Release Notes
October, 2017
The Curran Index (www.curranindex.org) began as a series of additions and corrections to the Wellesley Index. As of... Read More
October, 2017
The Curran Index (www.curranindex.org) began as a series of additions and corrections to the Wellesley Index. As of October 2017 there are 1,100 of these corrections to Wellesley Index entries or to information previosly reported in the 1994 Victorian Periodicals Review paper by Mary Ruth Hiller on the Eclectic Review or in Ann Lohrli's 1973 book on Household Words.
Most Curran Index entries, however, deal with either types of periodicals, or types of writing, which were left out of the Wellesley Index. These new entries can be grouped into 4 categores:
- Quarterly Reviews dealing with foreign or religious interests: Three foreign-oriented quarterly reviews -- the Calcutta Review, the Foreign and Colonial Quarterly Review, and the Foreign Review -- have been addressed in earlier updates. In 2017 the Curran Index has added the Christian Remembrancer, the Church of England Quarterly Review, and the English Review to the previously indexed British Critic and the Church Quarterly Review to comprehensively address High Church Anglicanism. All told over 4,300 articles have been listed, and over 35,000 pages of review articles have been traced to their authors.
- Verse in monthlies: With this latest release's inclusion of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the Curran Index now lists over 6,000 poems or poem groups in six early Victorian monthlies up to 1854, including the previously examined Ainsworth's Magazine, Bentley's Miscellany, Fraser's Magazine, Metropolitan Magazine, and New Monthly Magazine. Over 2,000 prose articles in the Metropolitan Magazine have also been indexed.
- The annuals: This latest update adds Alaric Watt's Literary Souvenir / Cabinet of Modern Art (1825-1837) to the previously indexed Keepsake (1828-1857) and Scottish Annual (1836). Collectively these annuals contain 700 prose articles and over 1500 poems.
- Weeklies: The first five years of Once a Week, with almost 2,000 prose articles and a little under 500 poems, are now incorporated into the Curran Index.
Adding everything, 18,300 articles are now listed in the Curran Index, with a composite attribution rate of approximately 75%. Additionally, the index now includes almost 2,200 contributors, more than half of whom are not in the Wellesley Index.
As always, questions, comments, and suggestions about anything having to do with the Curran Index or attribution research are most welcome. Please send these to gsimons@mail.usf.edu.
G.S.
August, 2017
This update includes verse from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1824-1840), the English Review (1844-1853), and the indexing, with article payments,... Read More
August, 2017
This update includes verse from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1824-1840), the English Review (1844-1853), and the indexing, with article payments, of our first weekly, Once a Week (1859-1864).
As of this writing the index of Blackwood's is complete through 1840. So far 678 poems or poem groups have been indexed, with an attribution rate of 86%. Some of these verses were signed or tellingly initialed; many others, however, were not. As with other early Victorian monthlies, a significant number of the unsigned verses were subsequently republished in a manner which lays bare their authorship. By year end the indexing of verse in Blackwood’s will be extended up to 1854. At that point the Curran Index will have incorporated early Victorian verse in Ainsworth’s Magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany, Blackwood’s Magazine, Fraser’s Magazine, the Metropolitan Magazine, and the New Monthly Magazine – thereby substantively addressing perhaps the greatest omission of the Wellesley Index, its failure to include poetry.
A second great, although perhaps not as widely recognized, Wellesley omission was its failure to address High Church critical thought and commentary. At various times, and in various places, the Wellesley investigators announced their intent to index several different High Church quarterlies, but for a number of reasons, including Ester Houghton’s declining health, none of these periodicals were ever included in the Wellesley Index. This is a serious omission, as these periodicals not only address ecclesiastical issues but also offer commentary on virtually every aspect of social, political, scientific, literary, and artistic life. In previous years the Curran Index has reported on the early-century British Critic and the late-century Church Quarterly Review. This update includes the English Review (1844-1853).
The English Review served as a forum for many former Tractarians and other Anglicans who, in the throes of the Oxford Movement, declined to follow John Henry Newman into the Church of Rome. Over its nine years the review staked out positions regarding Newman’s movement and followers; the Maynooth grant controversy and other aspects of Peel’s policies in Ireland; the so-called Papal Aggression of 1850; and much of the literature of the period. The indexing of that review has been facilitated by the serendipitous purchase of a marked set of the first three numbers. Among other attributions, these marked records have led to the identification (and subsequent confirmation) of a previously unattributed essay by Gladstone. To date our attribution rate is 27% -- not high by Wellesley standards but, nevertheless informative.
For practical reasons the Wellesley Index was restricted to monthlies and quarterlies. In 2016 the domain of the Curran Index was broadened to include annuals. This update incorporates our first weekly, Once a Week (1859-1864). Once a Week is best known today for its illustrations, but a surviving account book also contains information on payments to contributors of prose and verse. Over 1900 prose articles and nearly 450 poems have been indexed, with an attribution rate of approximately 98%. As part of this process, previously unattributed articles by well-known contributors have been found – Harriet Martineau, for example, contributed 178 items, 66 of which were not listed in Deborah Logan’s 2012 listing of Martineau’s contributions to periodicals. Perhaps more interestingly, a number of articles have been shown to be by non-professional journalists – men of science and industry, expatriates seemingly connecting with their English roots through Once a Week, and, of course, dabblers. For some contributors Once a Week served as an incubator; having originally written for that periodical they went on to make names for themselves in others. Many contributors to Once a Week were listed in the account book with only a last name and, perhaps, a first initial. Many of these contributors are obscure and, therefore, effectively anonymous. A great effort has been made to truly identify and describe many of these relatively unknown contributors.
As always, questions, comments, and suggestions about anything having to do with the Curran Index or attribution research are most welcome. Please send these to gsimons@mail.usf.edu.
G.S.
August, 2016
This essay responds to the question, what is in the Curran Index as of August, 2016?
1) Additions and Corrections to the Wellesley Index
Although the Wellesley investigators made every effort to be both comprehensive and correct, a project of that magnitude inevitably contained errors and omissions. Over time, further scholarship has shown that some seemingly well-considered attributions of articles were in fact incorrect. Sometimes improved justifications have been found for attributions that were initially presented as only conjectural. And new sources of information have come to light that support the attribution of articles whose contributor(s) were previously unknown. The Curran Index contains over a thousand article records either adding to or correcting entries in the Wellesley Index. Some of these corrections are minor – although, of course, the devil is in the details – but others are certainly not. It should also be noted that only some of these corrections are included in Proquest’s current on-line version of the Wellesley Index, whereas a complete set of them is included here.
2) Critical Reviews
The quarterly reviews which both formed and expressed critical opinion in the 19th century are central to the study of Victorian intellectual and literary history. The Wellesley team of scholars indexed the “big three” (the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review, and the Westminster Review) as well as several others, but they did not fully accomplish their goals. In particular, limitations of time and resources hampered their explorations of those quarterly reviews that looked to the world outside the British Isles; while the Foreign Quarterly Review and the British and Foreign Review were included, many other important reviews were not.
In 1991, Eileen Curran published a Wellesley-like analysis of the late 1820s Foreign Review, a publication studded with distinguished contributors like Robert Southey and Thomas Carlyle. With this update her analysis has been incorporated into her namesake index. On several occasions she also announced her intention of publishing an attribution analysis for the Foreign and Colonial Quarterly Review, a mid-1840s periodical distinguished by contributions from W. E. Gladstone and other prominent figures. Unfortunately, she did not live to bring that project to completion. However, using her surviving notes in the Eileen Curran Papers archive at Colby College as a starting point, the current editor has been able to add a preliminary but substantive entry for this important periodical to the Curran Index. As it happens, in addition to political luminaries, a number of familiar 1840s literary figures, including Henry Fothergill Chorley, John Abraham Heraud, Richard Henry Horne, G.P.R. James, George Henry Lewes, Julia Sophia Pardoe, and Thomas Adolphus Trollope wrote for the Foreign and Colonial. The inclusion of their writings into this organized index should facilitate analyses of their careers and contributions to periodical literature.
Although the Wellesley scholars did not, apparently, contemplate extending their study to periodicals published outside of Great Britain, Dr. Antonietta Consonni has fortunately brought to our attention the existence of records of contributors to the Calcutta Review, a quarterly established in 1844 with the goal of being a “first class English periodical in India.” Revising Dr. Consonni's preliminary work on these records, this edition of the Curran Index includes detailed article-contributor information for the first ten volumes of the Calcutta Review, with more to come in the future. With this addition, a novel and distinctly Anglo-Indian perspective on culture, history, and literature has been brought into the characterization of Victorian periodicals.
The editors of the Wellesley Index also initially intended to delineate the arc of Anglican high church critical thought through the 19th century via analyses of the British Critic (1793-1843), the Church of England Quarterly Review (1837-1858), the English Review (1844-1853), the Christian Remembrancer (1819-1868), and the Church Quarterly Review (1875-1900 and beyond). Unfortunately, these studies were not completed during the course of that project. Under the auspices of the Wellesley Index, Esther Rhodes Houghton produced a lengthy attribution study for the British Critic, a pivotal publication in that it eventually became the central critical organ of the Oxford Movement. For various reasons this analysis was not included in Volume IV of the Wellesley Index, a decision which the last editor of the Wellesley Index, Jean Slingerland, came to regret. However, Esther Houghton's typescript has survived in the archives of the Wellesley Index which are maintained at Wellesley College, and is now published for the first time, with additional material. This edition of the Curran Index thus at last opens to scholarly view the contents and writers of the British Critic as detailed in Houghton’s long-buried study. Additionally, thanks to Russell Wyland, we are able to report some early 1814-1823 British Critic attributions associated with John Taylor Coleridge and John Keble.
The Church Quarterly Review was the dominant high-church critical review in the last quarter of the 19th century. As Josef Altholz has written, “everybody who was anybody in the high church wrote for this new review.” But who were these people, and what did they write? Altholz, part of the Wellesley project team, found a limited marked file and a few summary articles supporting the attribution of 83 articles, which he published in 1984 independently of the Wellesley, in the Victorian Periodicals Review. With this edition of the Curran Index we have built upon Altholz's work to report a far more extensive listing for the Church Quarterly Review, now encompassing over 1,000 articles and all issues between 1875 and 1900. Our attribution rate is about 25% -- not great by Wellesley standards -- but still constituting a significant addition to our knowledge base. Readers of the Curran Index will be able to assign names to those who were presenting and establishing High Church positions on topics such as socialism, evolution, education, missionary activities, treatment of the poor, and contemporary writers.
3) Verse in Victorian Periodicals
One major limitation of the Wellesley Index was the decision not to include verse. Victorian miscellanies – periodicals such as Blackwood’s Magazine, Fraser’s Magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany, the Cornhill, Macmillan’s Magazine, and the New Monthly Magazine – featured prose interspersed with poetry, much of it unsigned. Houghton and his associates questioned the lasting value of much of this poetry, particularly when weighed against the enormous difficulty of arriving at plausible attributions for a significant portion of it. Now, after Linda Hughes’ influential article, periodical verse’s value is indisputable. If verse is ignored, our understanding of the construction and presentation of miscellanies, the contributors to these periodicals, and the values and interests of the Victorian reading public will be misconceived.
Eileen Curran recognized this deficiency, and in 1999 she published in Victorian Periodicals Review an extended bibliographical study of verse in Bentley’s Miscellany. Others are also addressing this shortfall, perhaps most notably in Alison Chapman’s Victorian Poetry Network and in the Periodical Poetry Index, co-directed by Natalie Houston, Lindsy Lawrence, and April Patrick. This edition of the Curran Index incorporates an attribution analysis of verse in five prominent London-based monthlies through the year 1854.
Dr. Curran’s earlier Bentley’s Miscellany assessment has been heavily revised and extended. Our analysis of verse in Fraser’s Magazine was stimulated by an initial listing kindly provided by Professor David Latané. The listings for Ainsworth’s Magazine, the Metropolitan Magazine, and the New Monthly Magazine are entirely new. In toto, the Curran Index indexes 5,300 poems or verse groups, 75% of which are attributed; the attributed poems are associated with 529 known unique authors. Many of the major poets of the era are represented; however, perhaps even more interesting are the shifting allegiances and contributions of the many workaday Victorian poets whose literary pathways can be traced through these listings.
4) The Metropolitan Magazine
The Wellesley Index covered the prose of a number of prominent monthly periodicals of the 1830s and 1840s. However, the Metropolitan Magazine, although initially considered for inclusion, did not make the final cut. Of course, contributors migrated back and forth among the major competing early Victorian miscellanies, and various features, article concepts, and editorial positions reflected this competitive environment. To understand and fully appreciate the jockeying for position, contributors, and readers among these periodicals, one should include the Metropolitan.
The Metropolitan was conceived as a virtual clone of the 1820s New Monthly Magazine; it was a true miscellany, and was a significant although not dominant contender in the marketplace. Its politics were moderately Whiggish – generally pro-reform, but not wedded to any party or any politician. Each issue of the Metropolitan had from 8 or 9 to 14 prose articles as well as a number of poems. One of the distinguishing aspects of the Metropolitan was that both fiction and non-fiction were often serialized; a second interesting aspect is that it was a chameleon publication, taking on different colorings over time.
The Curran Index now includes a full listing of both prose (2,108 articles) and verse (1,479 poems or poem groups) published in the Metropolitan from May 1831 through its final issue in May of 1850; indeed, this may be the only extended attribution-oriented table of contents listing for a Victorian monthly that includes both verse and prose. Metropolitan contributors included Victorian periodical figures such as John Banim, Dudley Costello, Catherine Gore, James Hogg, Richard Henry Horne, Eliza Linton, David Moir, James Montgomery, Lady Morgan, Sir Charles Morgan, William Pickersgill, John Poole, Samuel Warren, and James White. Any examinations of these authors or their works, or of their various migrations among or interactions with different periodicals and editors, should presumably include the Metropolitan. And among authors not included in the Wellesley Index one finds in the Metropolitan intriguing figures such as Georgina Chatterton, Hannah Clay (best known for her writings in the Ladies Companion), Catherine Grace Godwin, James Grant (author of The Great Metropolis), Hargrave Jennings, Marion Moss (publisher of the first Jewish women’s periodical), Harriott Pigott, Harriet Anne Scott, and Marianne Young / Postans.
5) The Annuals
A new category of periodicals, the Annuals rose to prominence and subsequently fell to decline in the 1820s-1850s. Normally issued at the beginning of November for the holiday market, Annuals were elaborately bound gift books which typically contained steel plate engravings, poetry, and light fiction. Annuals were not included in the Wellesley Index. Although the Annuals were held in light regard by many critics of the era, it is nevertheless true that almost every major literary figure of the period --including the Brownings, Carlyle, Coleridge, Dickens, Scott, Tennyson, Thackeray, Wordsworth, and others -- contributed to them. Of course, the great majority of the contributors to the annuals were relative unknowns, and some were then and now rather completely unknown! Most Annual stories or verses were signed, or at least initialed, but the names or initials were often obscure, pseudonyms were often used, and some items were published without any indication as to their author or authors.
The standard bibliographic study of the Annuals is Andrew Boyle’s 1967 book. This is an invaluable, though dated, resource. Unfortunately, Boyle often did not find the true identities behind pseudonyms or initials; did not appreciate that certain writers who used different identifying signatures at different times were, in fact, identical; and did not have the benefit of the research into editors’ correspondence which has occurred in the last fifty years. Moreover, perhaps because the Annuals’ cultural importance was not appreciated by many scholars until recent years, the Annuals were generally not treated in concert with other Victorian periodicals.
Yet to understand the phenomenon of the Annuals (in the same manner as one seeks to understand the prestige and importance of the quarterly reviews, or the popularity and significance of the early Victorian monthly miscellanies), one should not neglect the people who created their copy. Further, the contributors to the London monthlies were, by and large, also contributors to the Annuals. Efforts to consider the roles of these writers, or the composite workings of contributors in the periodical marketplace, should surely consider all these types of periodicals in tandem.
The Curran Index now includes the complete 1827-1856 run of the Keepsake (perhaps the most famous Annual) and the Scottish Annual (which may be one of the most obscure, as only one issue was published, in Glasgow in 1836). Many additions and corrections have been made to Boyle’s Keepsake study; further, the analysis of the Scottish Annual is entirely new, as Boyle did not examine it. Authors of roughly two-thirds of the articles in each of these annuals were deemed important enough by posterity to be included in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Many of these contributors were not listed in the Wellesley Index, and it is noteworthy that nearly half of the Keepsakes’ contributions were by women.
As always, questions, comments, and suggestions about anything having to do with the Curran Index or attribution research are most welcome. Please send these to gsimons@mail.usf.edu.
G.S.
December, 2015
Since the last update in March 2015 there have been major additions to the Curran Index; the CI now... Read More
December, 2015
Since the last update in March 2015 there have been major additions to the Curran Index; the CI now itemizes and indexes over 7,500 contributions to nineteenth-century periodicals and traces many of these articles to one or more of almost 1,000 individual contributors.
Partial listings have been introduced or extended for two important religious periodicals. In March we incorporated Josef Altholtz’s bibliographic analysis of the Church Quarterly Review, the voice of high church Anglicanism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; now that listing has been substantially enhanced. Additionally, Russell Wyland has kindly provided some early listings for the British Critic, as a forerunner to our planned inclusion of a several-decades-old 1824-1843 listing by Esther Houghton which has never been published.
The identification and analysis of an additional collection of letters by Frederick Marryat has supported the revision and substantial improvement of our earlier listings of the Metropolitan Magazine, a miscellany of the 1830s and 1840s.
In 1991 Eileen Curran published a Wellesley-like analysis of the Foreign Review, a publication studded with distinguished contributors like Southey and Carlyle. With this update her analysis has been incorporated into her namesake index. On several occasions the late Eileen Curran also announced her intention of publishing an attribution analysis for the Foreign and Colonial Quarterly Review, a mid-1840s periodical distinguished by contributions from Gladstone and other prominent literary and political personalities. Unfortunately, she did not live to bring that project to completion. Using her surviving notes as a starting point, we have incorporated a baseline for this periodical into the Curran Index.
Professor Curran also separately published a study of verse in Bentley’s Miscellany up to 1854 – a study which has been extensively revised and augmented in previous Curran Index updates. All of this information, with new corrections and additions, has now been brought into the CI. We are also pleased to report that an unpublished listing of verse in Blackwood’s Magazine by Eileen Curran has been discovered among her files and papers. At some point this will also be brought into the CI.
To accompany the Bentley’s verse listings, our prior listing of verse in the New Monthly Magazine has been extended from 1851 to 1854. This added much verse by women and some interesting Crimean War poetry to the index. Additionally, our earlier listing of verse in Fraser’s Magazine, which had only gone up to 1841, has similarly been extended to 1854 – thereby adding verse by Coventry Patmore, Charles Kingsley, Frederick Tennyson, Arthur Hugh Clough, George Meredith, William Allingham, and many others to the CI. Lastly, a start has been made on adding verse from the Metropolitan Magazine. All told, the Curran Index now provides extensive coverage of verse in the early Victorian London monthlies.
The table below summarizes the current article counts per periodical in the Curran Index Database:
Periodical Prose Verse
Bentley’s Miscellany 382 954
British Critic 25
Calcutta Review 133
Church Quarterly Review 214
Foreign Review 131
Foreign and Colonial Review 184
Fraser’s Magazine 106 671
Metropolitan Magazine 2120 204
New Monthly Magazine 78 1810
Other Periodicals 509 14
3882 3653
A major effort has been made to ascertain and provide extended biographical information regarding the contributors of articles listed in the Curran Index Database. As of this update, 985 contributors, including 462 which were not listed in the Wellesley Index, have been identified. As a further point of reference, approximately half of the 985 contributors are not listed in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
The indispensible Volume 5 of the Wellesley Index was a comprehensive bibliographical listing by author that covered all attributed articles detailed in Volumes 1-4. With this update we have provided a similarly comprehensive multi-periodical Curran Index bibliography.
The volume of new attributions arriving with this new edition is so large that inserting them into their proper places within the existing webpages that have always made up the Curran Index has proved impractical. Instead, we are making all of this new information available in easily accessible and printable PDF files that in most cases include all existing Curran Index attributions for a particular periodical. This system is a transitional one. With the support and guidance of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP), the plan is for the Curran Index to be redesigned and reconfigured in the near future from its current format into a fully and flexibly searchable online database. Stay tuned for updates about these exciting new developments.
As always, questions, comments, and suggestions about anything having to do with the Curran Index or attribution research are most welcome. Please send these to simons@victorianresearch.org.
G.S.
March, 2015
The Wellesley Index is such an enormous achievement -- spanning 40 periodicals, almost 90,000 articles, and over 11,000 identified... Read More
March, 2015
The Wellesley Index is such an enormous achievement -- spanning 40 periodicals, almost 90,000 articles, and over 11,000 identified authors – that it is tempting to consider it representative of contributions to Victorian periodicals as a whole. However, that would be an overreach, because the WI does not include dailies, weeklies, regional publications, or many specialized or ephemeral monthly periodicals. Moreover, even within its specified domain of scholarly quarterlies and “major” monthlies, the WI left out a great deal.
One major omission was the failure to incorporate verse. Victorian miscellanies – periodicals such as Blackwood’s Magazine, Fraser’s Magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany, the Cornhill, Macmillan’s Magazine, and the New Monthly Magazine – featured interspersed poetry and prose. Houghton and his associates questioned the lasting value of Victorian periodical poetry and consequently excluded it from consideration. Now, after Linda Hughes’ influential article, "What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies," Victorian Periodicals Review, 40 (2007), 91-125, periodical verse’s value is indisputable. If verse is ignored, our understanding of the construction and presentation of miscellanies, the contributors to these periodicals, and the values and interests of the Victorian reading public will be substantively incomplete.
Eileen Curran recognized this deficiency, and in 1999 she published in Victorian Periodicals Review an extended bibliographical study of verse in Bentley’s Miscellany. Others are also addressing this shortfall, perhaps most notably in Alison Chapman’s Victorian Poetry Network and in the Periodical Poetry Index, co-directed by Natalie Houston, Lindsy Lawrence, and April Patrick. With this update the Curran Index enters the fray with its own contributions: a bibliography of verse in the New Monthly Magazine from 1821 to 1850 and, stimulated by an initial listing kindly provided by David Latané, a first installment bibliography of verse in Fraser’s Magazine in the years 1831-1840.
As listed in an associated separate file, bibliographic information has been provided for over 1700 separate poems or groups of poems published in NMM. Since many of those poems were subsequently reprinted in volumes with named authors, we have been able to attribute 73% of these verses to 159 specific contributors. Almost 28% of these contributors were women; in contrast, the Wellesley Index reported that only 13% of its identified contributors were women, so that either by virtue of the nature of the writing (poetry vs. prose), or through editorial practices, the NMM was a favorable environment for women poets. Some frequent contributors are now well known: Felicia Hemans, Thomas Campbell, Letitia Landon (L.E.L), Thomas Hood, Leigh Hunt, and Bryan Waller Procter (Barry Cornwall). Other frequently encountered names might be more surprising. The humorists James and Horace Smith together contributed almost 200 verses, and their niece Maria Abdy, a prolific poet and story writer who has almost disappeared from literary history, contributed almost 50 works. Cyrus Redding, the active subeditor during the 1820s, contributed over 100 poems. And there is evidence that poems cited by recent biographers of Leigh Hunt and Theodore Hook as being particularly representative of their respective principals were, in fact, written by others.
Our separately reported analysis of verse in Fraser’s Magazine during the magazine’s first decade enumerates almost 400 poems. Of these only 55% have been traced to one of 51 specific authors; this lower attribution rate is associated with the nature of this poetry. The occasional and most often political 1830s verse in Fraser’s was less frequently reprinted in author-specific volumes. In striking contrast to the NMM, only 18% of Fraser’s contributing poets were women, raising the questions whether women of the day simply didn’t write much political poetry, or whether the Fraserian circle was less open to female contributors. Further, the most frequent known verse contributors to the 1830s FM – William Maginn, James Hogg, John Abraham Heraud, Robert Macnish, Thomas Powell, Bryan Waller Procter – were male, and the percentage of published poems written by women was even lower, less than 8%.
Sometimes the limitations of pages and resources forced the Wellesley Index team to drop periodicals they would have liked to include. The Metropolitan Magazine – a monthly in competition with Fraser’s Magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany, the New Monthly Magazine, and other periodicals of the 1830s and 1840s -- was not included for these reasons. The March 2014 CI update included a file listing 2120 articles printed in the Metropolitan, with a 61% attribution rate connecting these articles with 169 authors. This file is now being reviewed and a revised version will be reported in a subsequent Curran Index update.
The Wellesley team also initially intended to include the Church Quarterly Review, the voice of high church Anglicanism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. However, Walter Houghton set the bar for inclusion in the Wellesley Index at an attribution rate of roughly 75%. When it was clear that nothing close to that rate was likely to be realized for the CQR, Josef Altholtz, who was investigating that periodical, instead published his results in “The Church Quarterly Review,” Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 17, No. 1/2 (Spring - Summer, 1984), pp. 52-57. Although this information is therefore available to those who carefully seek it out, it is an “orphan,” in that it is not associated with a larger collection of periodical bibliographic information. Further, while high attribution rates would obviously be better, limited information on contributors can still be valuable. Even a 10 or 20% attribution rate may give a useful sense of the nature of the contributors to a given periodical. Moreover, if one is interested in the work of a specific author – in the case of the CQR, say William Gladstone or Charlotte Yonge – it may be important to know at least some of the articles that author contributed to a periodical even if other contributions remain hidden. Accordingly, bibliographic data for the CQR has been incorporated into the Curran Index. As a probably not unexpected point of information, 23 of the 43 known contributors to the high church CQR were educated at Oxford, while only 11 were associated with Cambridge.
Although the primary focus of the Curran Index over the last year has been addressing writings and periodicals which were not included in the Wellesley Index, a few of our more traditional additions and corrections are included in the following. The interesting and carefully documented papers by Thomas McLean and Troy Gregory cited below demonstrate the continuing vitality of attribution scholarship.
G.S.
March, 2014
When Eileen Curran published her study “Verses in Bentley’s Miscellany,” she hoped that future investigators would continue the search.... Read More
March, 2014
When Eileen Curran published her study “Verses in Bentley’s Miscellany,” she hoped that future investigators would continue the search. She particularly wondered “who was Eta” – the translator-author of over thirty separately published poems taken from German or Italian originals – and presciently speculated “perhaps a woman?” Eileen was right, as she usually was; this update establishes that Eta was Elizabeth Colling, a minor poet of some repute, and a new name to Wellesley-Curran listings. Similarly, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes George Walter Thornbury as a prolific contributor to 19th century periodicals, but only ten of his specific contributions were previously identified. This update links Thornbury to an additional six articles in Ainsworth’s Magazine, one in Bentley’s Miscellany, and two articles in the New Monthly Magazine. In the same vein, William Henry Giles Kingston is noted as the author of six yachting stories in Bentley’s Miscellany; the “Age of Veneer” series on advertising in Fraser’s Magazine is attributed to George Henry Francis; and additions have been made to the bibliographies of Francis Buckland, Dudley Costello, Antonio Gallenga, Richard Levinge, and Charles Macfarlane. Google Book Search has been the central tool underpinning these new attributions.
Although Wellesley Index attributions mark the best efforts of committed scholars, it is inevitable that sometimes they (scholars and attributions) are wrong. Circumstantial evidence that seems quite strong can be misleading, and only very careful detailed scholarship – as exemplified by a study by Essaka Joshua and Eleoma Joshua, establishing Thomas Arnold rather than William Weir as the author of a series of articles in the New Monthly Magazine – can set the bibliographic record straight. The Joshuas’ results are here incorporated into the Curran Index, and readers are urged to read the Joshuas’ article.
Sometimes progress in understanding requires retrogression in attribution. When Walter Houghton softened his original stance and agreed to accept internal evidence as a basis for attribution, he suggested a confidence scale: outright attributions should be certain, probable attributions indicated with “prob.” written after the name of the presumed author, less confident attributions marked with a closing question mark, and highly speculative attributions denoted with the word “possibly.” Unfortunately, some Wellesley attributions were reported with more confidence than they probably merit. To test these uncertainties, Alexis Antonia and Ellen Jordan published a Burrow’s analysis of a number of articles in Tait’s Magazine which Wellesley suggests were written either by J. H. Burton or J. S. Blackie. (I thank Alexis Antonia for bringing this study to my attention.) While some attributions were supported, the study suggested that a number of attributions were in error. I am not inclined to accept the results of Burrow’s analyses, which depend on patterns of word usage, and which could potentially be disrupted by editorial intervention, as dispositive. On the other hand, particularly when the basis of the original attribution is less than compelling, I believe these analyses can and should “move the needle” of confidence; accordingly, several changes in attribution confidence level are included in this update.
A prior Curran Index update reported that a bibliographical study of the Metropolitan, a miscellany of the 1830s and 1840s, was in progress. That work has now been completed and is separately reported. It should be noted here, however, that of the 180+ identified Metropolitan prose authors, over 70 were known Wellesley or Curran authors. These include both prominent and journeyman Victorian periodical figures such as John Banim, Dudley Costello, Catherine Gore, James Hogg, Richard Henry Horne, Eliza Linton, David Moir, James Montgomery, Lady Morgan, Sir Charles Morgan, William Pickersgill, John Poole, Samuel Warren, and James White. Any examinations of these authors or their works, or of their various migrations among or interactions with different periodicals, should presumably include the Metropolitan. And among authors new to the Wellesley-Curran universe one finds in the Metropolitan intriguing figures such as Georgina Chatterton, Hannah Clay (best known for her writings in the Ladies Companion), Catherine Grace Godwin, James Grant (author of The Great Metropolis), Hargrave Jennings, Marion Moss (publisher of the first Jewish women’s periodical), Harriott Pigott, Harriet Anne Scott, and Marianne Young / Postans. Please look at the separately posted report on the Metropolitan.
G. S.
October, 2013
After contributing to the original Wellesley Index, and publishing several subsequent updates in Victorian Periodicals Review, Eileen Curran initiated... Read More
October, 2013
After contributing to the original Wellesley Index, and publishing several subsequent updates in Victorian Periodicals Review, Eileen Curran initiated this Index with Patrick Leary as an on-line home for corrections to and extensions of the Wellesley project. To this project she brought precise thinking and unbiased assessment, clarity and conciseness of prose, and extraordinary knowledgeability. Although ill health prevented her from publishing Curran Index reports after 2007, she persisted in her life-long calling, and this update includes a number of findings from her later years. The Curran Index, challenged to meet Eileen Curran’s standards of excellence, continues.
Although the world of scholarship, like the world at large, has changed dramatically since the 1958-1989 years of the Wellesley project, the life blood of Victorian periodical studies still resides in the examination of the individual writings of thousands of contributors, representing differing vantage points of gender, interest, status, and situation, and contributing to a large number of varied periodicals. Our field treats not just the big names, but rather contemplates the works of the multitude. The Curran Index tackles a fundamental question: who are these nineteenth-century periodical contributors, and what did they write? Determinations of who wrote what, where and when, remain valuable both in their own right and as building blocks for new investigations.
Further, the second decade of the twenty-first century has brought with it exploratory tools that were not available to the Wellesley investigators. Subsequent republication of a periodical article in a collection associated with a specific individual was always considered a good, although not fool-proof, indication of authorship. But it was often very difficult to determine if an article had been republished. Candidate books of collected articles were often scarce, maintained perhaps at only a handful of primary academic libraries. And without a hint as to authorship, how would one know where to look? The extensive digitization of Victorian periodicals and books and the advent of Google Book Search have dramatically changed that situation. By searching with a salient phrase from a given article, one can often readily ascertain where, and under what auspices, the article has been reprinted. (Or one can work backward, from a collection, to identify prior periodical publication.) In this current Curran Index update a number of articles have been attributed with these techniques.
Volume 5 of the Wellesley Index is a de facto master bibliography for nearly 12,000 authors, the overwhelming majority of whom will never have separate scholarly bibliographies. But as Eileen often pointed out, just associating a name with an article is not enough. Names were often similar or duplicated, or spelled differently in different places, and vital dates or locations that might have provided context and specificity were frequently incorrect or missing. The whens and wheres of an author’s birth or death, or further specifics regarding an author’s life, could shed light on his or her writings. Eileen was often able to provide such information from her searches of the files of the Royal Literary Fund. Looking to the future, new genealogical sites and tools can now provide information which would otherwise have come only from exhaustive individual efforts. In this Curran Index update, for example, the correct birth date and location for Catherine Gore, information which has hitherto been elusive, has been determined through such a tool.
Although the prime movers of the Wellesley Index had hoped to cover more, the Index as published covered only a modest number of periodicals. After the last Wellesley volume was issued, Ruth Hiller separately published a study of the Eclectic Review, as Eileen Curran did for the Foreign Review, and the Curran Index has since provided updated information regarding these periodicals. Eileen also published a study of poetry in Bentley’s Miscellany which is now updated in Curran. And in 2007 the Curran quietly started including updates to Anne Lohrli’s study of Household Words. Thus, step by step the scope of the Curran Index has expanded. Without abandoning its post-Wellesley mission, our intent is to grow the Curran Index to be a general reference point for substantive attributions on a broader range of Victorian periodicals. Inputs regarding individual additions and corrections to Wellesley periodicals will still be highly valued, but we will now welcome inputs, particularly “wholesale” inputs spanning groups of articles or selected months or years, for other periodicals. To facilitate contributions, we will be flexible regarding format; the only sine qua nons for inclusion in the Curran Index will be relevance to nineteenth-century British periodicals and convincing arguments regarding the validity of information provided. All inputs reviewed and accepted by the Curran Index will be duly acknowledged and posted on the Victorian Research Web. Accordingly, this update includes as an addendum a report prepared by Antonietta Consonni on the authorship of the Calcutta Review (a quarterly established in 1844 with the goal of being a “first class English periodical in India.”) A Wellesley-like analysis of the Metropolitan Magazine (a miscellany which competed with Fraser’s Magazine, the New Monthly Magazine, and others in the 1830s and 1840s), is in process and will be reported in a future update.
G. S.
August, 2006
This installment of ‘Additions and Corrections’ is larger than any yet published. Partly as a result, it is also more miscellaneous than some... Read More
August, 2006
This installment of ‘Additions and Corrections’ is larger than any yet published. Partly as a result, it is also more miscellaneous than some have been, and there is no overriding emphasis on a single periodical that might provide a focus for this introduction. I will therefore glance at parts of the process of developing Additions, both here and more generally. The present installment identifies the authorship of some two dozen of the Wellesley Index’s previously unassigned (and occasionally mis-assigned) articles and of many more articles that can be considered ‘almost Wellesley,’ a category discussed at the end of this introduction. In addition, it removes a few of Wellesley’s question marks and ‘probably’s.’ At the same time it argues for the deletion of some earlier attributions, often guesses that have proved to be untenable. It offers a larger number than usual of incomplete attributions: evidence that a person contributed to a periodical with no identification of specific articles. A larger number of additions and corrections falls into Part B, providing or correcting contributors’ dates, occupations, full names, their very identities. Ultimately such details are not mere trivia, particularly when writers share similar or identical names, close family relationships, pseudonyms or initials, or other causes of confusion. Look at Philip Meadows Taylor (1779-1868), in Parts A and B here but not in Wellesley, which rolled two men with the same name into one. Some users of this Index may recognize the Taylor entries as corrections of corrections; it took two researchers, using mss. letters to Richard Bentley at the University of Illinois (available on microfilm) and to Sir Robert Peel in the British Library, to sort out the Rev. Philip Taylor (1747-1831), his son the aforementioned 1779-1868 Philip Meadows Taylor, and the latter’s son, Capt. Philip Meadows Taylor (1808-1876)—and to assign to PMT sr. articles mistakenly given to the son in Wellesley.
Evidence here is drawn, as always, from several sources: authors’ reprints of their articles, usually in book form; manuscript and printed letters; the always informative archives of the Royal Literary Fund (RLF); more recent scholarly work; the searchable online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB); and from the unsolicited and always welcome help offered by strangers. I am particularly grateful to Professor Nora Crook for alerting me to her work identifying Mary Shelley’s contribution to the Monthly Chronicle. Though it had long been known than Shelley contributed an article there, the article had never been identified, and the identification was made more difficult by Wellesley’s attributing the article to someone else. True, with a ‘prob.,’ and to someone known to have contributed. There are lessons to be learned here that we all forget at times. First, be chary with guesses, which no matter how carefully labeled as such, may convince others by their existence. Second, check out one’s own prejudgments. Here there seemingly was an assumption that, given two contributors with unidentified work, the Italian would have written on Italian literature, not the English woman. However, several English critics read, reviewed, and even translated Italian writers.
The work of identification can depend heavily on plain luck. Somewhat hesitantly I bought a manuscript letter offered online; it was expensive, but the excerpt offered by the bookseller was promising and it was written to Richard Bentley by a known contributor to New Monthly Magazine. After I had deciphered handwriting and references and then read articles and books side by side, that single letter produced ten new attributions, nine of previously unattributed articles and one of a previously mis-attributed article (see under John Carne). Elsewhere evidence is more elusive. As I have argued before now, a claim of authorship of an article published two years previously is usually more credible than a claim made forty years after an article’s appearance, when time and illness may have impaired a person’s memory. Assertions by a third party, whether colleague or friend or widow, and assertions made a generation later need careful examination, but often they are all we have. For some years I struggled with repeated, but it seemed to me unlikely, claims that two men had edited the New Monthly Magazine. Finally I understood the problem; yes, they had been editors—of a new series of the Monthly Magazine.
There are good reasons even for getting seemingly trivial details as correct as possible, if only because the habit of accuracy may forestall significant errors. The exact date of birth, for example, may make no real difference, or it may lead one from a chance remark in an article to identification of the author. For it to do so, it must be read carefully. If an 1835 essay presents its writer as having been born the day of Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar (21 Oct.) and having just turned 30, we know that he was born in 1805 and that ‘the day’ means the exact day. If he said that he was now in his 31st year we would know that he was born in 1805. If, however, he would turn 30 between 22 October and 31 December 1835, he was born in 1804. If one has the author’s age but no day and month, one must give the year of birth as 1804/05. However, the original comment may be a red herring, and the apparent author of an article that presents itself as autobiographical and personal may be a fiction, a persona, untrustworthy. A woman may identify herself as a man, a foreigner as an Englishman born and bred, a young man as a world-weary senior. Still, just in case the author honestly means every word s/he writes, one must investigate every hint.
Finally, to return to the ‘almost Wellesleys’ mentioned at the start. These ‘Additions to and Corrections of the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals’ have gradually gone beyond Wellesley boundaries, first by including the names of contributors whose contributions have not been identified. Some of these ‘But What?’ semi-identifications appeared in the Victorian Periodicals Review (VPR) but were not included in the first online compilation; now they are all here. The New Monthly Magazine presents a variant of this problem. Though the NMM ran from 1814 into 1884, Wellesley covers only the years 1821 through 1854. Limiting the expanded ‘Additions and Corrections’ to the Wellesley years quickly proved impossible; here I have made some chronological separation, probably a bad idea.
Also edging in now are some of the true ‘Almost Wellesley’s,’ titles on Walter Houghton’s original list of periodicals to be included in Wellesley that in the end were dropped for lack of space. For a discussion of the intended coverage, see Walter Houghton, ‘The Wellesley Index, volumes II and III: Plans and problems,’ VPN, [vol. 1,] issue 4 (Apr. 1969), 3-6. (At the beginning the Index was to be complete in 3 volumes; even the addition of volume 4 could not accommodate the entire list.) These ‘lost’ periodicals are the ‘Almost Wellesley’s.’ Eventually Mary Ruth Hiller published an extensive identification of authorship in the Eclectic Review, in a different format than Wellesley’s; it includes titles only of articles whose authorship has been at least tentatively identified, but it covers the Eclectic from 1805 through 1868 in contrast to Houghton’s intended (at least in 1969) restriction to 1823 – 1844 volumes (‘The Eclectic Review, 1805-1868,’ VPR 27 [1994], 179-278). I published a study of the Foreign Review (VPR 24 [1991], 119-136), fully indexing the short run of this periodical. Additions to and corrections of these two Victorian Periodicals Review articles here join the official Wellesley titles. I have in manuscript or typescript similar treatments of two other periodicals on Houghton’s original list, the Foreign and Colonial Quarterly / New Quarterly Review, 1843-1847, and Cochrane’s Foreign Quarterly Review, 1835, and should eventually add them online. The others dropped from the original list are the Christian Remembrancer, 1841-1868, and the Church Quarterly Review, 1875-1900. Some work on their publishing histories, planned for Wellesley, has been published, but they have not been indexed. Perhaps someone eventually will identify authorship in these journals. Houghton’s 1969 article also discusses other titles that were considered but not added to the original list and titles that would have been included if work on them had not already been published; the primary example of the latter was the Monthly Repository, the subject of Francis Mineka’s Dissidence of Dissent.
E. C.
April, 2005
Another batch, mainly of additions. A dozen Wellesley ‘blanks’ have been filled, some by the identification of Fraser’s ‘retired barrister’ who wrote about... Read More
April, 2005
Another batch, mainly of additions. A dozen Wellesley ‘blanks’ have been filled, some by the identification of Fraser’s ‘retired barrister’ who wrote about his contemporaries. One genderless name, a contributor to the Westminster about whom Wellesley could find no biographical information, turns out to have been the pseudonym of a woman known as a contributor to two other periodicals. A couple of ‘prob.’s’ have been removed and supporting evidence added elsewhere. Part B gives new biographical information on twenty previously identified contributors, often when nothing was previously known about them, and introduces two new contributors.
True to form, I include a few nit-picking, tidying ‘improvements,’ and I return to a question raised in an earlier installment of these Additions and Corrections: what exactly does ‘collaborate’ mean? If a writer’s previously published book is used extensively in an article, is that writer a collaborating author of the article? Wellesley said he was (not consistently, or a vast number of articles would be called collaborations); I think not. While it is helpful to learn that an article is derivative, even if not exactly plagiarized, some term other than ‘collaborator’ must be found to describe the first writer. (I do not raise here, but will in future return to, another problem, that of the editor as collaborator.)
Listed here are almost a dozen likely but vague claims of contributorship—what I sometimes call ‘But What?’ Some erroneous ‘identifications’ are confuted. In one particularly frustrating instance, contemporary sources identified author, periodical, article(s), and approximate date—all false leads.
The archives of the Royal Literary Fund (RLF) remain a rich source of information. This installment also benefits greatly from the new online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), even if at times the latter seems a mixed blessing. Some entries contain errors, even easily avoidable errors, and some give less total information, and less specific information, about a writer’s involvement with periodicals than did the old DNB. More than balancing these drawbacks is the fact that the ODNB is searchable. A full-text search by periodical title will bring up all references to that periodical, usually with enough context shown that one can quickly eliminate those not relevant to a particular search. In addition, from each ODNB biography one can click on the earlier DNB entry, though one cannot do a full-text search of the old entries.
E.C.
September, 2004
The present collection of Wellesley revisions shows, I hope, the importance of small accretions of information. Only three Wellesley blanks are newly filled:... Read More
September, 2004
The present collection of Wellesley revisions shows, I hope, the importance of small accretions of information. Only three Wellesley blanks are newly filled: an 1865 article in Temple Bar and two tales that Bentley’s Miscellany pirated in 1840. The latter, known at least a quarter of a century ago, are by Edgar Allan Poe. If their authorship could go unnoticed, one must wonder if other unidentified stories and essays may have been pirated from American publications. New evidence supports some attributions tentatively made in earlier “Additions and Corrections.” Authors of other articles have been re-identified: which Thomas Cooper, for example, could be called “Dr.” and credited with another Temple Bar article? In several instances collaborators are produced or suggested where a single author had previously been identified; occasionally the newly identified co-author proves to be the main writer. The nature and extent of collaboration in 19th-century periodicals needs further study; the examples here do not even touch on some varieties of collaboration.
Some of these additions and corrections fine-tune the text in other ways. There are, for instance, corrections of first names and of birth dates, or questions about these, and a large underlying question: when sources disagree, whose account should we accept? In the absence of other evidence, I usually prefer the writer’s own version (inconsistency may qualify as “other evidence”) while realizing that s/he may be creating a fictional contributor, either overtly on the printed page or privately, in his relations with the publisher or editor or with the non-reading world. How does one decide when a young woman always signs letters as Christabel while the publisher’s clerk writes her name in the ledgers as Christina? Is she creating a romanticized self, with Coleridge’s poem in mind? Or did her father, who fed the fantasies of many readers (he was Mudie, of the lending library), have Coleridge in mind when he named his daughter? I will let her be Christabel, as she either was or wanted to be. Though these may seem petty details, they give us clues about a contributor and a time, and they sometimes provide clues to the authorship of other articles.
Once again, I would like to hear from anyone who can add to these “additions and corrections.” Not “well, it sort of sounds like so and so,” but “A. reprinted it as his in such and such a volume” or “B. identifies it as hers in a letter of such and such a date, to be found in such and such an archive.”
E. C.
June, 2004
In this, the first online edition of Wellesley Index additions and corrections, I am concerned, as so often in the past, with the... Read More
June, 2004
In this, the first online edition of Wellesley Index additions and corrections, I am concerned, as so often in the past, with the minutiae of periodical authorship. If this seems nit-picking, I can only reply that the devil is in the details. What may seem insignificant errors may in fact significantly misrepresent a writer, a journal, a period. For example, here and earlier I have corrected Wellesley’s spelling of German names and words— after finding these correctly spelled in the journals being indexed. Relying on Wellesley, without consulting the original articles, would lead to at least one flawed generalization about 19th-century British knowledge of Germany.
Since much of this apparent nit-picking examines the evidence for attributing authorship, it deals directly with Wellesley’s main business. We rely on various forms of evidence, even on some that we know to be weak. One aim here is to sort out arguments either based on faulty premises or too weak to support an attribution.
While one might expect to find the surest evidence of authorship in the claims of authors, editors, or publishers, at times even these must be qualified or rejected. Were those statements made near the time of publication or decades later, when memory had started to play its tricks? Did the writer really draw up the list of his articles, or did his widow, who inadvertently miscopied some details? The Corrections below include at least one instance of this type of misattribution.
What are called publisher’s accounts or receipts would seem to provide a second apparently sure type of evidence, but these too must be examined critically. Occasionally one finds a person receiving payment on behalf of an author, perhaps for convenience (the author lives on the Continent, is an invalid or a young woman) or to preserve the author’s anonymity. This person may also have submitted the article in the first place; one must read any surviving correspondence carefully. Does it describe the article as being by a friend, the sister of a friend, in wording that suggests a middleman? Yes, we all know the fiction by which “a friend” stands for “I.” Details may provide a clue: not simply “a friend” but “a friend living in Rome” when the sender is known not to have been out of London for decades, or “a young friend who has not previously published and does not know how to approach editors” when the sender is established, with a lengthy bibliography. George Croly stands out as someone willing to assist neophytes, friends abroad, women; as a result the list of his writings, already lengthy, has been inflated with misattributions.
At least, you cry, republication in book form of an article or parts of an article gives incontrovertible proof of authorship. It should, but as with all rules, there are exceptions. I have found the same section of an article reprinted verbatim in books by two different writers. Did one plagiarize the other’s work (and if so, which is the plagiarist?), or did both plagiarize the work of a still unidentified third writer?
Those are some of the possible puzzles even when the evidence seems firm. Most often we rely, at least in part, on what is called internal evidence—crossing fingers all the time. Several deletions below challenge Wellesley’s use, particularly in vol. 4, of such evidence. Sometimes better evidence now either confirms earlier suppositions or gives an article to a different contributor; often, unfortunately, when we question Wellesley’s evidence we are left with no attribution of authorship. So be it. What, however, gives credibility to internal evidence, and what denies it credibility?
If we attribute authorship on the basis of an introductory “As we explained in our article on this subject last year …,” are we not ignoring the possibility of a conscientious editor? An anonymous writer speaks with the voice of the journal, not as “I, John Smith,” and the editor effects that merger of writer and journal. Even well-known pseudonyms do not always belong to a single contributor. Though Blackwood’s “Christopher North” is from the start most often John Wilson, other contributors did write as Christopher North. Some editors were conscientious and made themselves acquainted with the contents of volumes published before they assumed the editorship. John Forster asked for earlier volumes of the Foreign Quarterly when he became editor and, perhaps with a lawyer’s instinct, familiarized himself with their contents, weaving his issues of the review into the fabric of the whole. Sometimes a person employed by the publisher acted as a sub-editor, providing continuity from editorship to editorship. (Changes of publisher make authorship more difficult to trace than do changes of editor.) We must also remember the Victorian love of cataloguing and classifying. While “as we noted in an earlier article” at the beginning or even later in an article may mean “as I noted,” we cannot without more evidence assume that it does.
So we look at style and immediately find ourselves sinking in quicksand. First, assessments are subjective; two readers may have exactly opposite views of which of two styles is aggressive and which quieter, less assertive (here I would refer, as several times below, to examples given in Wayne Hall’s excellent study of authorship in the Dublin University Magazine). If we argue that certain words or constructions are repeated, we must look for more than two or three words or constructions occurring in two different articles. We must also be sensitive to each period’s buzz words; think of someone 160 years from now arguing that two writers from the year 2000 must have been one person because of his/her frequent use of the word “contextualization” and its variants. Even the repetition of details may prove nothing. I once found the same Connemara anecdote in a book (signed) and at least three articles (unsigned, and in more than one periodical, the articles usually not about Ireland). Eureka! Retrieving the articles was not easy; that was in the days when notes were on 3x5 slips. And when I had retrieved them, I came to the unhappy conclusion that they were by different writers; the Connemara story was the equivalent of an often repeated urban myth today.
Always, if we think there are enough stylistic points to justify assigning articles to a common author, there should be at least one work known without doubt to be by that person. Other information may warrant our looking for internal evidence. Do we know that this person contributed to a particular journal at a particular time? It won’t do to think an 1830 article sounds rather like someone who is known to have written in the journal in 1870. Do we have any reason to suspect that he contributed earlier? We must keep in mind the tenures of editors and the relations between editors and certain contributors. Some writers stayed loyal to a periodical from editor to editor; others were loyal to an editor, leaving with him, often going to the next periodical he edited. In addition, was this possible contributor writing on the same subject or reviewing the same book elsewhere? A contributor could get away with such double dipping with some editors, not with others; the Blackwood’s, for example, were very possessive of some of their writers; if one of those is known to have reviewed a work for Blackwood’s, it is almost certain that he would not review it elsewhere. It may seem obvious, but one should try to discover a contributor’s dates and titles. I question one Wellesley atribution here because the man had died several years earlier. Articles were occasionally published posthumously, usually with an editorial note; they did not discuss events since the purported writer’s death. At the same time, some details need not be taken at face value. “His” use of male references, for example, does not prove that a writer is male; assigning the article to a woman, however, requires supporting evidence.
Just as seemingly insignificant typographical errors can indicate a more serious misunderstanding, here too we’re concerned with more than getting authorship right. As yet we have no reliable studies of many aspects of 19th-century journalism. For example, were the contributors to a particular journal a small and close-knit group of regulars, a larger and only loosely knit group of regulars, a disparate group of occasional contributors many of whom appear only once? So far these questions have been addressed for only a few journals—the early Edinburgh, Fraser’s, Punch. Was there ever a norm? a relation between a journal’s contributorship and its frequency of publication, intended audience, price? What were an editor’s duties? To what extent may many articles be collaborations between contributor and editor?
Some of the deletions that follow are what I would call positive deletions, when new evidence allows the removal of Wellesley’s “prob.” or “?”. There are additions (fewer than I would like): articles by previously known contributors and a new contributor, James Deacon Hume, secretary to the Board of Trade. There is also new biographical information. One addition continues the expansion of Wellesley. In vol. 32 of VPR, I identified authorship of verse in Bentley’s Miscellany; in one item below, Dr. Christopher Stray identifies a respected scholar who did not want to be known as the writer of a long satiric poem in Blackwood’s.
I hope that other workers on 19th-century periodicals will help make possible continued correction and expansion of Wellesley and urge anyone with good evidence (not “Well, it sounds like …”) to send me the information; credit will always be given. I would be particularly happy to learn more about anonymous authors of verse in these periodicals.
E. C.