| Nearly forty years on, the
conditions are equally propitious for new research in this
still evolving field, as the editors, Andrew King, Alexis
Easley, and John Morton, make clear in their introduction
to the Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century
British Periodicals and Newspapers. The most
significant development in the last two decades, as they
point out, has been the digitization of a vast corpus of
newspapers and periodicals published in Britain, North
America, and in the far-flung reaches of the British
Empire. Scholars coming into this field now, as James
Mussell cautions in a thoughtful essay that leads off the
collection, must learn to assess what digitized texts have
to offer as well as what is lost when physical copies—the
closely printed columns of now fragile newspapers or the
more substantial book-like pages of the quarterly and
monthly reviews— are exchanged for fully searchable
digital versions. Guides, companions, and handbooks are the order of the day, the terms used more or less interchangeably by publishers to suit the project in hand. The Routledge Handbook contains twenty-nine essays by experienced scholars, each of which offers a perspective on current research. The chronological span of the volume is the long nineteenth century, rather than the more limited Victorian period, a sound editorial decision which acknowledges the continuum of the newspaper and periodical press from the last decades of the eighteenth century through the turn of the twentieth. Newspapers and periodicals are given equal coverage as interconnected elements in an ever-expanding culture of print which responded to the increased literacy of the population. This is a handbook to "British" periodicals and newspapers, as the editors explain, an important qualifier that acknowledges the transnational role of the press and the reciprocal relationship between the press at home and its counterparts in the British Empire and North America, as well as the distinctive contribution of the press in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Joanne Shattock, Review in Victorian Periodicals Review 50:1 (Spring 2017) |