It is not customary for descriptive bibliographies to present periodical
publications in the same format, or with the same level of detail, that is used
for books. The practice of indexing periodical publications is so well
established that one would question a bibliography that neglected to present
such a record; and yet, while all seem to agree that it is important to establish
the history of an author's periodical contributions, few seem to have asked
whether it might not also be important to investigate those publications as
thoroughly as we investigate books. G. Thomas Tanselle brings up the matter
in "The Arrangement of Descriptive Bibliographies,"[1] pointing out that bibliographers rarely explain
"why they simply list, rather than describe, contributions to periodicals" (25),
and suggesting that bibliographers might "write separate descriptive
bibliographies of individual periodicals" (26). But although a few scholars
have undertaken serious
bibliographical study of periodicals (such as Donald Bond's work on the
Spectator and William B. Todd's work on the Gentleman's
Magazine, the Examiner and the World),[2] they are exceptions to the rule.
The drawbacks of this practice for Victorian writers became apparent to
me during my work on a critical edition of George Meredith's short fiction.
Although Meredith, like many Victorian authors, frequently published in
periodicals, bibliographical studies of Meredith[3] and other Victorian writers routinely present
periodical publications in enumerative
lists, and sometimes (as often happens in the case of serialized fiction) in a
note appended to a description of the book publication. Those few periodical
numbers
[4] that are described (mostly in
bibliographies completed early in the century) usually have special
significance; most often they were edited by the author, were found to
include material that was not published elsewhere, or were judged to be
"booklike" (special issues or annuals).
[5]
The purpose of this essay, then, is to consider why and how one might
create bibliographical descriptions of Victorian periodicals, and in the
process, to offer a general reassessment of the distinctions between these
publications and nineteenth-century books. I conclude with some suggestions
for the identification and bibliographical description of nineteenth-century
periodicals which, I hope, will also be useful for the description of serial
publications of other eras.
Periodicals have long been regarded as bibliographical troublemakers.
John Winterich's "The Expansion of an Author Collection," one of the essays
included in John Carter's 1934 volume New Paths in Book
Collecting, provides an early example of the usual objections:
Periodicals, says the bookseller, are not books but mere transitory
anthologies whereof the contents are only adventitiously durable, and seldom
that; physically they are awkward, fragile wares; they age and tatter out of all
conscience; they must be tended as delicately as their aristocratic cousins, the
Victorian novels in parts, and as articles of commerce they are not worth a
tithe of the bother which their handling necessitates. These shortcomings
constitute a damning indictment from the bookseller's side of the wall —
and so many collectors are prone to forget that a bookseller earns his
livelihood from selling books. (19 — 20)
Of course Winterich was not discouraged by the bookseller's complaints (to
which I will return later on), but to this day, even the advocates of
periodicals are well aware that periodicals present distinct challenges. Take,
for instance, the "Preface" to John North's 1989
Waterloo Directory of
Scottish Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800 — 1900:
Periodicals bibliography is a much neglected field, for understandable
reasons. First, it is massive: periodicals easily outdo monographs in sheer
volume of publication. Second, no clear definition of a periodical is generally
accepted, and the working definition varies from library to library. Third, any
one periodical is likely to change in some of its primary bibliographical
elements from issue to issue (title, subtitle, format, editor, publisher,
proprietor, frequency, printer, size, etc.) Moreover, periodicals are often
considered ephemeral. . . . They are often on poor quality paper, arriving in
libraries unbound and in endless irregular succession, so are unwieldy to
shelve and catalogue, and are seldom to be found in complete runs, seldom
well indexed. They are the nightmares of librarians and bibliographers.
(9)
Now of course the difficulties of working with Victorian periodicals are
exacerbated when one is trying to track down a few thousand different titles,
but even the study of a single number of a popular periodical can be
complicated by difficulties in locating copies, by extreme diversity in
presentation (at the least, issue in wrappers and in bound volume), and by the
destruction of valuable information that results from poor and at times
negligent handling of fragile material. But we should not forget that these
"nightmares" also represent a golden opportunity for research, since even the
best-known Victorian periodicals have yet to be studied
bibliographically.
Thanks to the efforts of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals,
founded in 1969, much of the scholarly groundwork for advanced
bibliographical research on Victorian periodicals is already in place. The
resources for what librarians refer to as the "bibliographic control" of British
periodicals have flourished; American periodicals are not nearly as well
charted, but the establishment of a Research Society for American
Periodicals in 1990, followed by the debut of American Periodicals: A
Journal of History, Criticism and Bibliography in 1991, bodes well. The
large scale indexing of nineteenth-century (mostly British) periodicals began
as early as 1888, with the first volume of Poole's Index to Periodical
Literature (1888 — 1908), followed by the Nineteenth Century
Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, 1890 — 1899: With
Supplementary Indexing, 1900 — 1922 (1944) and the Wellesley
Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824 — 1900 (1966 — 89).[6] While there is still a tremendous
amount of indexing to be done,
[7] the even
more basic work of enumerating Victorian periodicals is well under way;
major accomplishments in this area include the
Union List of Victorian
Serials (1985) and the ongoing Waterloo series of directories to
nineteenth-century periodicals in Great Britain and Ireland (the series
includes the
Waterloo Directory of Victorian Periodicals, 1824 —
1900 [1976],
The Waterloo Directory of Irish Newspapers and
Periodicals, 1800 — 1900 [1986], the aforementioned
Waterloo
Directory of Scottish Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800 — 1900, and
the recently released first series of the
Waterloo Directory of English
Newspapers and Periodicals 1800 — 1900 [1995], which lists nearly
30,000 titles). The
Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and
Periodicals is especially useful because it includes references to
secondary sources and locations for some titles.
In his 1978 essay "The Bibliographical Control of Periodicals," Scott
Bennett took the progress that had been made in the "indexing and . . .
inventorying" of Victorian periodicals as an indication that "the next
bibliographic horizon for periodicals will involve analytical bibliography and
textual criticsm" (50).[8] In 1980, a
Manual for the Bibliographical Description of Serials Preliminary
Draft was compiled by the late John Palmer and several members of the
Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, including Bennett and John
North. In a second essay, "Prolegomenon to Serials Bibliography: A Report
to the Society,"[9] Bennett explains that the
Manual was conceived as a first step towards producing "a
bibliography of key Victorian serials" (9), and was intended to provide
"detailed advice to bibliographers on what data to collect and how to record
it," a goal that would demand the creation of "new models
of bibliographical description that do justice to the timeliness of periodicals
and to the special relations periodical communication establishes between
readers and writers" (8).
Unfortunately, the Manual did not progress beyond the draft
stage; however, its influence can be seen in the later volumes of the
Waterloo series, in which one observes a gradual move from treating
periodicals as repositories of verbal texts to acknowledging the importance
of the periodical itself as a physical object. There is a striking contrast
between the earlier Wellesley Index, which entirely omits any
description of the
periodicals it features, and the
Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers
and Periodicals, which includes images of the title-pages of over 3000
periodicals and provides some bibliographically relevant information (such as
the periodical's dimensions and types of illustrations).
The draft of the Manual also offers the perfect point of departure
for the descriptive bibliography of Victorian serials. Citing the absence of
bibliographical study of periodicals by R. B. McKerrow, Fredson Bowers,
and Philip Gaskell, the Manual quotes from Bowers's "Foreword" to
Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949):
The methods of descriptive bibliography seem to have evolved from a
triple purpose: (1) to furnish a detailed, analytical record of the
characteristics of a book which would simultaneously serve as a trustworthy
source of identification and as a medium to bring an absent book before a
reader's eyes; (2) to provide an analytical investigation and an ordered
arrangement of these physical facts which would serve as the prerequisite for
textual criticism of the books described; (3) to approach both literary and
printing or publishing history through the investigation and recording of
appropriate details in a related series of books. (Bowers vii)
The
Manual follows this quotation with the claim that "Provided that
for 'book' we read 'serial publication' there can be no better statement of the
intentions of this manual" (6). Except, of course, that the
Manual was
not intended as a guide for descriptive bibliographers but for library
catalogers, and as such is primarily concerned with describing the content of
the periodical rather than describing its physical elements.
[10] The only mandatory physical details included
in the
Manual's recommendations for description are a measurement
of a type page (but no further description of leaves, cover, or binding); a
notification of whether the periodical is printed on anything other than
"untinted paper"; a notification of any "peculiarity of printing from the
letterpress type," including ink in
colors other than black and printing methods other than letterpress (such as
stereotype or lithography); and notification of the presence of illustrations. In
providing these (albeit limited) criteria the
Manual opens the door for
discussion of how periodicals might be handled in a descriptive
bibliography.
