Conclusion: Victorian Novels and the Periodical Press

Abstract

‘From our present vantage point the nineteenth century begins to look like the great age of the periodical’.1 So wrote R.G. Cox in an essay published in 1958 which offered a brief, but suggestive, overview of the genre. Since then there have been successive attempts to map out an extensive and diverse field. Nearly a decade after Cox’s essay, Walter E. Houghton, in his introduction to the first volume of the invaluable Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900 (an index to what can only be a limited sample of the thousands of Victorian monthly and quarterly journals), emphasized the centrality of the periodical press to our understanding of nineteenth-century culture. The importance of Victorian periodicals, he stated, ‘can scarcely be exaggerated’.2 By 1982, scholars were demonstrating the range and significance of the archive in an important volume of essays, The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, edited by Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff. This marked an attempt to read the engagement between Victorian literature and culture and its periodicals, rather than use the archive as though it offered a passive mirror which unproblematically reflected the past.3