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Victorian religious periodicals: fragments that remain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Patrick Scott
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Extract

‘Victorian Britain was not only the first urbanising society,’ Michael Wolff has recently reminded us, ‘. . . it was the first “journalising” society,’ also. Recent research, resulting from professor Wolff’s victorian periodicals project, shows that there were upwards of eighteen thousand periodicals of differing title, published during the victorian period. Of course, these periodicals varied greatly both in duration and in influence, but the average ‘run’ of a victorian periodical was about twenty-eight years, and most victorians would have agreed with professor Wolff’s verdict that the magazines were one of the major new characteristics of their age. ‘We look for our monthly and weekly magazines,’ wrote one correspondent to the British Controversialist in 1862, ‘as readily as we look for our daily food.’ ‘Periodical literature,’ agreed another, ‘is essentially an outgrowth of modern times.’ They were both contributing to a debate, in a monthly periodical, on the question, ‘Does the present multiplicity of periodicals retard rather than foster intellectual progress’?

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 11: The Materials Sources and Methods of Ecclesiastical History , 1975 , pp. 325 - 339
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1975

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References

1 V[ictorian] P[eriodicals] Newsletter], 8 (Bloomington 1970) p 5. Compare Wolff, [Michael], ‘Charting the golden stream: [thoughts on a directory of Victorian periodicals’], in Editing Nineteenth Century Texts, ed Robson, John M. (Toronto 1967) pp 37–59 Google Scholar.

2 These titles will be listed alphabetically with publication details in the Waterloo Directory of Victorian Periodicals, ed Dorothy Deering and John North (forthcoming). Until then, see the three shorter lists, in BM Catalogue, under ‘Periodical Publications’ (arranged by place of publication), the Times Tercentenary Handlist (arranged by date of commencement), and British Union-Catalogue of Periodicals (arranged alphabetically, and giving locations for surviving runs). None of these will include more than a fraction of parish magazines. By 1936, there were 11,085 of these, with a total monthly circulation of 2,763,000: Swift, J.M., The Parish Magazine (London 1939) p 12 Google Scholar.

3 [British] Controversialist, 3 series, 8 (London 1862) pp 205, 276. Compare the famous phrase ‘the age of periodicals’ in Collins, Wilkie, ‘The unknown public’, Household Words, 18 (London 1858) p 222 Google Scholar.

4 Anon., , The Newspaper Press of the Present Day (London 1860) p 34 Google Scholar. For short descriptions of 32 major religious periodicals see Ellegård, [Alvar], [The Readership of the Periodical Press in Mid-Victorian Britain], Gotseborgs Hogskolas Årsskrift, 63 (Gotseborg 1957) tables 9, 11, 14 Google Scholar: reprinted in VPN, 13 (1971) pp 3-22. There are narrative surveys of the Victorian religious press in Fraser’s Magazine, 18 (London 1838) pp 330-8; Dublin Review, 89 (London 1881) pp 1-29; Elliott-Binns, L.E., Religion in the Victorian Era (2 ed London 1946) PP 331-7Google Scholar; Kellett, [E.E.], ‘The Press’, in Early Victorian England, ed Young, G.M. (London 1934) II, pp 1–97 Google Scholar; Darlow, [T.H.], [William Robertson Nicoli, Life and Letters] (London 1925) pp 57–66 Google Scholar; and Peet, H.W., ‘The religious press: a wide field’, Times Anniversary Number (London, 1 January 1935) p xxi Google Scholar.

5 Controversialist, 8 (1862) p 201.

6 Altick, [R.D.], [The English Common Reader 1800-1900] (Chicago 1957) p 361 Google Scholar, gives 253 religious periodicals out of 630, in 1870. In VPN, 16 (1972) p 1,1 found 179 religious periodicals out of 355 in 1860.

7 Altick, p 151. For book statistics, see SCH, 10 (1973) p 224.

8 Press of the Present Day, p 39, quoting advertisement of 1807.

9 Savage, William, A Dictionary of the Art of Printing (London 1841) p 467 Google Scholar. On hand-presses, the work on the last sheet of each number had to be started ten days before publication. The Evangelical Magazine had already circulated 18,000 to 20,000 copies monthly by 1807 (Altick p 392), but slumped badly in the 1850s: in 1856, it gave its ‘present circulation’ as 9,500, N[ewspaper] P[ress] Directory] (London 1856) p 125.

10 Underwood, [A.C.], [A History of the English Baptists] (London 1947) pp 245-6Google Scholar. I am indebted to Mr J. H. Y. Briggs for this reference. The Gospel Standard, or Feeble Christian’s Support was founded in 1835, and edited by Philpot for twenty years from 1849. The circulation touched 17,000 at its peak. Miss Rosemary Taylor, of the Institute of Historical Research, is at present completing a biblio graphical survey of baptist periodicals.

11 Underwood, pp 245-7: the two papers eventually merged. The Earthen Vessel claimed in 1849 a circulation of 5,000, and that it was ‘read by double that number, and by a class of persons who seldom see any other publication’ (Underwood, p 245, n 1).

12 VPN, 16 (1972) p 11. Compare ‘ The publications of Evangelical papers such as the Christian or the Life of Faith assisted this healthy sense of unity’: Atkinson, B.F.C., Valiant in Fight (London 1937) p 187 Google Scholar.

13 NPD (1879) pp 36, 37. See also Fletcher, John R., ‘Early Catholic Periodicals in England’, Dublin Review, 4 series, 198 (1936) pp 284–310 Google Scholar.

14 Controversialist, 8 (1862) p 203.

15 Rivington, Septimus, The Publishing Family of Rivington (London 1919) p 142 Google Scholar.

16 Doran, G.H., Chronicles of Barabbas 1884-1134 (London 1935) p 300 Google Scholar.

17 This is only a selection of religious imitations: see New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature III (London 1969) cols 1873-8. The whole section on periodicals (cols 1755-1884, by H. and S. Rosenberg) is the best guide to the secondary literature and publication details on individual magazines.

18 Times Tercentenary Handlist of English and Welsh Newspapers 1620-1920 (London 1920), under 1832.

19 Thirteen such reviews will be included in the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900, 4 vols (Toronto and London 1966- ): the first two volumes (1966, 1972) include the Home and Foreign Review, the Dublin Review, and the Rambler. On the secular development see Kent, Christopher, ‘Higher journalism and the mid-Victorian clerisy’, Victorian Studies, 13 (Bloomington 1969) pp 181-98Google Scholar.

20 Kellett, p 69.

21 Williams, [Raymond], [‘The growth of the popular press’], in his The Long Revolution (London 1961, 2 ed 1965) part II, cap 3 Google Scholar.

22 NPD (1856) advertisement section.

23 Good Words, ns I (London, 5 May 1906) p 2.

24 Macleod, [Donald], [Memoir of Norman Macleod D.D.] (London 1876) II, p 136 Google Scholar.

25 Strahan, Alexander, Norman Macleod D.D. A Slight contribution towards his biography (London 1872) p 10 Google Scholar; compare p 19 also, ‘the first year or two was not a success’.

26 Good Words I (London, January i860) p 1.

27 Good Words I (London, December i860) p 796.

28 Macleod, p 136. Ellegård estimated circulations of 30,000 (1860), 70,000 (1865), and 80,000 (1870), and cites the Freeman (7 January 1863) as giving Good Words’s circulation as 70,000 (Ellegård, table 16).

28 Anon, ., Norman’s Blast. A Rejected Contribution to ‘Good Words’ (Glasgow 1865, 1866 Google Scholar; Edinburgh 1866; 2 ed with music, Glasgow 1866; 3 ed 1866).

30 Ellegård, table 9.

31 ‘Good Words’: the theology of its Editor, and of some of its contributors, reprinted from the ‘Record’ newspaper (London 1863) pp 3, 4, 6.

32 Authorised Report [of the Church Congress held at Plymouth, October 3, 4, 5, and 6, 1876] (London 1877) p 283.

33 Porritt, Arthur, More and More of Memories (London 1947) p 76 Google Scholar.

34 Altick, p 395.

35 Reverend Godfrey Thring, in Authorised Report pp 262-8: Thring’s detailed plan is a remarkable precursor of the pattern later realised in the British Weekly.

36 Authorised Report pp 271-81.

37 The British Weekly made its impact by adopting the broken-up format of the New Journalism of the 1880s: for rather kind estimates of Nicoll, see Darlow, and also Lawrence, G. W., ‘William Robertson Nicoli (1851-1923) and Religious Journalism in the Nineteenth Century’, unpublished PhD thesis (Edinburgh 1954)Google Scholar. For a hostile caricature, see Wells, H.G., The New Machiavelli (London 1911) bk I, cap 3 Google Scholar.

38 Williams, p. 227.

39 Wolff, ‘Charting the golden stream’, p 43.

40 Good Words, ns I (London, 5 May 1906): with the 7 July number was given away a coloured picture of Edward VII at worship in Westminster Abbey. In 1899, the Gospel Herald, when soliciting advertisers, stated ‘Patent medicine advertisements not admitted’ (NPD, 1899, p 343).

41 Currie, Robert, Methodism Divided: a study in the sociology of ecumenicalism (London 1968) pp 134-8Google Scholar.

42 Berger, P. and Luckman, T., ‘The sociology of religion and the sociology of knowledge’, in Sociology of Religion, ed Robertson, Roland (Hardmondsworth 1969) pp 65, 70-1 Google Scholar: reprinted from Sociology and Social Research, 47 (London 1963) pp 417-27.

43 Dublin Review, 89 (1881) p 3.

44 Authorised Report p 272. There is striking confirmation, of the two responses sketched here for periodical sources, in a general interpretation of Victorian attitudes to secular activities, which became available after this paper was written: Willmer, Haddon, “‘Holy Worldliness” in nineteenth-century England’, SCH, 10 (1973) pp 193–211 Google Scholar.