1829), the Editor; for the National Review, Kazuko Dailey and Harold E. Dailey; for the New Quarterly Magazine, the Editor, assisted by Meredith Luyten; for the Nineteenth Century, Meredith Luyten; for the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, Walter K. Gordon and the Editor; for the Rambler, Esther Rhoads Houghton with the collaboration of Josef L. Altholz and the assistance of Fr. Damian McElrath; and for the Scottish Review, Antoinette Petersen.
Among those who have aided in various ways with the preparation of the MS., including its proofreading and typing, were Mary Ann Bukovitch, Mary Cannon, Eleanor Clemence, Marianne Durgin, Gail Edmands, Barbara Erskine, Caroline Hatch, Mary Ruth Hiller, Anne Meixsell, Lindsay Miller, Sheila Morrison, Sydney O'Malley-Keyes, Elizabeth White.
In England we have been greatly indebted to Anne Byars, Elizabeth Falsey, and Ann Palmer, our research assistants in London. In various ways the Index is grateful to Margaret Skerl, recently retired Assistant Librarian, University College, London, and her colleague, Janet Percival; Jeanne Pingree, archivist of the Imperial College; Henry and Sheila Rosenberg, editors of the demanding section on nineteenth-century periodicals in the new Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature; Elisabeth Poyser, archivist of the Westminster Diocesan Archives; Rosemary Rendel of the Catholic Record Society; Miss S. J. A. Muir, Director's Assistant, Royal Geographical Society; Richard Story of the National Register of Archives; R. K. Brown, Librarian, Writers' Library; and T. S. Blakeney of the Mt. Everest Foundation, who gave us crucial information about some Victorian Alpinists.
Outside of London S. Wright, Esq. of Bures, Suffolk, has taken the trouble to send us lists of relevant articles in the learned journals. Ian Fletcher of Reading University and Professor A. W. Coats of the University of Nottingham have kindly responded to requests for information; and David Collard, University of Bristol, was good enough to publish a letter of inquiry in the History of Economic Thought Newsletter. J. S. G. Simmons, now a fellow of All Soul's and recently librarian of the Taylor Institute, has been an invaluable and friendly source of material on Russian authors; and Charles C. Nickerson, presently at Trinity College, Oxford, aided this volume in various ways. At Cambridge Brendel Wittman Lang has handled our research with skill. Others we wish to thank are Father C. S. Dessain of the Birmingham Oratory, who has put his knowledge of Cardinal Newman and other Victorian Catholics at our service; the Abbé Alphonse Chapeau of the Université Catholique d'Angers, now writing a biography of Cardinal Manning, who kindly sent us a list of authors marked in the file of the Dublin Review at St. Mary of the Angels, Bayswater; James Sambrook, the University, Southampton, for his helpful letters on the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine; Priscilla Metcalf for her careful reading of our introduction to the Nineteenth Century; Allan J. Rands of Farnham, Surrey, for permission to examine many cuttings of essays by his grandfather, William Brighty Rands; and Charles W. Crawford, for sending us annotations in copies of the Rambler at Oscott College.
In Scotland our chief indebtedness has been, as it was in Index I, to T. I. Rae, Assistant Keeper of Manuscripts at the National Library in Edinburgh; also to Julian Russell of the library staff for his highly professional help on Scottish biography. Special thanks are due to Dr. E. F. D. Roberts, the keeper of manuscripts, for his generous gift of research assistance in the summer of 1970. Margaret Rae has kindly examined letters for us in the library. Finally, we are most grateful to the present Lord Bute for allowing us to quote from the unpublished letters of the third Marquis of Bute, who was the proprietor and in some degree editor of the Scottish Review, 1886-1900; and to his librarian, Catherine Armet, for bringing them to the National Library for examination.
From Australia Susan Eade of Canberra sent us an analysis of an unsuspected collaboration in the Fortnightly Review.
In North America, to mention only a few on whom we have depended, Jack Robson of Victoria College, University of Toronto, and Robert Tener of the University of Alberta at Calgary are old and kind friends of the Index. Wilbur J. Smith, Librarian of Special Collections, University of California at Los Angeles, and J. R. Dunlop, Associate Librarian, City College of New York, made significant contributions to our work on the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. Mrs. David Bonnell Green lent us the papers of her late husband on J. W. Parker, Jr., editor of Fraser's Magazine. Extensive research at the Morgan Library in New York was ably carried out by Nancy Houghton Brown. In his review of Index I Professor V. C. Knoepflmacher of the University of California at Berkeley suggested that the final item of any series be indicated by adding a "concl.," thus sparing the reader the annoyance of searching in vain for Part IV of a three-part article — a suggestion we have gratefully adopted. A general note of praise and thanks goes to Maurianne Adams of Smith College, Robert A. Colby of Queen's University, New York, Gordon Haight of Yale, William E. Fredeman, University of British Columbia, W. Eric Gustafson, University of California at Davis, Robert H. Woodward of San José State College, California, Edgar W. Morse, University of California at Davis, William S. Peterson, Andrews University, Edward M. White, California State College at San Bernardino, H. B. de Groot of University College, University of Toronto, Marjory Douglas of Coconut Grove, Florida, James Belliveau of the Boston Athenaeum, Lawrence Evans of Northwestern University, B. M. Langstaff of New York City, and Frank Fetter of Hanover, New Hampshire. We owe various debts to the scholars, here and abroad, who made the survey of Victorian periodical writers, editors, proprietors, and publishers which are mentioned in the DNB, and their chairman, William H. Scheuerle, State University System of Florida, who made their findings available to the Index.
The chief contributor to Appendix A (Corrections and Additions to Volume I) is Joanne Shattock who has written the section on the North British Review. Other scholars who have enabled us to tighten our previous work are Nicholas Boyle of Magdalen College, Cambridge; Beatrice Corrigan and Robert A. Fenn of the University of Toronto; Joseph Hamburger of Yale; Anne Lohrli of the University of New Mexico, Las Vegas; Allan J. Rands of Farnham, Surrey, grandson of William Brighty Rands; and D. J. Walder of Edinburgh University.
In a category of immense importance we wish to express our gratitude to those institutions and foundations which have supported the preparation of this volume — indeed, without whose generosity there would have been no second volume: the National Endowment for the Humanities; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and its president, Gordon N. Ray; the Council on Library Resources, as Mr. Verner Clapp was retiring as president and Dr. Fred C. Cole taking over; the American Council of Learned Societies and its president, Frederick Burkhardt; the Braitmayer Foundation of Marion, Massachusetts; and the Sophie C. Hart Fund at Wellesley College. In connection with more than one of these grants we appreciate the guidance and recommendation of the administrative staff of Wellesley College, above all its president, Ruth M. Adams, its dean, Phyllis Fleming, its vice-presidents, Philip Phibbs, Albert E. Holland, Robert J. Schneider, Joseph Kiebala, and Harry B. Jones, controller. Other institutions which have made small but important grants for typing, travel, and in some cases resident expenses in London are Colby College, Haverford College, Rutgers University Research Council, and the University of Minnesota.
We have, of course, depended heavily on the staff of the Wellesley College Library under the leadership of Helen Brown. Hannah French, Research Librarian for Special Collections, has helped us more than once on Victorian publishing history. Other libraries in the area have continued to respond to our needs, and some have been good enough to loan us periodicals, or parts of periodicals, which were not at Wellesley. I refer in particular and with special gratitude to the Boston Athenaeum (James Belliveau and Jack Jackson), the Dinand Library of Holy Cross College (James M. Mahoney), and the Forbes Library at Northampton (Lawrence E. Wikander and Violet Durgin).
The Editor wishes to express his personal appreciation to all of our Associate Editors. They have contributed unstintingly both from their stores of knowledge and from their personal contacts with foreign scholars and archivists. To our Assistant Editors we are also indebted, particularly those who worked primarily on this volume, Kazuko Dailey, Walter K. Gordon, and H. B. de Groot. We have had great satisfaction in broadening the scope of our Advisory Editors, the full list of whom now consists of Robert A. Colby, Beatrice M. Corrigan, William E. Fredeman, Gordon S. Haight, Howard M. Jones, Oscar Maurer, John M. Robson, Henry and Sheila Rosenberg, Robert H. Tener, and Michael Wolff.
Finally, we thank the University of Toronto Press for the handsome volumes it is publishing. The print, the paper, and the spatial allowance have been praised in more than one review of Index I. For this volume we much appreciate the editorial assistance of Miss Joan Bulger.
W.E.H. and E.R.H. Wellesley College January 12, 1972 Introduction
The present volume contains 12 more periodicals, supplementing the 8 in Volume I, and bringing us to the half-way point of our project. The goal of indexing about 40 of the principal monthlies and quarterlies, 1824-1900, will be completed in Volumes III and IV.
At this mid-stage we have gained sufficient experience to state the grounds on which we are choosing our periodicals. From the beginning "principal" meant journals of relatively high calibre in the writing and editing, and of considerable reputation in educated circles. Moreover, they were to be general as distinct from professional: they were to admit, like the Catholic Dublin Review, a range of material, however slanted, that would include literature, politics, religion, economics, science, etc.This sentence and part of another just below have been adapted from my report, "The Wellesley Index, Volumes II and III: Plans and Problems," Victorian Periodical Newsletter, no. 4 (April 1969), p. 3. Hence the exclusion of such distinguished serials as Nature and Mind. These two requirements are fulfilled in the eight journals of Volume I, and here, I should suppose, in the Dublin Review, Fraser's Magazine, the Fortnightly Review, and the Nineteenth Century. The National Review, edited by Bagehot and Hutton, the British Quarterly Review, and the Westminster, including Mill's London Review, coming in the next volumes, will complete a list of fifteen principal and general periodicals which no one, I think, would question.
But beyond that opinions would differ and the criteria of selection become more varied. Given our special objective of identifying the authorship of articles and stories, the availability of source materials for this purpose, in an age of anonymity, becomes a crucial matter. Though the tables of contents have independent value, an author index, especially from 1824 to 1865 when only 3.6 per cent of the prose is signed, would hardly justify its title if the attributions fell much below 80 per cent. Shall we include borderline journals like the Monthly Chronicle or Ainsworth's Magazine? Not if we are unable to find keys to unlock most of the authorships. Conversely, if a good record of identifications has already been published (as is the case with the Monthly Repository and the Germ),By Francis E. Mineka and Robert S. Hosmon, respectively. this is reason for an omission. Finally, we decided to provide a reasonable balance between articles and fiction (the latter about 30 per cent), and a sufficient geographical and sectarian spread to represent Irish and Scottish concerns, Catholic, Anglican, and Dissenting points of view, and the chief political positions. Clearly, with these subjective and partly incompatible criteria, the problem of choice becomes baffling: insoluble by logic, impossible even by Newman's illative sense. Moreover, whatever the decision, it is never final. As one makes his way deeper into the periodicals, gaining knowledge and judgment, he begins to reconsider journals he had once confidently accepted or rejected, which leads to a slightly new list of 40 — to be superseded a few years later by another, slightly different, slightly better, one hopes. I am confident that the editors will be able to defend the final choice, but will never succeed in explaining, even to themselves, some of the omissions.Anyone wishing to know what periodicals are planned for Volumes III and IV should consult the report mentioned in n. 1, p. xiii, or The British Studies Monitor, I (Spring 1970), 23-24. Temple Bar and the Theological Review were shifted to volume III when lack of space forced them out of Volume II. In place of the Church Quarterly Review we have substituted the Anglican English Review, 1884-1853, because of its interesting juxtaposition with the Christian Remembrancer. The Monthly Chronicle, 1839-1841, the London Quarterly Review, 1853-1900, and the Jesuit Month, 1864-1900, have been added. The division between Volumes III and IV has not yet been definitely decided upon. The report, but not the Monitor article, explains why other periodicals were ruled out and mentions some which might have been included.
The selection in this volume — or indeed in any volume — is not ideal. We plan a pattern of associated periodicals, but "circumstances beyond our control" — the illness of an editor, the resistance of a given journal, for the time being, to the probing of its anonymity, the unexpected discovery that this particular combination makes the volume too large or too small — force us to make substitutions; and in doing this, we have to take some account of what fits the available space rather than what would be most appropriate. But the make-up of a given volume is of little consequence so long as it contributes to a total body of periodicals that makes sense. Nevertheless, Volume II is not without a rationale. It brings together the two leading periodicals of the later century, the Fortnighly Review and the Nineteenth Century; and since both are liberal, in different ways, they are partly balanced by the conservative National Review, 1883-1900. The Dublin Review and the Rambler (the predecessor of the Home and Foreign Review in Volume I), nicely represent the orthodox and liberal wings of Roman Catholicism. The London Review of 1829 and Bentley's Quarterly Review of 1859-1860 were highly literate periodicals which refused to adopt any party line, religious or political — and so met speedy death. It was only in the period after 1865 that the public became more tolerant of non-sectarian journals, an attitude significantly encouraged by Matthew Arnold's "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1864). Fraser's Magazine belongs with Blackwood's, on which at first it was modeled, as well as with Macmillan's (both in Volume I), in representing the best monthly magazines that focused on politics, religion, and society. By contrast, the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine of 1856, founded by William Morris, and the New Quarterly Magazine, 1873-1880, like the general run of the new magazines of the 1860s (the Cornhill is in our first volume), were essentially literary, emphasizing fiction, literary criticism, and verse. The Foreign Quarterly Review is the first of a large number of journals (others of which will be indexed in Volume III) designed to open up foreign affairs and foreign writing to a public largely untravelled but eager to broaden its outlook. The Scottish Review, a conscious successor to the North British (also in Volume I), provides special insight into thought and opinion north of the border in the 80s and 90s.
The score for Volume II is less spectacular than that for Volume I. Publishers' lists, marked files, and editorial correspondence have proved harder to come by; and we have often had to turn to internal evidence, that is, autobiographical references and/or stylistic characteristics, where the results are frequently negative. Many writers for the Foreign Quarterly Review were obscure foreigners; only determined perseverance made the percentage of attributions as high as it is. The large number of political articles, which at best are too ephemeral to be reprinted, and of anonymous serials never published as books, made Fraser's especially baffling; while its size (6562 items) gave it excessive weight in the final average. On the other hand, the discovery of an old, cobwebbed tea chest in the basement of Archbishop's House Library containing more than 2000 letters to the executive editor of the Dublin Review from 1837 to 1863 — a period in which only 4 articles were signed — made possible a final score there of over 90 per cent. In addition, the finding of Richard Simpson's notebook at Downside Abbey and a large collection of the correspondence of T. H. S. Escott in the London home of a descendant threw extensive light on the contributions to the Rambler and the pseudonyms in the Fortnightly.
The following table gives the record for Volume II.
Thus, Volume II supplies the name of the author, or of a probable or possible one, for 84.29 per cent of the articles and stories.It should be noted that where the number of total entries given here for a periodical is larger than the last number in the text, this is probably because articles were accidentally omitted in the manuscript and had to be added with a lower case "a" — as for Fraser's no. 1286a. But regardless of the level of attributions, there is the value, so often noticed in the reviews of Volume I, of the tables of contents. They give a scholar access to the titles of articles and stories in a journal he does not have at hand, or has only in incomplete form; indeed, even if his library has the full run of a periodical, the Index enables him to size up its contents, or its changing contents under changing editors, far more easily and quickly than examining it volume by volume. Also, in no other way can one readily gain a sense of what public opinion was focussing on in a given year or series of years, since here one can utilize so many journals at once. What was being discussed in 1860, say? Look at our contents for Bentley's Quarterly Review, Blackwood's, the Cornhill, the Edinburgh, Fraser's, Macmillan's, the North British, and the Quarterly; and when Volumes III and IV appear, there will also be Bentley's Miscellany, the British Quarterly Review, the Dublin University Magazine, Bagehot's National Review, Temple Bar, and the Westminster. Of course I chose a good year to make this point, but to a lesser extent any year will provide a range of opinion from various journals.
It may be noted that the number of contributors to Volume II is 4776, of which 1543 had also contributed to Volume I. For both volumes the total is 9556; or more accurately if we add the new contributors now discovered for Volume I (see the index to Appendix A [in the print edition of this Index), 9597.
Two generalizations made in the Introduction to Volume I require comment. I there estimated (see above) that before 1870 about 97 per cent of the articles and stories were anonymous or pseudonymous, while for the whole period, 1824-1900, the number was probably 90 per cent. On the basis of the 20 periodicals in both volumes, the first figure is proving fair enough: the number before 1865, when the Fortnightly initiated the signed article as a policy, is 96.4 per cent. But the second figure was too high. It now stands at 70.7 per cent. The extent to which the signed article gained ground after 1865 everywhere except in the Edinburgh and the Quarterly is striking and unexpected. Indeed, while 96.4 per cent of the articles and stories from 1824 to 1864 were anonymous or pseudonymous, the figure dropped to 57 per cent for the later period, 1865-1900. It should be noted, however, that two-thirds of the articles in Volumes I and II appeared in or after 1865. When we can include the figures for the 20 periodicals in the next two volumes, where the median will move backward, the final average of anonymous articles during the whole period will be higher, perhaps about 75 per cent.
The omission of poetry has disappointed some readers. The decision was readily defensible but it required explanation. To have included verse would have added an enormous number of worthless items to Part A and a large number of obscure authors to be identified and then described in Part B. No one who has tried to read "Ode to the Coming Year," by M. J. Chapman, or "Pitt and Peel; or, "Tis fifty years since ... By an old Parliamentary Rhyme Maker," starting
Tis half a century ago, And but one twelvemonth more, Since leagued the Whigs to overthrow Will Pitt in '84 ...
could think the Index the worse for their omission, or imagine that the hours required to try and discover the contributors (full names, life dates, vocations) could not have been better spent on prose and its authors. Some of the verse, of course, is good (Tennyson himself published in Macmillan's and the Nineteenth Century), and while we were doing the job, a complete listing of material, once and for all, had its logic. But since the prose alone is requiring so many years of intensive work and so much funding, we simply cannot afford to include the verse.
At least, not as a rule. When it illustrates a critical or historical introduction, notably in the case of translations from ancient and modern literature, we have made an exception. Maginn's "Homeric Ballads" and his "Comedies of Lucian," with their prefatory essays and footnotes, are a very different thing, in kind, from occasional verse: they could hardly have been ignored. Wherever a significant headnote can stand alone, we have retained it and omitted the verse (see Blackwood's no. 2999). In both cases the critic or critic-translator, not the poet, is entered in Part B. Anyone concerned with periodical material on Homer or Lucian, for example, should go to Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, and use our Index for the authors of critical articles or translations with prose introductions.
We are also now including what have been called satiric imitations — that is, satires of life and politics in Victorian England which are modeled, for example, on the epistles of Horace or the satires of Juvenal. The series of nine written by J. E. Thorold Rogers, the economist, for Temple Bar (1873, 1874) are as relevant to the study of the age as they would have been in prose.
[Note: This and the following paragraph are included in this electronic edition for background information only; all corrections and additions from the Appendices to the print edition (as well as those from the Victorian Periodicals Review) have been taken in to the text at the correct point, and a note at the end of the entries indicates any such changes.] Volume II contains one unique feature of great importance — Appendix: Corrections and Additions to Volume I. This appendix is deceptively long because it covers every change, however minute, including the spelling of a middle name, and even new biographical sources which change nothing in the Part B entry, though they provide further information. Had we limited the appendix to new and wrong attributions of articles and stories, only a few pages would have sufficed. At the present time, the new attributions, including those now found definite in cases of conflict, number 172, and there are 42 new contributors (each marked with an asterisk [*] in the index to the Appendix). Incorrect attributions — whether outright, probable, or questioned — number 84 out of 27,903 articles and stories, which is three-tenths of one per cent (0.301 per cent). Considering the nature of the Index and the size of Volume I, this seems an acceptable margin of error. It will increase as our research goes on and as readers write, though not, I should suppose, very much. Certainly new attributions will emerge. Both will be taken account of in Appendix A to Volume III.
The utility of compiling such corrections and additions depends heavily upon the reader. Unless he examines the brief Explanatory Note to Appendix A and follows the simple rules it lays down for determining possible errors or new discoveries — and not simply of authorships but of every kind — the labor and expense of this work is wasted, and much worse, wrong information is perpetuated.
Besides increasing the accuracy of Volume I, the appendix provides some valuable insight into the hazards of identification; for an examination of why the 84 misattributions occurred throws light, of course, on where the pitfalls lie. Under scrutiny, only two causal patterns are conspicuous: the assumption that a credible name like Constance Eaglestone is not a pseudonym (see Blackwood's no. 6629), and the tendency to falsify a correct surname by giving it someone else's first or middle name and life dates. "Poachers and poaching" (Contemporary Review no. 1976, September 1883) is signed James Purves but he was wrongly identified in Part B as James Liddell Purves.
I see no adequate way of guarding against the first pattern. When one has looked in vain into a dozen or more sources, he begins to suspect that the name may be a pseudonym and therefore checks it in Halkett & Laing's Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature, Cushing's Initials and Pseudonyms, and similar reference works; but not finding it, as is the case with Constance Eaglestone (and he will not find it unless the author wrote a book or a pamphlet, and one which the editors have discovered to be by Constance Sutcliffe), he can only accept it as genuine; and place it with the hundred or so "hard core" names, on our list of 12,000 contributors, who are equally without specific identification. The practice was extensive. To take an example at random, Temple Bar for 1898 contains articles and stories signed E. Greck, Adam Penne, Helen Cartwright, John Le Breton, Wirt Gerrare, Christian Carneige, Maarten Maartens, A. B. Romney, Cicely L'Estrange, Naranja Amarga, James Neirn, Reay Mackay, Powell Millington — all of which are pseudonyms.
Sometimes — as with most of the examples just cited — a publisher's list will happily do what the standard reference works cannot: provide the real name. A novel called A Philosopher's Romance, serialized in Macmillan's, 1896-1897, under the signature (in the Contents) of John Berwick, was published in 1898 as by the same man, and so appears in the British Museum Catalogue of Printed Books. The Macmillan list of contributors, however, assigns the novel to "Mrs. Haggard, British Consulate, Trieste,"who would be Mrs. John George Haggard, according to the Foreign Office List, and Agnes Marion (Baber) Haggard, according to Landed Gentry. In this way the Index is discovering that names supposed to be genuine are in fact pseudonymous, and passing on the information to John Horden, Esq., of the School of English at Leeds University, who is editing a new edition of Halkett & Laing.
The misattributions that result from starting with a correct name, signed or attributed, and then jumping to the wrong person, can be reduced only by checking and double checking the first conclusion, however persuasive it seems. In the search for James Purves one comes on James Liddell Purves, 1843-1910, in Venn's Alumni Cantabrigienses, Foster's Men at the Bar, and Who Was Who; and though he spent much of his life in Melbourne, he was in England while at Cambridge and later at Lincoln's Inn, becoming a barrister in 1865 before returning to Australia. He might have contributed later to the Contemporary. However, there was a plain James Purves, 1853-1922, a solicitor before the Supreme Court of Scotland, who wrote a number of Scottish essays in Fraser's, 1880-1882; and upon examination, we found that "Poachers and Poaching" in 1883 was definitely by a Scotsman (see the entry for no. 1976, which takes in this correction). Though when Volume I was prepared Fraser's was not yet indexed and the only conspicuous Purves was James Liddell, the date of the article and the presence of James Purves in the British Museum Catalogue should have given us pause.
Or, to take a case where two people have precisely the same name: after assuming, rightly, that the contributor of three animal stories in Macmillan's, the first in April 1889, signed "W. H. Hudson" or, if not signed, so attributed in the Macmillan list, was the famous author of Green Mansions, whose life dates were 1841-1922, we did not hesitate to add to his bibliography "Jacques Tahureau," published a few months earlier in the same journal and signed "William Henry Hudson." But in Who Was Who and the British Museum Catalogue there is a William Henry Hudson, 1862-1918, a literary historian who later wrote several books on French literature and French writers, a field far from the naturalist's interests. The moral is plain: more skepticism and more biographical research.
Less common than these mistakes are others that occasionally occurred or might have occurred. Attributions based simply on Mr. X's offer to review such-and-such a book or an editor's letter requesting him to do so are, or should be, marked: "Unidentified. Perhaps Mr. X, who ...." If there is additional reason to show that the offer or the request was accepted, Mr. X is given the authorship with a "?". If he is to have a "prob.," there must be evidence that he did in fact write a review and that such a review appeared in the editor's periodical. For an outright attribution a note from the editor enclosing a cheque is needed, or a positive claim to the review by Mr. X. The original entry for the Quarterly Review no. 1136 shows that the only evidence we had for Layard was a request from Whitwell Elwin, the editor, that he review Moltke's The Russians in Bulgaria and Rumelia. The correction included from this volume adds further evidence against any claim for Layard.
This type of error is not uncommon. Professor C. L. Cline, in his edition of George Meredith's letters, prints a note from J. W. Parker, Jr., editor of Fraser's, to Meredith, dated [Sept. 20, 1854], in which Parker writes: "What say you to an article on the Songs of the Dramatists? for next month, about 8 or 10 pages." The footnote cites Fraser's, 50 (Nov. 1854), 583-594, which bears this title, followed by Mr. Cline's comment: "It was unsigned, but internal evidence as well as the evidence of this letter clearly points to GM as the author." I do not know what internal evidence, whether autobiographical references or stylistic characteristics or both, were in his mind. All I know is that the article was reprinted by William Bodham Donne as his own in his Essays on the Drama, published in 1858 when both men were alive. No one who has ever examined an editor's correspondence (as we did for the North British Review under A. C. Fraser, where scores of suggestions came to nothing) will be tempted to take the proposal for the deed. It can only be an hypothesis to investigate in hope of finding solid evidence of its validity (as in the case of the Quarterly Review no. 847).
Another hazard is the tendency to assume that the name on a publisher's list is that of the author; and since it is, 99 times out of a 100, one is lulled into acting as though it always were. Publishers' lists, roughly speaking, are of two kinds, though the same list may be partly one, partly the other. The first is a memorial record drawn up some time later from memory, old notes, and letters: for instance the Murray "Register of Authors and Articles in the Quarterly Review, 1809-1879," and "Blackwood's Contributors' Book" down to 1870, after which the entries in both are contemporary; or H. R. Bagshawe's incomplete list for the Dublin Review, 1837-1863, complied in 1863. The second type is a contemporary list, kept month by month or quarter by quarter, of people to whom payment was made, normally adding their addresses and the amount of the cheque: the Macmillan list, the Smith Accounts for the Cornhill, and the Longman account book for the Edinburgh Review, 1847-1900, are examples.
The liabilities of the first type are not only faulty memory, but the assumption that a person mentioned in notes and letters in connection with a particular article was the author, when in fact he may simply have procured the article and been paid for it, or he may have been only the editor or translator. The Quarterly Review no. 984 in March 1850, "Diary of a Dutiful Son" [by Thomas George Fonnereau], is attributed in the Murray "Register" to J. G. Lockhart. However, almost the entire article consists of passages called "March of Intellect," "Homer," "Modern Poetry," and the like, written by Fonnereau himself. Lockhart made the selection, and besides a short preface wrote one paragraph of comment on the author's introduction. He was only the editor. But since he had been invited to make any use of the book he chose (see the preface), it became his article for which he was paid. Hence the entry in the "Register." And because Lockhart was a regular contributor and the "Register" for March 1850 is full of genuine authors, it is all too easy to assume the piece was a review and assign it to him. In the case of collaborations, names of contributors may be completely suppressed. Blackwood's no. 2388, "The Burn's festival," in September 1844, is assigned to W. E. Aytoun in the "Blackwood's Contributors' Book," but he wrote only 12 of its 29 pages. Theodore Martin in his Memoir of Aytoun assigns him simply the description of the event; and the article itself is found to be a series of speeches, one by Aytoun, but others by Professor John Wilson, Sir John McNeill, Henry Glassford Bell, etc., all of whom "collaborated" with Aytoun, who was, in effect, a reporter sent by Blackwood to cover the festival, which he did in this his article for which undoubtedly he was paid. The other speakers are simply omitted from the Contributors' Book. The correction in our Appendix A [to the print edition; all corrections and additions have been taken in to their correct place in this electronic edition] identifies Aytoun's work and lists his chief collaborators. The moral, which can also be drawn from many types of error, is simple enough: read or at least skim every article no matter what attribution is given by a publisher's list, a bibliography, or a letter.
The second type of publishers' list might seem to be more reliable because it is contemporary, but unhappily that is not the case. Since here the name is that of the person paid, it is normally that of the author, but not always. It may be that of an agent, like W. A. Watts; or, if the writer was abroad, some relative or friend; or, as before, simply an editor or translator; or perhaps a lifelike pseudonym which was used in the correspondence. Furthermore, here too a collaborator may be concealed if his partner contributes the article in his own name and is paid. The illustration of this which follows is chosen because it also exposes another difficulty — the ambiguity of the term "collaboration." Macmillan's Magazine no. 2886, June 1890, "On the character of Nero," signed Janus, is attributed in the publisher's list, and in our text, to H. W. Orange. However, Arthur W. Patrick in his Lionel Johnson, Poète et Critique (Paris, 1939), p. 238, attributes it to Johnson and Orange in collaboration, which we might well have adopted. But "collaboration" would have carried its inevitable suggestion of approximately an equal share in the work, and in this case that would have been wrong. For in January 1890 Johnson wrote a letter to Campbell Dodgson saying, "You remember that Nero essay, which I wrote, and which Orange slightly altered and read [presumably to some Oxford literary society]? He has got it accepted by Macmillan"B.M. Add. MS. 46363. I owe my knowledge of this letter to the kindness of Ian Fletcher of the University of Reading. — and therefore he alone was on the list and received the cheque. The right attribution would have been: "Lionel Johnson, somewhat revised by W. H. Orange." We are now trying to make such distinctions, either by explaining them (see the correction of Macmillan no. 2886) or at least by saying: "Mr. X, with the assistance of Mr. Y." But such information, which still leaves the exact role of each contributor uncertain, is hard to come by.For a "brave" effort see my letter in the Times Literary Supplement, Sept. 3, 1971, p. 1057. Most of the time one has to use "collaboration" loosely, to imply only that both authors apparently had some share in the work.
Any full account of the hazards of attribution would be endless. I conclude simply by mentioning a few others: the dangers of stylistic tests except where a given writer has a conspicuous manner of his own; the too ready use of parallel ideas, phrases, and quotations as evidence of common authorship (a later writer may have adopted them, consciously or unconsciously); the everlasting lure of interpreting "we wrote" such-and-such a paper to mean "I wrote" — which it sometimes does; the tendency to forget that a bishop's "surname" is that of his diocese (and therefore to think that Harvey Carlisle is a Carlisle and not a Goodwin, Bishop of Carlisle); the care required to determine which Churchill could sign himself Marlborough or which Fitz-Patrick was Lord Castletown at the particular date of publication; the baffling question of pseudonyms which are used by two men ("Bon Gaultier" first by Theodore Martin and "after they met" by Martin and W. E. Aytoun or by either alone; or still worse, the independent adoption of the same pen name by two contemporaries, like "A London Physician" by both James Howard and W. A. Guy, leading to endless confusion about the authorship of their books and in turn that of the articles printed therein); and the possibility that a volume of collected essays published posthumously may contain another man's essay because a "cut" or offprint of it was found among the dead man's papers. But once bitten, twice cautious. Though misattributions will never be eliminated and some can be corrected only by stumbling on the real author in unlikely places, they can be considerably reduced by being aware of their major sources.
A NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY
Since 1966 there have been, I think, only three major works of a general kind relevant for our purposes. (Articles and monographs on particular journals will be found below at the end of the introductory essays for each periodical.) The new CBEL, III (1969) contains a long chapter called "Newspapers and Magazines," in which the original section in CBEL, III (1940) by H. G. Pollard and the supplement in CBEL, V (1957), by R. D. Altick, have been much expanded and revised by Henry and Sheila Rosenberg. They have put secondary scholarship into a separate section and arranged it under each periodical, added the names of proprietors wherever possible, dated the journal or its various series by month as well as year, and added many new editors and subeditors. Furthermore, with scrupulous accuracy they have made liberal use of question marks to warn readers of information that is not firmly established. All in all, this is the best bibliography of its subject that exists. A second significant development has been the Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, conceived and edited by Michael Wolff. It first appeared in January 1968 and is still flourishing, having reached its twelfth number in June 1971. To the vast surprise of lonely periodical scholars, VPN suddenly revealed many others like themselves and a number of projects already under way or proposed, some of them large cooperative undertakings, such as the survey of all editors, contributors, and proprietors cited in the DNB, the alphabetical listing of all periodicals published in the U.K., 1824-1900, and a checklist of manuscript sources for Victorian editors and journalists. It is not too much to say that VPN was the creator of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP), and when that was established in the fall of 1968, it became, as it should have, the society's official organ. Finally, Christopher Kent's "Higher Journalism and the mid-Victorian Clerisy," Victorian Studies, XIII (Dec. 1969), 181-198, seems to me the best general article of recent years. It documents the changing attitude toward journalists and the increasing number of educated men who, about 1850-1870, began to write for the top periodicals, and relates these developments to the controversy of anonymity versus the signed article.
A NOTE TO THE READER
As in Volume I, references to books without mention of the number of volumes or date of publication are short titles: see section called Abbreviations and Short Titles for full bibliographical information. If the date is given and the number of volumes, where more than one, but the place of publication is omitted, the latter is to be understood as London. The footnotes to the several introductory essays may refer the reader to the Bibliographical Note or the Note on Attributions, both of which appear at the end of the essay and there indicate exactly what book or article is being cited.
W.E.H.
Editor's Note
The basic formats for Part A, described in the Editor's Note to Part A of Volume I of the Index (pp. 3-5), have remained the same, and most of the modifications which have been introduced in Volume II to provide clearer or fuller accounts of the items require no explanation.
Special mention, however, must be made of two changes. The first is of major significance. In Volume I the term "Signature" was distinguished from "Signed." Where "Signed" meant that the name of the author, without regard to any title or address, appeared in the text exactly as we gave it, "Signature" indicated that the editors had deduced the attribution from some name or other, the reader knew not what, which had been printed at the start or end of the paper. This practice has now been almost wholly discontinued. The entry in Volume I for Macmillan's, no. 2079 — "Elizabeth Mayhew Edmonds. Signature; BMCat." — concealed the precise name signed to the item. It would now appear as: "Elizabeth Mayhew Edmonds. Signed E. M. Edmonds; see BMCat. for her concern with modern Greek literature." Or, instead of "Herbert W. Wilson. Signature and DNB" (Macmillan's no. 3710), the entry would now be written: "Herbert W. Wilson. Signed H. W. Wilson; see DNB." Another mode of getting rid of the mysterious "Signature" involves a cross-reference in Part B. "Mrs. Julia Ady. Signature; see WWW" would now become: "Julia Cartwright. Signed." An entry in Part B would then read: "Cartwright, Julia: see Ady, Julia Mary (Cartwright)," under whom the item would be found. Only for those few cases where an abbreviated form of a name is used over and over again, have we retained the old "Signature" simply to avoid innumerable repetitions of the full facts. Instead of writing "Eliza Lynn Linton. Signed E. Lynn Linton; see DNB" 121 times, because our rule is always to give the feminine name if known, we continue to say, "Eliza Lynn Linton. Signature." But with this important difference in Volume II — that all ten such cases are herewith listed: Articles and stories entered as
"Alphonse Bellesheim. Signature" are signed A. Bellesheim. "Matilda Betham-Edwards. Signature" are signed M. Betham-Edwards. "Ellen M. Clerke. Signature" are signed E. M. Clerke. "Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian. Signature" are signed MM. Erckmann-Chatrian. "Andrew Lang. Signature" are signed A. Lang. "Eliza Lynn Linton. Signature" are signed E. Lynn Linton. "Friedrich Max Müller. Signature" are signed F. Max Müller. "Margaret Oliphant. Signature" are signed Mrs. Oliphant. "John Ruskin. Signature" are signed J. Ruskin.
Thus, in Volume II the reader is always informed of the precise name attached to the article or story, either at once in the entry for Part A, or here in the list of the ten "Signatures" retained. This is by no means a pedantic piece of precision. In Volume I a scholar had to accept a thing like Blackwood's no. 7268, which read: "Robert Anderson, 1841-1918. Signature and Table of Contents," trusting our deductions from some signature or other and its illumination by whatever it was which the contents gave. He would now be told: "Robert Anderson, 1841-1918. Signed R. Anderson; Contents adds `C.B., LL.D'; see WWW." Thus, by knowing the facts and seeing how our conclusion was reached, the reader is in a far better position to accept our attribution or to "consider it again." It should be added that any article or story that is not followed by a name and the word "Signed" or "Signature" is anonymous; for in the case of an unsolved pseudonym, one finds, "Signed: A Barbarian Eye"; or in that of a solved pseudonym or the title of a peer or bishop, the author's name is followed by "Signed Toby Allspy," or "Signed Northcote," or "Signed Harvey Carlisle," followed by elucidation.
The other change is less significant but requires explanation. In order to avoid repeating a pseudonym like "The Author of Friends and Enemies at the Old Mill" for fifteen entries of a novel, and yet not being able now to use the dubious "Signature" employed in Volume I to avoid such repetitions, we have devised "Evidence for no. 000," where the number is the beginning of the serial. Since such a statement must apply to the whole evidence block, it must cover the pseudonym, now placed at its beginning.
SPECIAL NOTE
The reader should remember that letters criticizing an article, and the author's reply, if any, as well as later notes or postscripts, are entered with the article itself and not at their chronological place. See, for example, National Review no. 796. Consequently, in the Correspondence sections, National Review nos. 830 and 841, these letters are omitted.
Volume III Preface
While many editors and members of the staff have worked on the periodicals in this volume, those chiefly responsible for each are as follows: for Ainsworth's Magazine, Florence Baer, with an introduction by the Editor; for the Atlantis, Esther Rhoads Houghton; for the British and Foreign Review, H. B. de Groot and the Editor, with some assistance from Eileen Curran, and an introduction by H. B. de Groot; for the London Review and the London and Westminster Review, see the Westminster Review below; for the Modern Review, Esther Rhoads Houghton; for the Monthly Chronicle, the Editor; for the National Review, 1855-1864, the Editor with the assistance of Annamaria Abernathy and Elizabeth Falsey, and an introduction by R. H. Tener; for the New Monthly Magazine, 1821-1854, Mary Ruth Hiller, with some assistance from Linda Dobbins and Linda Jones; for the New Review, Elizabeth Evans, with an introduction by Mrs. Evans and the Editor; for the Prospective Review, Elizabeth Falsey and the Editor, with some assistance from Alice Robinson; for Temple Bar, Constance Bates, with additional material supplied by Scott Bennett of the Rare Book Room of the University of Illinois-Urbana, Elizabeth Falsey, and the Editor; for the Theological Review, Esther Rhoads Houghton; for the Westminster Review, Mary Ruth Hiller, the Editor, and (mainly for the Hickson years, 1840-1851) Rosemary VanArsdel, with introductions, including those to the London Review, 1835-1836, and the London and Westminster Review, 1836-1840, by Mrs. Hiller, except for that to the Hickson period, which is by Professor VanArsdel. For most of these periodicals, as well as those in Appendix A, we are greatly indebted to the skilful research of our two London correspondents, Elizabeth Falsey and Ann Palmer. Elsewhere in the United Kingdom we have turned to Brendel Lang at Cambridge; Perry Butler, Chad Wright, and K. A. Manley at Oxford; and Alma Cullen in Edinburgh. Those at Wellesley who have aided in the preparation of the manuscript, including the typing and extensive proofreading, are Cleta Booth, Dorothy Colburn, Dolores Costantino, Barbara Erskine, Alison Ridley Evans, Mardean Huggler, Michael Hyde, May Moy, Iola Scheuffele, and Elizabeth White.
In London we are especially grateful to Norman St. John-Stevas, M.P., for permission to quote from the letters of Walter Bagehot and the diaries of Eliza Bagehot now in his possession; to Longmans and Co. for copies of the Commission Ledger of the Monthly Chronicle and the business records of the New Review, 1889-1903; to John Cressy, Librarian of the Dr. Williams's Library; to Dr. Sheila Rosenberg; to the Richard Bentley Will Trust for permission to make use of the Bentley Papers at the British Library and the University of Illinois-Urbana; to Richard Story, recently of the National Register of Archives; to the late John Carter, C.B.E., of Sotheby's; to the Library, University College, for allowing us to quote from letters of Jeremy Bentham, Lord Brougham, and W. E. Hickson; and above all, to the Trustees of the Royal Literary Fund and its archivist, Nigel Cross, for permission to explore and utilize its large collection of applications for pensions-a kindness that resulted in over 500 new attributions.
Outside of London we wish to thank Dudley Ryder, the 6th Earl of Harrowby, for permitting us to make use of the correspondence of Lord Dudley Coutts Stuart in the Harrowby Papers, and Miss Pauline Adams of Somerville College, Oxford, formerly archivist of the Harrowby Manuscripts Trust, for her assistance. John O. Crump, anthropologist of Clifton, Bristol, has made many learned suggestions of authorship for which we are especially grateful. The Hertford Record Office has allowed us to quote from various letters in its Bulwer-Lytton Collection. Others who have contributed to Volume III are G.F. Bartle of Richmond, Surrey; the late Father C. Stephen Dessain of the Oratory, Edgbaston, Birmingham; the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, for permission to quote from five letters in their possession; Fred Kenworthy, late Principal of the Unitarian College, Manchester; Miss C. M. C. Olver, librarian at the University of Reading, for informing us of Russell Martineau's marked file of the National Review and arranging for a microfilm that she gave us permission to use; the Cooperative Union Ltd., Holyoake House, Manchester, for xeroxes of 16 letters to and from George Jacob Holyoake; Joanne Shattock, bibliographer of the Victorian Studies Centre at Leicester, for further assistance on attributions in the North British Review; William Thomas of Christ Church; Miss S. A. Wilks of Somerville College; the Bryamor Jones Library at the University of Hull for permission to quote from the T. P. Thompson Papers; the Liverpool Record Office for a copy of the lists that John Chapman sent to the 15th Earl Derby of authorships in 18 numbers of the Westminster Review.
In Scotland we have, as usual, received extensive assistance from our friend T.I. Rae, Keeper of Manuscripts at the National Library, especially a report on the papers of John Hill Burton. The National Library of Wales has kindly permitted us to use G. S. Venables' Journal. In Ireland we are grateful to Robert W. Mills, assistant librarian, King's Inns Library. To Australia we send our thanks to Robert Whitelaw of East Melbourne; to Barbara Troy of the Fisher Library at the University of Sydney for a copy of many pages in their "marked" file of the Westminster Review; and to Jean Dyce of the Mitchell Library at Sydney for a bibliography of some writings of R. H. Horne compiled by Maurice Buxton Forman. From New Zealand Ian A. Gordon of Wellington provided some additions and corrections to our attributions for John Galt, G. R. Gleig, and W. H. Leeds.
In Canada, to identify a few of our generous correspondents, we wish to thank John M. Robson, of Victoria College, University of Toronto; Sydney Eisen of York University, Toronto, who made some useful suggestions about our introductions to the periodicals; R. H. Tener of the University of Calgary who has helped and encouraged us from our beginnings in 1958; the late H. M. McCready of McMaster University at Hamilton; H. B. de Groot of the University of Toronto; Peter Allen, University of Toronto, for information about E. L. Lushington; Marion W. Hagerman, Head of the History and Government Division, Vancouver Public Library; and Douglas Wertheimer of the University of Vancouver.
In the United States we are indebted to Maurianne Adams of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Constance Bates of Evanston, Illinois, for research in Edinburgh; Harold Dailey of Cleveland State University; Scott Bennett, librarian in the Rare Book Room of the University of Illinois at Urbana, for extensive identifications in Temple Bar; William H. Bond, Curator of the Houghton Library, Harvard University; Robert A. Colby and Vineta Colby of Queen's University, New York, for research at the Morgan Library and the Beinecke Library at Yale; Herbert Cahoon, Curator of Autograph Manuscripts, Pierpont Morgan Library; Mrs. Irvin Ehrenpreis of Charlottesville, Virginia, for a copy of the periodical articles of Henry Arthur Bright written in his own hand; Patricia H. Gaffney, formerly of the Cornell University libraries; Mrs. Maria Grossman, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, for the loan of the Theological Review; Gordon S. Haight of Yale University for answering many questions; Judith Harding, Director of Circulation, Widener Library at Harvard University, for the loan of Ainsworth's Magazine; Lawrence H. and Carolyn W. Houtchens of Miami University, Ohio; the Huntington Library of San Marino, California, for xeroxes of many letters by various authors and permission to use them for attributions; Mary Ingham of the University of New Hampshire; Jack Jackson of the Boston Athenaeum for the loan of various periodicals; Anne Lohrli of Claremont College, California; Charles E. Robinson of the University of Delaware, for new attributions; Sydney Ross of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York; C. A. Ryskamp, Director of the Pierpont Morgan Library, for permission to quote from a letter of W. E. Henley in their possession; Edith Skom of Northwestern University; Lena Snook of the Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts, for the loan of the Prospective Review; Rosemary VanArsdel for a whole week of research at the Huntington Library; Alexander D. Wainwright, Curator of the Parrish Collection at Princeton University, for selecting letters of William Harrison Ainsworth in the Collection dealing with articles and stories and providing us with copies; Louisa Worthington of the Countway Library, Harvard Medical School; and Marjorie Wynne, Curator of the Beinecke Library at Yale University for her unfailing welcome to our editors.
In a category of immense importance we wish to express our gratitude for the funding of this volume-indeed, without this generous support there would have been no Volume III (or Volume II either)-to the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Editor would like to add his appreciation for the friendly assistance, from time to time, of three of its officials, John Borden, John Mason, and George Farr, Jr.
We have, of course, depended heavily on the staff of the Wellesley College Library under the directorship of Helen Brown and her able assistant, Margaret Munroe. Hannah French, Research Librarian for Special Collections, and her successor, Eleanor Nicholes, have put their knowledge of Victorian publishing history at our service. Our reference librarians, Sally Linden, Joan Stockard, and Clare Loranz, have been most helpful, especially when a remodelled building meant a radical reshelving of books. Elizabeth Mott and Marjorie Mentz have handled our interlibrary loans expeditiously.
Finally, we are grateful to University of Toronto Press for the handsome volumes it has published. The print, the paper, and the special arrangement have been praised in many reviews. For this volume, and for Volume II, we much appreciate the able editorial assistance of Joan Bulger.
The editorial staff consists of: Walter E. Houghton, Editor; Esther Rhoads Houghton, Associate Editor; Josef L. Altholz, Robert A. Colby, Eileen Curran, H. B. de Groot, Mary Ruth Hiller, William G. Lane, John A. Lester, Jr., Ann Palmer, and Rosemary T. VanArsdel, Assistant Editors; Scott Bennett, William E. Fredeman, Gordon S. Haight, Howard M. Jones, Fr. Damian McElrath, Oscar Maurer, John M. Robson, Sheila Rosenberg, Robert H. Tener, and Michael Wolff, Advisory Editors.
On the office staff at present are: Michael Hyde, Marjorie Patterson, Iola Scheuffle, and Elizabeth White.
W.E.H. and E.R.H. Wellesley College Library September 1, 1978 Introduction
Volume III contains 15 more periodicals (counting the London Review, 1835-1836, and the London and Westminster Review, 1836-1840, though these are bound with the Westminster), bringing us to a total of 35 periodicals indexed at this time. The 12 projected journals for Volume IV, to be published, we estimate, in 1984, will complete this author index at 48 monthlies and quarterlies.
As I remarked in a previous Introduction, the selection in any volume is not ideal. We plan a pattern of associated periodicals, but "circumstances beyond our control" — the illness of an editor, the resistance of a given journal, for the time being, to the probing of its anonymity, the unexpected discovery that this particular combination makes the volume too large or too small-force us to make substitutions; and in doing this, we have to take some account of what fits the available space rather than what would be most appropriate. But the make-up of a given volume is of little consequence so long as it contributes to a total body of periodicals that makes sense.
The present volume, though somewhat altered from the original scheme, is not without a rationale. Its special feature is the third of the three famous Reviews — the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, and now the Westminster. The Westminster began in 1824 as the organ of the Philosophical Radicals, and carried on, at least along Benthamite lines, until 1851, with a period of broad liberalism under J. S. Mill in his London and Westminster Review (October 1836-April 1840). Under John Chapman (1852-1896), it had a Comtist phase followed by very progressive views, notably on the independence of colonies and the role of women in society, before falling off in quality about 1875 and drifting down to the so-so monthly of the last fourteen years of the century. Though taken as a whole the third of the three in calibre, the Westminster occupied an important place left of the Edinburgh and attracted a sizable number of able contributors, some of whom were too radical for the other two quarterlies. In this volume we provide a broad perspective of liberal Unitarian opinion from 1845 to 1884 in the Prospective (1845-1855), the National (1855-1864), the Theological (1864-1879), and the Modern Reviews (1880-1884). But the National under Bagehot and Hutton not only transcended sectarianism, it became one of the major periodicals of the Victorian age — such as the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, the Westminster (to 1875), the Fortnightly, the Contemporary, and the Nineteenth Century. The Atlantis (1858-1860, 1862-1863, 1870) stands on the border-line between the general periodicals we are doing and the specialist ones like Mind and Nature that we are omitting. It continues our coverage of Catholic writings. The British and Foreign Review (1835-1844) complements the Foreign Quarterly Review of Index II (1827-1846), a category to be completed in Volume IV with the Foreign Review of 1828-1830. The New Review (1889-1897) is a strongly imperialist, anti-aesthete periodical that can boast of novels by James, Conrad, and Wells. With these substantial journals we are including the lighter literature of the New Monthly Magazine (1821-1854), Ainsworth's (1842-1854), Temple Bar (1860-1900), and, more serious than the other Magazines, Saint Pauls (sic) (1867-1874). Here, serialized novels, short stories, and verse are the distinguishing staple, though all print articles and a few reviews. Except in Saint Pauls, politics and religion are avoided. Finally, there is Dionysius Lardner's Monthly Chronicle (1838-1841) which is neither a Review nor a Magazine but a monthly miscellany, being a curious conglomeration of astronomy, engineering, crime, Irish politics, short stories, verse, literary criticism, continental commerce — and two excellent departments of music and drama. I should add a word about the dates of the New Monthly. We went back to 1821 (but not to its beginning in 1814) because in that year it assumed its standard form, under Thomas Campbell as editor. Though it continued until 1881, we have stopped our indexing at 1854 when W. H. Ainsworth, then the editor-proprietor, abandoned his own Magazine (Ainsworth's) and bought Bentley's Miscellany, in which he then published his best contributions. That left the New Monthly no longer of sufficient quality to warrant the space a complete coverage would have required, thus making room for two better journals that otherwise would have had to be omitted. Though our editors are not in entire agreement on this policy, we shall have to adopt it once more in Index IV if we follow our present scheme.
An important feature of this volume is the extensive use of internal evidence, once rejected in ignorant disdain (Index I, above); for where it was used in Index II, it was too often confirmed by later external evidence to be viewed any longer with suspicion. As we define it, internal evidence consists of (1) autobiographical remarks that tally closely with what is known of the supposed author from biographical sources; (2) reference to a previous article in the same journal already assigned, say to John Hill, on sound evidence in words that strongly imply a common authorship: e.g., a remark in which "we" now resume the subject we discussed before in order to deal with another aspect of it, or a sizable summary of the earlier article — both of which tend to rule out the "we" as editorial and identify it with Hill; and (3) internal similarities between the two papers (in some cases between the article in question and two or three articles by Hill, later as well as earlier). Such similarities, besides the general subject, may be common ideas and attitudes; mention of the same people, events, or books; a style using common techniques (rhetorical questions, short or long sentences, lack of imagery, or imagery drawn from the same kind of material — nature, industry, disease — and either neutral or emotive in connotation, the use of epigraphs, frequent quotations in verse or prose, coined words and phrases, and repetition of favorite words and phrases like con amore or, at the end, "We must now lay down our pen"); and finally, similarities in typography (use or absence of footnotes, and if used, source citations or genuine notes, single-sentence or two-sentence paragraphs, parentheses employed for dates, page references, scientific names, numerations like (1), (2), etc., excessive presence of dashes, italics, capitalization, exclamation points — though these must be checked against surrounding articles to be sure they are not regularly inserted by the editor). Needless to say, the effectiveness of internal evidence depends on the extent to which (1), and/or (2), and/or (3) can be found, and, of course, on the absence of conflicting elements. It is especially persuasive where it supports external evidence that is too weak to be adequate alone. For some successful examples see the New Monthly Magazine nos. 2822, 3732, and 4779.
The identifications for Index III were handicapped by the fact that editorial lists, publishers' cheque books, and marked files proved very scarce; and valuable as it can be, internal evidence, requiring far more time per item than we have available (the New Monthly no. 1565 consumed the better part of two days' work by two people, though this was an exceptional case), cannot be used as much as it should be, and when used ends as often in indecision or negative decision as in attribution. The following table gives the record for Volume III:
Thus, Volume III supplies the name of the author, or of a probable or possible author, for 80 per cent of the articles and stories. This, indeed, was the goal we had arbitrarily set up to begin with as a possibility. The average for Volumes I-III, excluding appendices [of the print edition], is 87.32 per cent.
Regardless of the level of attributions, there is the value, so often noticed in the reviews of Volume I, of the tables of contents. They give a scholar access to the titles of articles and stories in a journal he does not have at hand, or has only in incomplete form; indeed, even if his library has the full run of a periodical, the Index enables him to size up its contents, or its changing contents under changing editors, far more easily and quickly than examining it volume by volume. Also, in no other way can one readily gain a sense of what public opinion was focusing on in a given year or series of years, since here one can utilize so many journals at once. What was being discussed in 1860, say? Look at our contents for Bentley's Quarterly Review, Blackwood's, the Cornhill, the Edinburgh, Fraser's, Macmillan's, the National Review, the North British Review, the Quarterly, Temple Bar, and the Westminster; and when Volume IV appears, the contents of the British Quarterly Review, the Dublin University Magazine, the Eclectic Review, and the London Quarterly Review will also be available. Of course I chose a good year to make the point, but to a lesser extent any year will provide a range of opinion — political, religious, and geographical — from a variety of journals.
The number of contributors to Volume III is 3627, compared with 4826 for Volume I (including the additions in the Appendix of II and Appendix A of III), and 4778 in Volume II (including the additions in Appendix A of III), giving a total of 13,231. Or, counting each contributor only once (and including the appendices), there are now 4826 in Volume I, 3235 in II, and 2239 in III, giving a total of 10,300 different writers in all three volumes. This gives a projection of about 12,000 for the whole Index, making the work a concise dictionary of Victorian periodical writers in the principal Reviews and Magazines. It is worth noticing that of the 10,300 now discovered, 1426 were women, which is nearly 14 per cent. This is undoubtedly too low, since some authors for whom we have only initials and no biographical information (like F. H. Evans in Index I) are not counted, and some masculine names are surely feminine pseudonyms not yet uncovered. On the other hand, a few women listed as authors merely received the cheques for their absent husbands' work. But whatever the limitations, the statistics are indicative, as well as relevant to contemporary interest.
So much research on periodicals has been done in recent years that it is impossible — and invidious — to try to select the "best" articles. The reader had better use two bibliographies: One is The Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press in Britain: A Bibliography of Modern Studies, 1901-71, ed. Lionel Madden and Diana Dixon, first printed as a Supplement to Volume VIII of the Victorian Periodicals Newsletter for September 1975, and reproduced by photo-offset as a book by Garland Press in 1976 — without acknowledgment of previous publication. It contains many errors, for the most part minor, and should be used with caution. The other is the annual "Checklist of Scholarship and Criticism" edited by J. Don Vann, starting in 1972 and published in the December issues of VPN. One essay of special relevance to the Index is Mary Ruth Hiller's "The Identification of Authors: The Great Victorian Enigma," in Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research, ed. Rosemary VanArsdel and J. Don Vann, to be published at New York in October 1978.
The contents of Index IV as now planned is as follows: Bentley's Miscellany (1837-1868), the British Critic (1824-1843), the British Quarterly Review (1845-1886), Cochrane's Foreign Quarterly Review (1835), Dark Blue (1871-1873), the Dublin University Magazine (1833-1877), the Eclectic Review (1824-1868), the Foreign and Colonial Quarterly Review (1843-June 1844), the Foreign Review (1828-1830), the London Quarterly Review (1853-1900), Longman's Magazine (1882-1900), the New Quarterly Review (July 1844-1847), and Tait's Edinburgh Magazine (1832-1846).This covers the period when Tait's was published in Edinburgh. We are not including the Glasgow years, 1847-1861.
As in Volume I, references to books without mention of the number of volumes or date of publication are short titles: see Abbreviations and Short Titles, pp. 953-973, for full bibliographical information. If the date is given and the number of volumes, where more than one, but the place of publication is omitted, the latter is to be understood as London. The footnotes to the several introductory essays may refer the reader to the Bibliographical Note or the Note on Attributions, both of which appear at the end of the essay and there indicate exactly what book or article is being cited.
W.E.H.
Editor's Note
The principal description of the format in Part A is in Volume I. In Volume II three modifications were introduced.
Of the latter the most important concerned the term "Signature." Originally used to indicate the name deduced by the editors from a printed name (and title, if any) or from information in the Table of Contents, the term was largely abandoned in Index II in favor of giving the exact name as it appeared in the periodical or in the Contents, but with ten exceptions, listed above — contributors who normally used only an initial for their first names. Thus, in Volume II "John Ruskin. Signature" was retained to cover the many articles signed "J. Ruskin." This compromise has now been dropped. In volume III we write: "John Ruskin. Signed J. Ruskin."
The omission of any evidence for the jump from the "J." to the "John" (such as "see DNB") is characteristic of a tendency in this volume to condense our entries, relying on the reader to consult Part B, where the only "J. Ruskin" is "John" and the biographical source is cited. In similar fashion the full name of many contributors is often not provided in Part A nor the professional title. An article signed "Professor T.H. Huxley" appears as "T.H. Huxley. Signed." If the title is needed for purposes of identification, it is added: e.g., "R. T. Ames. Signed, with title `General'." For "R. T." and