The Importance of 19th Century Newspapers and Periodicals
The work of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, with its various international branches, since its inception in 1968, has provided ample evidence of the range and depth of impact of newspapers and periodicals in Victorian Britain. Readers are directed to the quarterly Victorian Periodicals Review for reviews of the many hundreds of books and articles in this field over recent years.
Many, probably most, of the eminent poets, novelists, and essayists were first and primarily known through the periodicals. The newly literate classes found their reading material in this medium, lacking the radio, telephone, television and paper-back book media which so dominate our own age. So the periodicals, whether religious, political, class, business, professional or scholarly, were a primary source of entertainment, instruction, information, news, and a notable means of social bonding.
We tend to think of periodicals and newspapers as less important than printed books: `cheap', so disposable; not `standard' in size, so not book-shelf material; less carefully and seriously produced, so less to be heeded; not written primarily by scholars, thinkers, the important folk in our society. Yet these responses are little more than unwarranted prejudice. We ourselves probably read more periodicals and newspapers than we do printed books, whether for casual information about our current world, or for the most essential details of our trade or profession or of the organisations in which we participate.
This Directory begins to provide a bibliographical resource which will enable a fresh, more thorough and perhaps a more mature assessment of Victorian England. Without such access to the entire body of nineteenth century newspapers and periodicals we will be limited to that relatively tiny number of publications previously known to scholars. We would be imprudent to assume that the periodicals already known to us were the most important at the time. With the statistical and bibliographical evidence of this Directory before us, especially as it grows to the completion of all five series, we will be better able to answer the questions "Important to whom?" and "Important by what criteria?" Scholarly tastes of the 1990's are likely to be dismissed as offhandedly in the next generation as we treat much of the scholarship of the 1950's.
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