Periodical Speculations: Early "Science-Fiction" and Popular Victorian Weeklies

Abstract

This article implicates early weekly periodicals in the history of British science fiction by examining the effects of periodicals as media defined by their specific rhythms of publication, diversity of content, and place in a larger media ecology. Specifically, it examines how prominent cheap weeklies Chambers's Edinburgh Journal (1832-1956) and Household Words (1850-1859) helped popularize science, promoted science-fictional habits of mind, and incubated science-fictional hybrid genres, including "reflective science," "science in fable," the fairy-tales of science, and what was first labeled "science-fiction" in 1851. Decades before H.G. Wells published his works in monthly periodicals, these accessible weeklies helped cultivate casual readers to whom his "miscellany of inventions" might appeal. Harnessing insights from the Gibson Collection of Speculative Fiction, this article varies its scale of analysis from individual periodical-based works to larger patterns that develop within and across periodicals and their associated book-length works, ultimately arguing for a genre evolution paradigm that explicitly attends to the material formats of publication, intermedial networks, and the practices of remediation, collection, recollection, and forgetting that necessarily shape critical assessments of sf.