Abstract: This paper investigates the sociocultural implications of a relatively understudied print medium in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengali literary culture, the children’s periodical. Through a study of Pramadacharan Sen’s Sakhā , Sivanath Sastri’s Mukul , and Upendrakishor Raychaudhuri’s Sandeś , this paper explores how the emergence of these vernacular periodicals was interlinked with the construction of a literary selfhood among the Bengali middle classes and their understanding of childhood and children’s literature from the 1870s onwards. Using Robert Darnton’s circulation model of print culture in a colonial context, it also traces the material basis of these children’s periodicals, the technologies of their production, and their diffusion, transformation, and commercial survival within a larger colonial print market until the 1920s.

Abstract: This article examines the surprising success of the weekly broadsheet the Temperance Companion (1894–1901) in navigating the currents of the commercial market for nearly seven years. It differed significantly from similar social purpose periodicals not only in content and approach but also in its financial basis, and this article shows how the two were closely linked. The study advances our nuanced understanding of the New Journalism of the 1880s and 1890s, illustrates the broad field of temperance periodicals, and highlights the work of a dynamic and adventurous female editor.

Abstract: The idea of the mother tongue is a current of thought that establishes monolingualism as a condition of true language. Developed in relation to pre-national German territories, the idea also had repercussions for debates about the linguistic identity of mid-Victorian Britain that were drawn out in the periodical press. This article examines how the journals Household Words (1850–59) and All the Year Round (1859–95), edited by Charles Dickens until 1870, align themselves with Johann Gottfried Herder’s view that only a native speaker can master a language. Focusing on a corpus known as “the language articles,” this essay considers how Dickens’s contributors worked towards implementing a prestige language as the national language, all the while disbelieving the possibility of such an enterprise.

Abstract: This article explores the work of Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett (1846–1930), a prolific and successful journalist and novelist who nonetheless struggled to earn a living. It argues that her writing is deeply informed by her financial experiences and her political view of the relationship between capital and labour. Burgoyne Corbett’s detective stories, published as a series in many local papers, interrogate capitalism from a feminist and socialist viewpoint. Her female detective, Dora Bell, resembles the female investigative journalists of the 1890s. Dora exposes wealthy men as frequently the originators of crime and women as its direct and indirect victims.