“I have just had one of those large ideas”: Walter Houghton, Richard Altick, and the Origins of The Wellesley Index

Abstract

The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (1966–89), one of the twentieth century’s great feats of collaborative scholarship, would begin to strip away the veil of anonymity that had long concealed authorship in nineteenth-century periodicals. A cache of unpublished correspondence from the 1950s reveals that the origin and design of the index were rooted in the friendship between two pioneers of Victorian studies: Walter Houghton and Richard Altick. Key decisions made by Houghton in the early days of the project were crucially shaped by Altick’s advice, with consequences for the project and the field that are felt to this day.