II. THE EDITORS: In the Beginning

II. THE EDITORSIn the Beginning Michael Wolff (bio) The back-story of the Victorian Periodicals Review begins in 1954 when I was a graduate student at Princeton University and planning a dissertation on George Eliot. I wanted to know more about her reviews in the Leader and the Westminster Review and thought that I might find out something about her moral and intellectual frame of mind by comparing her reviews with those of other reviews of the same books (at the time, of course, a wildly unrealistic notion). That such a project has become, over the years, more and more feasible is one way of describing the growth of the field of periodical study. The first result of my foraging in bound volumes in the stacks of libraries was a paper I gave at the 1959 meeting of Victorian Group at the Modern Language Association on a hitherto unknown review of FitzGerald's Rubaiyat in the Literary Gazette, generalizing from my discovery to the importance of giving greater attention to the periodical press. I had spent my first sabbatical in 1964 at the British Museum and decided to try to recreate a Victorian week. I had in 1959, with my Victorian Studies colleagues Philip H. Appleman and William Madden at the University of Indiana, published 1859: Entering a Year of Crisis and I thought, following the popular TV show "That Was the Week that Was," that I could do a Victorian "week that was." I knew that the newspapers and magazines would afford the best insight into that week, but I was not prepared for the extraordinary number of titles nor, as it appeared, for our professional ignorance of them (the exception being the elite reviews studied by Emery Neff's graduate students at Columbia University and by Walter E. Houghton and his colleagues as they worked on the Wellesley Index). I tried to demonstrate the nature of this scale in a talk to the 1965 Anglo-American Conference of Historians at the University of London on the [End Page 6] twenty-nine journals available in October 1864 whose titles began with the letter "A." Later in 1965 Professor John M. Robson invited me to contribute to a Toronto conference on nineteenth-century editing. That was when I gave my most ambitious and, I suppose, pioneering paper, "Charting the Golden Stream: Thoughts on a Directory of Victorian Periodicals," dedicated to Houghton, whose Victorian Frame of Mind appeared in 1957. My paper, and others from the same conference, were published in Robson's Editing Nineteenth-Century Texts (1967). At the end of 1967 I asked some 200 subscribers to Victorian Studies, which I was then editing, whom we knew to be interested in one aspect or another of magazines or newspapers, to send us suggestions for scholarly work. We got enough replies to justify sending Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, no. 1 in January 1968, free of charge, to all subscribers to VS (except libraries). There was a form at the back to fill out that would let me know the nature of their interest in the periodicals. I invited them to subscribe ($2 or 17/6 for VPN 1-4) and asked them to get their libraries on board. I had also won grants from the Chapelbrook Foundation and the Council on Library Resources and that let me distribute no. 2, also free. The 1968 Modern Language Association meeting was in New York and William E. Fredeman, the student of the Pre-Raphaelites, and I scheduled a "Seminar in Research in Victorian Periodicals" for 8:45 a.m., 29 December. By a lucky chance, because of political disturbances in Chicago that year, the American Historical Association had moved its annual meeting to New York, so that there were both historians and English literature people at our session. It should perhaps be noted here that interdisciplinarity has been an essential constituent of periodical study, because obviously all "disciplines" were covered by Victorian journalists and writers, and almost all writers at one time or another wrote for journals. In any event, one result of that meeting, chaired, I think, by James E. O'Neil, was the decision to start a society for study...

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