Criticism and the Victorian Periodical Press

Abstract

It is still not as clear to most scholars, lecturers, and especially students of literature, as it was to George Saintsbury in 1896, that a corpus of Victorian criticism of quality and range exists; neither are its authors known. Still, numerous books and articles from different angles and disciplines attest to the criticism and avail themselves of it; the author-centred Critical Heritage volumes or works-centred Casebooks, for example, present it referentially, as a satellite of illustrious planets. Biographies of individual critics, research on non-fictional prose as a genre, and even belle-lettrist essays2 serve more self-consciously to bring it to notice, but the most appropriate and revelatory approach has been through the Victorian periodicals where almost all the criticism first appeared.3 The periodicals themselves, and work associated with them such as Walter Graham’s outline of English Literary Periodicals (1930), bibliographies such as The Wellesley Index (1966–89), Alvin Sullivan’s British Literary Magazines (1983–6), and the MLAA two-volume Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research (1978, 1989); and criticism such as Armstrong’s Victorian Scrutinies (1972), Shattock and Wolff’s The Victorian Periodical Press (1982), and Wiener’s Innovators and Preachers (1985) have been instrumental in the identification and understanding of Victorian criticism and critics.