RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

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Let’s Talk Manuscript Periodicals on August 4

Join us for the next RSVP digital event – a panel discussion of “Manuscript Periodicals of the
Long Nineteenth Century” – on Friday, August 4 at the usual time (4 p.m. BST / 11 a.m. EDT / 8 a.m. PDT). Our three speakers will introduce the manuscript periodicals they work on, followed by time for questions and discussion.

  • Mary Chadwick will be talking about two privately circulated late-eighteenth-century periodicals – The Breakfast Courant, or the Bread and Butter Chronicle and The Denbighshire Gazette Extraordinary – produced by guests at winter festivities at the Wynnstay estate in north Wales.
  • Catherine Sloan will be introducing us to the Sneezer, a manuscript magazine made at King’s College School, London, in 1885.
  • Abigail Droge will discuss the Dickenson Road Magazine, a manuscript magazine created by the Rusholme Wesleyan Mutual Improvement Society in Manchester in the 1880s and 90s. 

The presentations will explore themes such as reading communities, the relationship
between manuscript magazines and their print counterparts, and the way that local and
national events come together in these small-scale magazines.

Join Us August 4 via Zoom

All RSVP digital events are free and open to the public. Please register for this free event by clicking the button below. You will receive a Zoom link upon registration.

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Congratulations to Our 2023 Award Winners!

RSVP is pleased to announce the winners of our 2023 grants, fellowships, and prizes!

Our Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize Winner

We are very happy to announce that the winner of our third-ever Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize is Mila Daskalova for her dissertation, “Printing and Periodical Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Asylum”! The dissertation examines periodicals printed in mental asylums in the United States and Britain between 1836 and 1878, and was described by the adjudicating committee as “exemplifying periodical scholarship of the highest tier. […] It generates a rich new understanding of how such periodicals operated in the asylum context—as a means of therapy, self-expression, and community-building—and circulated beyond it.”

The Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize is awarded annually to the best Ph.D. dissertation that explores the 19th-century British periodical press (including magazines, newspapers, and serial publications of all kinds) as an object of study in its own right, not as a source of material for other historical topics. The prize was established to honor Sally Mitchell, a longstanding and highly valued member of RSVP’s leadership, and a committed and ardent mentor to graduate students.

Joint Winners for the Linda H. Peterson Fellowhip

Linda H. Peterson Fellowships support the study of any aspect of the periodical press in any of its manifold forms within and outside of the British Empire, where British magazines and newspapers were bought, sold, and read during the “long nineteenth century” (ca. 1780-1914). RSVP is delighted that there was an exceptionally high number of applicants this year, making for a very strong field. We congratulate our following joint winners for the 2023-24 year, each of whom will receive a fellowship:

  • Robert Burroughs, for his project, “S. J. Celestine Edwards, the ‘Black Champion’ of Victorian Oral and Print Culture.” The adjudicating committee noted that “This is a timely, deeply researched proposal…It spotlights the first Black editor of periodicals in Britain, while also pursuing interesting theoretical implications about oral, written, and print modalities; about Celestine Edwards’s cultural engagements; and about Black British experience then and now.”
  • Candace Ward, for her project, “The Caribbean Cosmopolis: Pan-Caribbean Identities and Nineteenth-Century Colonial Print Culture.” As the committee noted, “This proposal continues the urgent project of globalizing periodicals studies and complicating narratives about imperial relations, identity, and colonial archives with case studies from the Caribbean.”

Peterson Fellowships total $17,500 annually and are intended to support the researcher(s) awarded for a period equivalent to four full-time months. The Linda H. Peterson Fellowship was named after the widely influential Yale professor and longtime RSVP Board member and Vice President, and created with funds from a generous bequest to RSVP by the late Eileen Curran, pioneering researcher and Emerita Professor of English at Colby College.

RSVP’s Field Development Grant Winners Take on AI in Periodical Studies

This year’s RSVP Field Development Grant has been awarded to Thomas Smits (PI), with Paul Fyfe (North Carolina State University), Julia Thomas (Cardiff University), and Ben Lee (University of Washington Information School / Kluge Fellow Library of Congress) for their exciting project, “Multimodal AI, Image Analysis, and the Illustrated Periodical Press.”

The committee commented that “This is an outstanding proposal by four experienced scholars working at the forefront of machine learning methods for studying illustrations in the nineteenth-century press… It is exemplary in its collaborative and interdisciplinary approach it promises to undertake innovative scholarship that has a notable outward facing component.”

The RSVP Field Development Grant was created with funds from a generous bequest to RSVP by the late Eileen Curran, pioneering researcher and Emerita Professor of English at Colby College. The grant is intended to support an individual or a team of researchers in creating resources that will facilitate the work of other scholars in their studies of 19th-century British newspapers and periodicals.

Thanks to All Committee Members and Applicants

We very much look forward to seeing more of everyone’s wonderful research. We also offer our deepest thanks to all of the RSVP members and external experts who served on the adjudicating committees: it is a tremendous service to your community!

Come Discuss Altick’s The Shows of London on June 9

Join us for the next RSVP Digital Events event on Friday, June 9 at 4 p.m. London / 11 a.m. EDT / 8 a.m. PDT, when we will host an informal reading group and discussion of three chapters from Richard Altick’s The Shows of London (1978).

Register Here

“What did nineteenth-century readers respond to that later readers have trouble discerning? The short answer, I believe, is spectacle.”

Stephen Arata

“People mutht be amuthed.”

Mr. Sleary

The Shows of London is a remarkable archive of the spectacles nineteenth-century audiences loved and how they intersected with periodical culture. For the first RSVP Digital Events Reading Group, we wanted to pick a text that feels like a classic but is perhaps one that periodicals scholars haven’t engaged with in some time, or at all.

Recent work by Clare Pettitt and others shows the continued pertinence and vitality that The Shows of London offers for expanding our research methods into the wider Victorian media ecosystem. For the reading group meeting, we will consider three chapters from Altick’s text:

  • The Introduction
  • “Panoramas: Topics of the Times”
  • “The Noble Savage Reconsidered”

These three cover a breadth of spectacles that are also relevant to ongoing discussions about race and transimperial culture. Upon registering, you will receive a confirmation email that includes a link to PDFs of the chapters as well as the Zoom meeting link.

Join Us June 9

All RSVP digital events are free and open to the public. Complete the brief registration form below to receive the Zoom link and PDFs of the readings.

Register Now

Come for the Conversation

This will be an informal meeting for busy people, so participants are invited to read as much or as little as they have time for, and to come along for conversation and conviviality even if they don’t get to everything.

For those who are especially keen or want to keep reading afterward, we will also make available completely optional chapters by Clare Pettitt and Sadiah Qureshi to show recent engagement with The Shows of London and its subjects. We hope to see you there!

Next “Pick-A-Periodical” Digital Event Next Friday, 5 May

Press News masthead, vol. 5, no. 49 (15 Jan. 1870)

Join the RSVP Digital Events committee for our next “Pick-A-Periodical” event on May 5 at 10 a.m. CST / 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. GMT! During this informal session, our host Patrick Leary will open up a discussion on a fascinating but little-known trade journal, Press News.

Everyone in the periodicals trade called it “Press News,” but the full title of this now obscure periodical bristled with broader ambitions: “The London, Colonial, and Provincial Press News.”  In an almost 50-year run that began in 1866, Press News aimed to be much more than simply a trade journal for the printing trade, although it was certainly that, too.  Under the direction of founder William Dorrington (1816-1894)–who in his long career had moved easily among his roles as printer, poet, dramatist, journalist, and editor–the paper covered the “news” of everything to do with the world of Victorian magazines and newspapers. For historians today, Press News offers up a literary history of late-Victorian Britain and its empire as seen from the print-shop floor.

Register Here and Join Us May 5

All RSVP digital events are free and open to the public. Complete the brief registration form below to receive the Zoom link.

Register Now

An Informal Yet Informative Collaborative Discussion

During our time together, Patrick will lead an informal ramble through Dorrington’s extraordinary but little-known journal to see what it can tell us about its time, and how its expansive notion of “the literary world” might inform our own understanding of 19th-century journalism. After this preamble, we hope the ensuing discussion will lean not just on Patrick’s insights but also observations from our audience members.

To that end, we highly encourage individuals to peruse the three volumes of Press News freely available on Hathitrust ahead of the event. Whether you want to quickly glance through one volume or deeply examine one or all three is completely up to you, of course. We know how busy you are. Things you might consider:

  • What articles or imagery stands out to you?
  • How does the structure or content contribute to Dorrington’s ambitious vision for the periodical?
  • How do the formal or informal elements of the magazine characterize his intended audience? What does it say about their interests?
  • What do we gain by “reading sideways” as suggested by Linda Hughes?

These are just a few questions to get you started, and by no means do we expect anyone to spend more of their precious time on this exercise than they want to. We merely hope to enrich our collective understanding of what makes 19th-century periodicals so rewarding as both objects and subjects of study.

Congratulations to Our 2023 Curran Fellows

Above: George Cruikshank, “Our Library Table”, Ainsworth’s Magazine, 1842. Source: Granger Academic.

Our 2023 Curran Fellows have been chosen! RSVP received many strong proposals for this year’s Curran Fellowship competition. The Curran Fellowships are a set of travel and research grants intended to aid scholars studying 19th-century British magazines and newspapers in making use of primary print and archival sources.

Made possible through the generosity of the late Eileen Curran, Professor Emerita of English, Colby College, and inspired by her pioneering research on Victorian periodicals, the Fellowships are awarded annually.

Join us in congratulating the successful applications of:

  • Abigail Farrier, “A Pioneer Editress”: Frieda Cassin’s Complex Contributions to the 19th Century Caribbean Creole Literary World
  • Abigail Clayton, Marginal Voices, Miscellaneous Fragments: Black Journalism and the Transatlantic Editing of Abolition, 1850–1860
  • Courteney Smith, “Most earnest in their endeavours to abate this evil”: Newspapers, the Contagious Diseases Acts, and the Creation of Moral Identities in Britain
  • Ellen Smith, Letters to the Editor: Uncovering ‘Ladies’ in Imperial Newspapers in the 1857 Indian Rebellion and Beyond
  • Marzena Kubisz, “In the service of the helpless”: (R)evolutions of Vegetarian Periodicals for Children 1893-1914
  • Sarah Pedersen, British Newspaper Coverage of Nordic Women’s Suffrage Campaigners and Women Politicians 1870-1914
  • Simon Young, Newspaper Notes and Queries: Local Print Communities in Victorian Britain and Ireland
  • Stephan Pigeon, Sub-Editorial Wages and Precarity in Journalism

Congratulations to all!

2023 Colby Scholarly Book Prize Winner Announced

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals is delighted to announce the Winner of the
2023 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize, awarded annually to the book,
published in the preceding year that most advances our understanding of the nineteenth-
century press.

The Colby Book Prize was endowed in 2006 in memory of Robert Colby by his wife, Vineta
Colby, both distinguished scholars and long-time members of RSVP. In 2011, following Vineta’s
death, the Board of Directors of RSVP unanimously voted to re-name the prize to honor
both Robert and Vineta Colby for their many fine contributions to the study of Victorian
periodicals and their long commitment to RSVP.

Our 2023 Winner of the Colby Scholarly Book Prize

Jennie Batchelor, for The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). The committee described Batchelor’s book as ‘compelling’, ‘bold’, ‘exciting’, and highly impactful for the discipline. The study is focused entirely on recovering the historical and literary importance of a major but understudied title. It displays considerable archival work, is meticulously researched, and offers a sophisticated argument that also manages to be powerfully and entertainingly written. Batchelor’s The Lady’s Magazine is a model of an extended case study that also makes an intervention in literary studies, with a reach that links communities of writers and readers from the end of the eighteenth century to well into the nineteenth century.

Honourable Mentions

In addition, the committee selected Matthew Wale’s Making Entomologists: How Periodicals
Shaped Scientific Communities in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Pittsburgh Press,
2022) for Honourable Mention. The committee praised Wale’s thorough and substantial
study of natural history periodicals, pointing out the thoughtful way in which material is
organised around four entomological modes of discourse. Archival work informs the strong
narrative thread running through the book, and the whole greatly increases our
understanding of the role of periodicals in the popular representation of science in the
nineteenth century.

The committee also shortlisted Andrew King, ed., Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press:
Living Work for Living People (epub, Routledge, 2022) commending its broad and deep
importance for Victorian periodical studies, its innovative organisation, and its combination
of weighty original research with some ambitious conceptual models.

Congratulations to all!