Abstract
These words are, of course, not my own preface to an heroic attempt to subject the periodical press to a regular and systematic course of study, but the words of James Mill writing anonymously in the Westminster Review in 1824. Over 150 years later the project announced by Mill did not seem a great deal further advanced when Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff echoed Mill’s words in their introduction to The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings.
The systematic and general study of [the Victorian periodical] press has hardly begun … for the press as a whole, we appear to have little choice except to be satisfied with a casual or glancing knowledge, believing that anything broader or deeper or more systematic is beyond the bounds of reasonable humanistic ambition… . The sheer bulk and range of the Victorian press seems to make it so unwieldy as to defy systematic and general study… . And yet, despite what prudence and common sense would tell us, a case can be made that the very impenetrability of the Victorian press requires of us that we attempt a systematic and general study?2
It is indeed a subject of wonder, that periodical publications should have existed so long … without having become subject to a regular and systematic course of criticism.1
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Notes
James Mill, ‘Periodical Literature’, WR, I (1824) 206.
Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff (eds), The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings (Leicester, 1982) p. xiii.
Michael Wolff, ‘Comments on AHA Panel’, VPN, no. 11 (1971) 14.
See Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1965) pp. 65–70
Michael Wolff, ‘Charting the Golden Stream’, VPN, no. 13 (1971) 23–38
Walter Houghton (ed.), The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, vol. I (Toronto and London, 1966) p. xv.
John North, ‘The Rationale — Why Read Victorian Periodicals?’, in J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel (eds), Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research (New York, 1978) p. 4.
Tony Bennett, ‘Media, “reality”, signification’, in Michael Gurevitch et al. (eds), Culture, Society and the Media (London, 1982) p. 287.
Tony Bennett et al., (eds), Culture, Ideology and Social Process (Milton Keynes, 1981) p. 14.
‘Culture is Ordinary’ is the title of an early essay by Raymond Williams, in Norman MacKenzie (ed.), Conviction (London, 1958). See Stuart Hall in Bennett et al. (eds), Culture, Ideology and Social Process, p. 21.
Raymond Williams, ‘Crisis in English Studies’, in Writing in Society (London, 1983) p. 210. See also his Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977).
Raymond Williams, ‘The Press and Popular Culture: an historical perspective’, in George Boyce, James Curran and Pauline Wingate (eds), Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (London, 1978) p. 41.
Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London, 1977) pp. 155–7.
WR, I (1824) 206.
WR, I (1824) 209.
Althusser defines ideology as ‘a system of representation … perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects’ which negotiate the ‘“lived” relations between men and the world’. See For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London, 1969) p. 233.
WR, I (1824) 209.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London, 1973) p. 150.
See, for example, Michel Foucault, ‘Orders of Discourse’, Social Sciences Information, X (1971) 7–30.
J.S. Mill, ‘Periodical Literature’, WR, I (1824) 505–41.
Michael Foucault, ‘History of Systems of Thought’ in D.F. Bouchard (ed.) Language, Counter-memory, Practice (Ithaca and Oxford, 1977) p. 199.
Brian Maidment, ‘Magazines of Popular Progress and the Artisans’, VPR, XVII (1984) 85.
Michael Lund, ‘Novels, Writers and Readers in 1850’, VPR, XVII (1984) 15–28.
Raymond Williams, Culture (London, 1981) pp. 12–13.
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© 1990 Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, Lionel Madden
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Pykett, L. (1990). Reading the Periodical Press: Text and Context. In: Brake, L., Jones, A., Madden, L. (eds) Investigating Victorian Journalism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20790-9_1
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