RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

Patrick Leary

RSVP announces first winners of Field Development and Peterson grants

RSVP is very pleased to announce the first winners of the RSVP Field Development Grant and the Linda H. Peterson Fellowship, both made possible by a generous bequest to RSVP by the late Eileen Curran, pioneering researcher and Emerita Professor of English at Colby College.

The winners of the Field Development Grant are Francesca Benatti and David King of The Open University for their project, “A question of style: individual voices and corporate identity in the Edinburgh Review, 1814-20”.

The winner of the Linda H. Peterson Fellowship is Tom Mole, Reader in English Literature and Director of the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh, for his project: “Periodicals and the Policing of Culture, 1802-1828”.

See the abstracts of these projects and learn more about these grants in Grants and Prizes on the RSVP website.

Colby Book Prize winner for 2015 announced

The Colby Prize committee of RSVP is pleased to announce that the winner of the prize for the best book in this field published in 2015 is Mary L. Shannon for Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street, from Routledge. Honorable Mention goes to Marianne VanRemoortel for Women, Work, and the Victorian Periodical: Living by the Press, from Palgrave/Macmillan. Many congratulations to Mary and Marianne!

Victorian Women Writers conference in honor of Linda Peterson, May 7-8, Yale University

All are invited to attend a memorial conference in honor of Linda Peterson, on May 7-8, 2016, in celebration of her final publication, The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing, to be hosted by the 18-19th Century Colloquium.

A member of the Yale community for 38 years, Linda was a scholar of Victorian prose and an authority on life writing; she served as English chair for seven years, helped shape Yale’s undergraduate writing program, and profoundly enhanced the scope and tenor of the Yale English Department. She was a scholar, teacher, colleague, and friend. Please save May 7-8 for an opportunity to fête Linda in a context that reflects her wishes, honors her legacy, and lauds the publication of her final book!

Please contact Margaret Deli (margaret.deli@yale.edu) or Natalie Prizel (natalie.prizel@yale.edu) to register (free of charge.) Attached is the conference poster

RSVP 2015 Conference in Ghent makes international news

RSVP’s 2015 conference in Ghent was a fascinating experience — splendid papers and plenary lectures in a gloriously historic setting. We’ll be posting more about it soon. The biggest news out of the conference, however, was this: scholar and bookdealer Jeremy Parrott revealed at RSVP, for the first time anywhere, his discovery of a “marked set” of All the Year Round. This hitherto unrecorded “deluxe edition” in scarlet binding has handwritten marginalia identifying (almost) all of the contributors by name, next to each one’s contribution. Between 300 and 400 contributors of some 2500 articles, stories, and poems, are now conclusively identified for the first time. As if this were not exciting enough news, experts like Michael Slater and John Drew have been able to confirm that many of these annotations are in Dickens’s own hand. In his paper, Dr. Parrott made a persuasive case that this was Dickens’s own personal set of the magazine, probably kept in his private office at the magazine’s offices in Wellington Street.

The atmosphere in the room when Dr. Parrott delivered his news was electric. As this group of scholars knows better than any other, a “marked set” of any Victorian magazine is an extremely rare and precious thing. Beginning with the astonishing achievements of the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals and continuing today in the Curran Index, RSVP-affiliated scholars have scoured the globe for such sets, and have used these and every other kind of resource — letters, diaries, reprints, ledgers, stylistic analysis, and much else — to discover, once and for all, the names of the authors who contributed anonymously to these hugely popular and influential Victorian journals.

Obviously, there is a great deal of work for scholars to do — experts in Victorian periodicals, as well as Dickensians — before we can know all of the implications of this stupendous All the Year Round discovery. In the meantime, articles have already appeared in the Independent, the Guardian, the Telegraph, and more media coverage is on the way. This could prove to be a wonderful opportunity to let more non-specialist readers know about the fascinating world of Victorian magazines and newspapers, and about the decades-long efforts of scholars to pierce the veil of anonymity characteristic of Victorian journalism to more fully reveal the riches of that world to readers everywhere.

Victorian Periodicals Review, the journal of RSVP, will feature an article by Jeremy Parrott about his discovery in an upcoming issue.