Victorian Periodicals Review最新文献

Abstract:

This essay traces the rise of the Lancet from its humble nineteenth-century beginnings to its current status as one of the most prestigious medical journals. By examining the Lancet's early years and the hopes of founding editor Thomas Wakely and his successors, I aim to reveal what distinguished this journal from others circulating at the time and guaranteed its longevity. Despite fierce competition with several early medical journals, including the British Medical Journal and a quack publication that called itself the Anti-Lancet, the Lancet continued to publish research-based information to instruct the medical community far and wide. Indeed, while fake news and anti-vaxers might seem like twenty-first-century problems, this paper shows how the Lancet has been addressing misinformation for two hundred years.

• Biographies

Françoise Baillet is Professor of British History and Culture at Université Caen Normandie, France. Her research addresses the role of the periodical press in shaping class, gender, and national identities in nineteenth-century Britain. She has published several articles related to Victorian cultural history and print culture, taking a particular interest in aestheticized renderings of working-class life in the Illustrated London News and the Graphic. She is also the author of Visions and Divisions: Punch's Cultural Discourses and the Victorian Social Order, 1850–1880 (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2022). Current projects include the digitization of the Punch Pocket Book.

Rob Breton is Professor of English Studies at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario, Canada. A Victorianist, he focuses on working-class and Chartist fiction. His latest book, The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction (2021), is with Manchester University Press.

Marysa Demoor, Senior Full Professor Emerita of Ghent University, is the author of Their Fair Share: Women, Power and Criticism in the Athenaeum (2000) and editor of Marketing the Author (2004). With Laurel Brake, she edited The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century: Picture and Press (Palgrave, 2009) and the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (2009). With Ingo Berensmeyer and Gert Buelens, she has edited the Cambridge Handbook to Literary Authorship (2019). Her most recent publications are A Cross-Cultural History of Britain and Belgium, 1815–1918: Mudscapes and Artistic Entanglements (Palgrave, 2022) and The Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals (coedited with Cedric Van Dijck and Birgit Van Puymbroeck, 2023). With Andrew King, Andrew Hobbs, and Lisa Peters, she is currently engaged on a four-volume collection, Primary Sources on Nineteenth-Century Journalism: Geographies of Print.

Astrid Dröse is a Research Associate at the University of Tübingen. She received her PhD from the LMU Munich in 2015. Her research focuses on the German and European literary and cultural history of the early modern period and the age of Goethe, including periodical studies. In 2022 she completed her habilitation thesis, "Journalpoetik: Literatur und Medienwandel 1770–1840." She also held a summer 2023 substitute professorship at the University of Rostock. Her research is published in the Jahrbuch der Heinrich von Kleist and in edited volumes from Secessioj (Berlin and Zürich) and Aisthesis Verlag (Bielefield).

Barbara D. Ferguson currently teaches at the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the Univers

Reviewed by:

• Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press: Living Work for Living People ed. by Andrew King
• Françoise Baillet (bio)

Labour occupied a prominent position in Victorian public discourse. After the Reform Bill of 1832 gave power to the wealthy middle classes, rhetorical constructions increasingly associated labour with manhood and respectability. In line with the principles of evangelical Christianity and under the influence of thinkers such as Thomas Carlyle—"Laborare est Orare. Work is worship" (Past and Present, 1843)—and Samuel Smiles, whose Self-Help (1859) was an instant success, Victorians emphasised work as the condition and instrument of self-improvement. The press played a decisive role in the formulation and dissemination of such values. Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press: Living Work for Living People (2022) precisely addresses this situation, investigating the content, form, and impact of the labour discourse in the pages of trade periodicals or under the pen of professionals. Edited by Andrew King, whose work on the Victorian period lies at the junction between literature, history, media studies, and sociology, this ten-chapter volume derives from the BLT19 project (https://www.blt19.co.uk/), a database of nineteenth-century business, labour, trade, and temperance magazines King launched in 2016. It is published as a complement to The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and Newspapers (edited by Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton, 2016) and Researching the Nineteenth-Century Press: Case Studies (edited by Easley, King, and Morton, 2017).

Beyond work's centrality as a benchmark of Victorian value, it was a cultural construction formulated and widely disseminated by the press. Pervading all sections of specialised periodicals, the labour rhetoric pertained to five areas: bodily and intellectual practice, social and commercial exchange, class, Christian value, and moral imperative. As King suggests in his introduction to Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press, this set of values can be used as a road map to the whole volume (7). The subsequent chapters assess this discourse as it was circulated by a selection of trade and business periodicals or through the writings of several well-known [End Page 516] figures connected to the printing business. In chapter 2, Andrew Hobbs shows how provincial newspapers and periodicals quickly became "an information technology, providing an infrastructure which assisted efficient trade and employ