Newspapers and Periodicals in Class

Abstract

In 2006 the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) published a special issue of their journal, Victorian Periodicals Review, which brought together papers that described how nineteenth-century periodicals could be used in the university classroom. Of the eight papers that stated where they sourced their materials for teaching, only five mentioned electronic resources (Christie 2006; Hughes, 2006; Smith, 2006; Steele, 2006; Tange, 2006). Of these five, two used American periodicals (particularly Harper’s Weekly (1857–1916), available online in Harpweek ) to access British literary texts in serial form; three mentioned bibliographic guides to periodicals such as Nineteenth-Century Masterfile, Reader’s Guide Retrospective, 1880–1982 and the Waterloo Directory; and one used a resource at Stanford called Discovering Dickens that issued serial instalments of nineteenth-century novels electronically or in paper over time to simulate the periodicity of their original publication. All the papers in the issue described innovative courses that attempted to place periodicals at the centre of nineteenth-century culture. The five that used digital resources recognized their benefits, providing access to material and supplementing holdings in hard copy, but the utility of the resources was restricted in each case by limited contents.