Nineteenth-century Periodicals Research Articles

“Psychic Poisons” or Emerging Medicines: A Thematic Analysis of Cannabis Representations in Australian Nineteenth-Century Periodicals

This interdisciplinary study investigates representations of cannabis in 386 Australian newspaper reports from the latter-part of the nineteenth century. During this time, periodicals were the primary means of information circulation, and the Australian press shared much of its reporting with other jurisdictions. Using a reflexive thematic analysis, this research reveals that in this period, in which cannabis was being introduced into colonial pharmacopeias but had not yet been regulated in Australia, periodicals were at the heart of communicating cannabis to Australian audiences. These newspapers represented cannabis as both a dangerous recreational drug and a legitimate medicine, with these very distinct representations largely siloed from one another. These discourses, facilitated and perpetuated by mass media, were representative of a patchwork of influences, including international anxieties of drug use. Therefore, such reporting both legitimized and de-legitimized cannabis, influencing popular understandings of cannabis in nineteenth-century Australia at a pivotal time in the drug's history.

“In the Midst of Smoke and Flame”: Extraction Ecologies and Industrial Tourism in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press

Abstract By addressing the shared formal, aesthetic, affective, and political characteristics of the industrial travel account, this article examines how travel writers in the nineteenth century mediate the tensions within and between extractive labour, tourism, and ecological relations. Focusing on industrial travel accounts published in The Leisure Hour (1852–1905), Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (1832–1897) and All the Year Round (1859–1895), the article highlights the periodical press as a productive arena for the cultural and literary study of nineteenth-century energy regimes.

Searching for "larrikin*": Using Digitised Newspapers to Trace the Transnational Coverage of Australian Street Gangs, 1870–98

Abstract: Digitisation is revitalising nineteenth-century periodicals as historical sources, particularly English-language publications. Far from replicas, these digitised sources have different attributes. Text searchability is one such property that is changing how and what historians can research. This article explores the use of keyword search to trace the transnational circulations of information about Australian juvenile street gangs and the controversy they aroused. Without multi-title, text-searchable archives it would not be feasible to attempt to discern the form and extent of this coverage. The article reflects on the new depth and breadth keyword searching can offer and some of the methodological choices and considerations involved.

“Penitential and Self-Mortifying”: Mourning Crape in Fashion

Abstract: In 2014, while preparing for the fashion exhibition “Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire” organized by the Costume Institute (CI) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the author, who was then the CI’s head conservator, encountered a question. Was the material being displayed toxic? This question arose upon discovering that nineteenth-century periodicals cautioned against wearing mourning crape, which is a crispy, crinkled, and dull black silk fabric worn in the first stages of Victorian mourning. According to these sources, mourning crape was poisonous. Seeking answers, the author would soon find out that, indeed, there was something to those warnings after all. In fact, an investigation into Victorian mourning crape reveals the incongruous story of a wretched and dangerous fabric that rose to the height of luxurious fashion. This article recounts this tale by exploring the history and materiality of English mourning crape to provide insight into both the macabre meaning of the fabric and the dreadful experience of wearing it.

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848, by Clare Pettitt

Reviewed by: Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 by Clare Pettitt William Lee Hughes (bio) Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848, by Clare Pettitt; pp. xviii + 348. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, $94.00. Clare Pettitt’s Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 sets out to develop an interdisciplinary methodology for understanding how ordinary people, particularly the working poor, came to feel like agents of history. This project is the first in a planned series of three books, which draws upon print media studies, affect theory, and nineteenth-century historicism to argue that “seriality is the defining form of modernity” (2). It will be of great interest to scholars of the Victorian period, but it is particularly noteworthy for its closely- and well-researched chapters that cover the Regency and Georgian periods, which are too frequently ignored in nineteenth-century scholarship. The greatest strength of the book is its meticulous research of periodicals, including The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction (1822–49), Penny Magazine (1832–44), Olio; or, Museum of Entertainment (1828–33), Parterre (1834–6), Saturday Magazine (1832–44), Chambers’s Edinburgh Magazine (1832–54), Howitt’s Journal (1847–8), and Frederick Douglass’s North Star (1847–51). In chapter 1, “Yesterday’s News,” Pettitt argues that repressive taxes on print that were passed after Peterloo, especially the Newspaper Stamp Duties Act (one of the Six Acts), created a time-lag in the distribution of news, so that poorer people experienced print not in terms of the ephemera of an empty homogenous time of modernity, but rather as part of a multi-media culture. The repressive taxes encouraged poorer people to purchase chapbooks, broadsides, ballads, and almanacs instead of the costlier newspapers. These older forms of print media provided a different model of time and history, which overlapped with the newer models of time and history created by the daily newspaper. Pettitt shows that these serial rhythms did not synchronize until mid-century, after the repressive taxes had been repealed. Serial Forms opens new directions for the study of nineteenth-century periodicals by thinking of them as media rather than as literature. As media, these texts are not just texts. Rather, they are tools to be actively manipulated and engaged with in various ways that enable the reader or user to imagine themself as a historical agent and to feel like a part of history. Pettitt creates a cogent set of terms for analyzing and theorizing seriality in the period, particularly in her chapters on Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. While Scott is often read as the progenitor of the historical novel, Pettitt argues that his work is “unbound” by its close relationship to ballads, broadsides, and popular oral, material, and print culture (69). For Pettitt, it is best to “abandon the idea of the novel” to understand Scott’s work. Instead, Scott’s works are “print objects” (71). This term highlights the ways in which the illiterate and semi-literate engaged with print media through illustrations and as toys, for example. The chapter on Byron argues that his work is best understood in terms of serial performance (rather than as plays or poems) in an “immersive media revolution” (123). This performance creates a structure of feeling, “feeling at a distance,” which makes possible the extention of civic culture to the illiterate and semi-literate working poor (129). Readers will notice Pettitt’s engagement with critical theory and with affect theory in particular. Indeed, Serial Forms offers a refreshingly material engagement with affect studies. In Pettitt’s argument, the working class’s increasing access to serial print media renegotiates their place in history and enables them to feel and “imagine themselves into a historical [End Page 697] present” (250). The chapter on Mount Vesuvius argues that “emerging serial news media” created a shared sense of ordinary dailiness for a widening portion of the population (165). This sense of dailiness precipitated a feeling of living in a potentially historical moment in which an event could emerge. Without the feeling of ordinary dailiness, no true historical difference (event) could occur. The chapter on the biopolitics of seriality brings Pettitt’s...

The Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini and Self-Borrowing

Self-borrowing and Rossini: music theatre scholars are well acquainted with this topic. Many publications have been dedicated to it, most of which concentrate on compositional-analytic aspects, the artistic and communicational nature of self-borrowing and its reception in nineteenth-century periodicals. At present, however, no study has attempted to question the relation between Rossini's self-borrowings and the critical edition of his works. This is the issue to which this contribution is dedicated. Beginning with the operating indications summarized by the editorial criteria provided for the Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini – first published in 1974, and revised and updated in 2015 – this study compares the various methodological approaches adopted while preparing critical editions and dealing with the specific features of each passage in which self-borrowing appears. This comparison furthermore allows us to formulate a general overview of the entire editorial undertaking. This in turn will give us a glimpse of how principles such as the autograph's centrality and concepts such as authenticity and originality have often become problematic and have been put into question. Knowing that Rossini often rewrote the pieces he self-borrowed is fundamental for philologists working on the critical edition of his works. Decoding the modus operandi Rossini adopted in each case of self-borrowing is therefore equally important, and can help choose the sources closest to Rossini's idea of the self-borrowed pieces at the time of their reuse.

Detection and Gender in Early Crime Fiction: Mrs Bucket to Lady Molly

Crime fiction is often mistakenly held to be based on books and male detection. In fact, in the nineteenth century periodicals were a major mode of publication and from the mid-century on women inquirers played a recurring role in the developing genre, while most early male detectives were, by later standards, distinctly under-gendered. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal was a major early source; by the 1860s, female detectives were being created by male writers and in Bleak House (1852–53), Dickens gave Inspector Bucket’s wife distinct inquiring capacities. The major Australian author Mary Fortune – with more than four hundred stories in magazines over forty years from the 1860s – developed female inquirers over time. By the 1890s, professional English woman detectives were created, Loveday Brooke by C.L. Pirkis and Florence Cusack by L.T. Meade, while Baroness Orczy created as well as her best-selling ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ the leading police detective Lady Molly, like the others first appearing in magazines.

Francisca Wood and Nineteenth-Century Periodical Culture: Pressing for Change by Cláudia Pazos Alonso

Reviewed by: Francisca Wood and Nineteenth-Century Periodical Culture: Pressing for Change by Cláudia Pazos Alonso Leticia Villamediana González Francisca Wood and Nineteenth-Century Periodical Culture: Pressing for Change. By Cláudia Pazos Alonso. Cambridge: Legenda. 2020. xi+250 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–781887–99–8. Cláudia Pazos Alonso's monograph explores the fascinating life and career of a neglected but ground-breaking Portuguese writer, journalist, and translator. As a cultural agent, an unorthodox and freethinking intellectual, an activist, and a mentor, Wood's multifaceted profile, work, and influence have at last found belated recognition and celebration in this full-length account that also provides an overview of the intellectual landscape of the period. Wood (1802–1900), the reader is convincingly shown, was an early and important precursor of first-wave feminism. Carefully documented, the monograph is composed of an Introduction, six chapters, a Conclusion, and a Bibliography, followed by three extremely valuable appendices that list over ninety works published by Tipografia Luso-Britânica, Wood's own press ('Tipografia Luso-Britânica'; 'List of Editorials by Francisca Wood'; 'List of Editorials'). Chapter 1 beautifully reconstructs the life and family background of both Francisca and her British husband, William Thorold Wood. Although information on Francisca is scant, Pazos Alonso succeeds in piecing together key moments from her biographical timeline, through the detailed exploration of articles and references in periodicals, as well as of different Portuguese archives and sites, such as the British cemetery in Lisbon, where the couple were buried. There is a significant focus on Wood's years in Britain given that, as Pazos Alonso argues, the Victorian era and the British political landscape between 1820 and 1850 impacted her later work and journalistic career. This is particularly evident on her return to Portugal in the 1860s, where the couple showed an educational and political commitment, contributing to female learning. It is precisely this presence of women in print culture that Chapter 2 scrutinizes, paying attention to the contributions of three other female intellectuals who have remained in the margins of Portuguese literary history. In so doing, Pazos Alonso not only demonstrates women's active contribution to periodical culture, but also shows how Wood's modern ideas and [End Page 508] journalistic work, especially her weekly A Voz Feminina (1868–69; known as O Progresso in latter years) stood up among her peers and became 'an unquestionable milestone in the Portuguese context' (p. 77). As such, the following chapters are dedicated to the detailed analysis of the periodical. Chapter 3 focuses on the progressive editorial team, mainly comprised of female contributors led by Francisca herself, who signed half of the editorials as well as other types of wittily crafted and transgressive articles, such as open letters addressed to distinguished men in power. All these political pieces, as Chapters 4 and 5 reveal, opened up debate on social issues such as the protection of animals and tackled gender discrimination and inequality, offering a searing critique of both Church and male hegemony, in an attempt to emancipate both men and women as a means to regenerate society and the country. Finally, Chapter 6 examines the cosmopolitan dimension of A Voz Feminina: that is, how the weekly contributed to the dissemination of foreign news on women's rights, becoming a cultural mediator and a key agent in a transnational network of periodicals that echoed the Woman Question across Europe and the Atlantic. By bringing Wood's ideas back to an English-reading audience, Pazos Alonso's compelling and engaging study not only rescues a prime Portuguese journalist and intellectual from cultural oblivion, but also grants her a well-deserved transnational place in feminist and gender scholarship. Leticia Villamediana González University of Warwick Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association

Feminist Networks Connecting Dublin and London: Sarah Atkinson, Bessie Rayner Parkes, and the Power of the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press

Feminist Networks Connecting Dublin and London: Sarah Atkinson, Bessie Rayner Parkes, and the Power of the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848

The Nineteenth Century Periodical Press and the Development of Detective Fiction by Samuel Saunders

Reviewed by: The Nineteenth Century Periodical Press and the Development of Detective Fiction by Samuel Saunders Troy J. Bassett (bio) Samuel Saunders, The Nineteenth Century Periodical Press and the Development of Detective Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 2021), pp. 256, $128/£96 hardcover. Samuel Saunders’s book, The Nineteenth Century Periodical Press and the Development of Detective Fiction, joins a long tradition of scholarly works tracing the invention and evolution of detective fiction in the nineteenth century. Based, as we are told, on his dissertation, Saunders’s book identifies two gaps in the existing scholarship on detective fiction: first, generic studies “insecurely connect sporadically-published texts together” to create a literary timeline; and second, historical studies rarely explore detective fiction’s “connection to contemporary representations of actual law enforcement” (1). Saunders aims to rectify these oversights by examining Victorian journalism about the police and crime and connecting this journalism to the fiction. The book is divided into three parts roughly corresponding to the early, mid-, and late Victorian periods. The first part examines reportage of the police and crime in Victorian periodicals. Crime reporting has a long history dating from the eighteenth century, ranging from broadsides to the Newgate Calendar to criminal court reports, but reports on policing are more recent and center on the various acts of Parliament that created the modern police force. As Saunders argues, discussions of the police in periodicals depended strongly on the title’s political leanings and audience, with conservative newspapers and magazines generally supportive and liberal ones more skeptical of the police. His grouping of the periodicals in making this claim is a bit simplistic, but effective. As crime reporting evolves over the century, Saunders finds the police rarely figure in the coverage as more than passing figures “who occupied a transitional, fringe or somehow threshold social space, located somewhere in between the criminal and the rest of society” (54–55). As the second part of the book shows, the liminal police officer becomes a fixture in social exploration journalism, such as that written by Charles Dickens, where the genteel explorer has safer access to criminal neighborhoods with the police officer as a guide. Saunders locates the first detective fiction in the fictional detective memoirs pioneered by William Russell. His argument that Russell’s stories were a “successful literary blending” of crime reporting and social exploration journalism convinced this reader of their probable origins as a “microgenre” of detective fiction (116, 122). The following chapter on sensation fiction, however, is less compelling: though sensation fiction often contains detective figures (such as Robert Audley in Lady Audley’s Secret), the police themselves rarely appear as important characters. The two forms—fictional police memoir and [End Page 658] sensation—follow separate tracks, though Saunders finds a handful of contemporary reviewers who note their cross-connections. Whereas sensation fiction is often cited as bridging the gap between Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories and Sherlock Holmes, Saunders places the fictional detective memoir as another, coequal bridge in the development of detective fiction. The final part examines press coverage of the 1877 turf fraud detective scandal in which four detective inspectors and an attorney accepted bribes from two criminals convicted of illegally obtaining £10,000 from a French noblewoman based on fake horse races. The criminals turned on their police accomplices for more lenient sentences. The case fueled much outrage at the police and led to a reorganization of Scotland Yard the following year. More importantly, as Saunders adeptly shows, the scandal led to a long-lasting change in how the periodical press depicted the police, ranging from simply inept or bumbling to outright dangerously criminal. This clear shift in the public perception of the police, Saunders argues, led to the rise of the amateur or private detective in fiction. Holmes himself, to give the most famous example, continually lambasts Lestrade and Scotland Yard as unimaginative if not inept detectives—a fact Lestrade himself tacitly admits in bringing difficult cases to Holmes. The amateur or private detective is free of the questions, limitations, or scandal hanging over the police force. The Strand Magazine and its imitators capitalized on the figure of the private detective, which proved...

Multimodal and Pedagogical Possibilities in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals Research

Multimodal and Pedagogical Possibilities in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals Research

The Phonographic Author of Milton, Edison and Uzanne

This paper maps the connection of Milton and Edison in the late Victorian imagination as examples of geniuses. I argue that their juxtaposition is rooted in the voice hearing etymology of the genius, but more importantly in the notion of what I call the phonographic author. Drawing on nineteenth-century periodicals and books, I will be comparing Edison’s own vision of the phonograph in authoring books and the Victorian popular imagination elaboration on the same, especially in Uzanne’s short story ‘The End of Books’ (1894) while showing Milton’s own role in making such an idea of the phonographic author feasible.

Getting Along with Relational Databases

Both relational databases (RDBs) and XML have strengths and weaknesses as data storage and modeling systems. Most researchers working with historical and literary data in the humanities would argue for the superiority of XML, since it allows unlimited nesting, linking, and complexity. Relational database proponents claim superior querying and processing speed, although recent advances in XML languages and tools have eroded that advantage. Nevertheless, RDBs remain popular and are widely used, particularly in the early stages of projects where resources and metadata are being collected, and projects may end up with both an RDB and an XML document collection. Programmers must then integrate these distinct forms of data when building project outputs. This article discusses the Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry (DVPP) project, where metadata on about 15,000 poems from nineteenth-century periodicals is captured in a MySQL database, and periodically exported to create a TEI file for each poem. Many of the poems are then transcribed and encoded. The canonical source of metadata is the RDB, while the canonical source of textual data is the TEI file. Metadata in the TEI files must be periodically updated from the RDB, without disturbing the textual encoding. Changes to the RDB data may result in changes to the id and filename of the related TEI file, so any existing TEI data is migrated to a new file, and the Subversion repository must be appropriately updated. All of this is done with XSLT and Ant.

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

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.

Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading

Donna Harrington-Leuker, professor of English at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, has written a detailed, thoroughly researched overview of the development of summer reading as an American phenomenon, something that most of us simply take for granted today. Utilizing a wide variety of primary documents, including publishers' records, book reviews, diaries and correspondence of readers, and the popular novels of the period themselves, she demonstrates that the concept of “summer reading” was a consequence of the rise of the middle class in the nineteenth century, with the accompanying concepts of summer travel and summer leisure. Of particular note is her consideration of the educated African American elite and the summer resort communities that catered to their needs.The work illuminates the role of nineteenth-century periodicals in marketing summer reading to vacationers and, in particular, to female vacationers, presenting it as a “genteel performance” (41) taking place in a gendered space under the gaze of marriageable males. Harrington-Leuker also reveals the cultural work of the American summer novel, exploring individual authors and titles in depth. She clearly demonstrates how the early American summer novel, set in summer resorts and “ostensibly about summer leisure … became a narrative of self and society at a transitional moment in nineteenth-century culture.” This section is perhaps the least successful, as it requires a familiarity with those authors and titles and she admits herself that most of them have passed into obscurity, Louisa May Alcott being a notable exception. Her “blood-and-thunder tales” are presented as an example of the way that “the season's saturnalian possibilities … remained a part of the public discourse of summer.” Apparently, what happened at the summer resort stayed at the summer resort.Of particular interest to library historians will be the section on the role of space and place in American Victorian summer reading, including as it does descriptions of social and solitary summer reading, and the establishment of libraries at hotels and summer resorts. These include the Athenaeum library at Saratoga and the library at the Poland Spring resort in Maine. Other than a fascinating mention of guests at various resort communities hosting fundraisers for the local public library, there is no consideration of the public library and summer reading, although the public library does appear in many of the diaries and letters that she cites. Rounding out the volume is a chapter on the Chautauqua Assemblies, other summer schools, and the Catholic Reading Circles, which bear witness to the continuing tension between the desire for light, leisurely summer reading, and the cultural pressure for self and social improvement through reading “the best books.”The book is of interest to anyone interested in the social and cultural history of reading in the United States. It fills a gap in the current literature on print culture in nineteenth-century America in regard to popular fiction. While works such as Sarah Wadsworth's In the Company of Books: Literature and Its “Classes” in Nineteenth-Century America and Lawrence W. Levine's Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America include popular fiction among the topics they explore, Harrington-Leuker's is the only work devoted specifically to popular fiction and to summer reading and to the role of the publisher in that phenomenon. It provides a background to works such as Joan Shelley Rubin's The Making of Middlebrow Culture, which focus on popular fiction, book club, and reading groups in the twentieth century. It also creates a need for additional works on summer reading in the nineteenth century that would approach it from different perspectives. Certainly there is room for additional work on African Americans and summer reading, as well as the previously mentioned public library and summer reading, and, of course, for the history of children and their summer reading beyond their participation in library summer reading programs.

Guiomar Torrezão: uma repórter portuguesa na imprensa do Grão-Pará

Os portugueses que migravam para província do Grão-Pará, no século XIX, diversificavam seus investimentos por meio da imprensa, chegando a fundar jornais com características próprias, dos quais se tornavam editores e redatores, oportunizando ao público maior acesso às informações locais e internacionais. Foi assim que a escritora lisbonense Guiomar Torrezão (26/11/1844 – 22/10/1898) se tornou, em fins da década de 1870, correspondente do jornal O Liberal do Pará. Guiomar, na condição de repórter de moda, escrevia periodicamente para as leitoras paraenses, ávidas das novidades estrangeiras tais como: moda, vestimenta, leitura, comportamento, entre outros assuntos. Mas o importante na escrita dessa repórter era a maneira como abordava tais assuntos, introduzindo, em suas correspondências, relevantes questões de feminismo destinadas a essas leitoras. Nessa perspectiva, selecionamos algumas publicações da referida escritora que, por longo tempo, estiveram esquecidas nas páginas dos periódicos oitocentistas – enquanto fonte documental de sua atuação – a fim de ratificar as contribuições da mulher na imprensa do Grão Pará oitocentista.

Teaching Digital Literacy Through Indexing Poetry in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals for the Periodical Poetry Index

Teaching Digital Literacy Through Indexing Poetry in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals for the Periodical Poetry Index

Translation in nineteenth-century periodicals

Abstract This article argues that when considering periodicals as “carriers” of foreign texts, attention must be paid to the modalities of this form of publication, and the manner in which periodicals enable and condition access to texts. The article examines not just the transnational circuits of communication of periodicals, but also the discursive practices, the agency, and the dynamic and distinct modalities of the periodical form. The nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented expansion of periodical publishing and this article uses the case study of a nineteenth-century periodical, the Dublin University Magazine, in order to question the cultural transfers taking place, the positioning of translations within the publication, the significance of the medium of communication, and the challenges posed when studying translation in periodicals. Drawing on book history approaches, the article focuses on integrating the study of the translations within their publication context, examining how the mutable and ephemeral form of the periodical allowed for expanded textual discourses and also for widened participation in the translation enterprise.

Indexing Periodical Poetry: First Steps in Building a Digital Bibliographic Project

Indexing Periodical Poetry:First Steps in Building a Digital Bibliographic Project Lindsy Lawrence (bio) Indices, bibliographies, catalogues, and codices are standard scholarly tools that enable researchers to locate text and information. As James Mussell suggests, there have been many attempts "to address the … bibliographic complexity" of the field of periodical studies through these tools.1 Grand collaborative endeavors such as The Wellesley Index, the Waterloo Directory of Victorian Periodicals, and Poole's Index have tried to make sense of the enormous amount of material published in nineteenth-century periodicals, but until recently only modest attempts have been made to index poetry. In 1990 George J. Worth published in Victorian Periodicals Review a "mini-index" of twelve poets whose verse appeared in Macmillan's Monthly Magazine.2 In a 1999 article, Eileen Curran indexed poetry in the first thirty-six volumes of Bentley's Miscellany, which was later updated for the static web and PDF versions of The Curran Index in 2015 with additions by Richard Ford and Gary Simons.3 In 2007 Linda K. Hughes called attention to the need for more study of periodical poetry in terms of author-publisher relationships, cultural history, and bibliography, and since then there has been a surge of work on periodical poetry, including a special issue of Victorian Poetry in 2014 devoted to essays on poetry in nineteenth-century periodicals.4 The Periodical Poetry Index emerged out of this climate to provide a bibliographic guide to the wealth of poetry published in nineteenth-century periodicals. In this essay, I define how a digital bibliographic project differs from a static index in both conception and design. In so doing, I examine how the periodical page influences our indexing methodologies and how the bibliographic codes on the page shape our iterative indexing process. When we began the Periodical Poetry Index in 2010, we considered several different project names. All of these titles included the word "index," as we envisioned the project in the tradition of scholarly periodical studies [End Page 608] enterprises attempting to make sense of the wealth of text produced by nineteenth-century print culture. Yet this is perhaps a misnomer given that the digital tools available make our work different from a static index meant to be published in a volume (as was the initial design of The Wellesley Index) or a web page merely providing a list of bibliographic citations. According to Nan Badgett, professional indices such as those commonly found in monographs or finding aids are designed "to indicate topics or features of documents in order to facilitate retrieval of documents or parts of documents."5 In this regard, Periodical Poetry functions as a finding aid much like The Wellesley Index, directing users to locate a poem in a specific issue and volume of a nineteenth-century periodical. But Houghton specifically designed The Wellesley Index as two static bibliographic indices: one that lists articles and attributions and one that lists the works of individual authors across periodical titles.6 In contrast, the breadth of bibliographic information we collect about each poem makes our project less an index and more a catalogue. According to the definitions laid out by Andrea Crestadoro in his 1856 work The Art of Making Catalogues of Libraries, catalogues and indices are lists with different functions: "The first [the catalogue] is a list of the goods; its direct object is to make an inventory of the property by recording a full and exact description of each and every article. The second [the index] is but a table of the contents of the first, a hand to show the way how readily to find any of the articles as actually entered in the inventory."7 In the Periodical Poetry Index, the item detail view for each poem provides a catalogue description of the poem's material context and bibliographic codes including poem length, page design features, illustration, poem type, epigraph, and notes on musical cues and explanatory headnotes. Designed as a digital relational database rather than a static list published online, the Periodical Poetry Index is best described as a digital bibliographic project because its digital format changes the function of a scholarly index. Locating the poem in...