Periodicals were a hot commodity in the Victorian era. Now, thanks to two BYU professors, we can read them once again.
You can learn a lot from someone’s Google search history. A quick examination of internet search trends can teach you a lot about a society’s interests, values, knowledge level, and daily activities. Before the internet, however, periodicals (published journals with articles, advertisements, and stories covering a variety of niche topics) offered this same insight and now serve as time capsules to another time. Though extremely popular in Victorian-era England, very few of these periodicals survive today, making the remaining ones a valuable resource for studying the culture and literature of their time. In 2020, Associate Professors Jamie Horrocks (Victorian Studies) and Brian Croxall (Digital Humanities) began creating an online conglomerate of British periodicals called The Victorian Print Trade Journals Database (VPTJD). Today, this bibliographic resource can be used to study and learn about periodicals that focus on print publication from 19th-century Britain.
Compiling the Works
When Horrocks began compiling Victorian periodicals, she had to confront many challenges associated with the project. The cheap and flimsy design of the periodicals combined with their inconsistent documentation made them tricky to preserve and sometimes even find. Additionally, Horrocks explains that journals had a “tendency to change titles, editors, publishers, prices, formats, and other elements, making establishing accurate bibliographic information difficult.” So, the VPTJD addresses two of the main issues researchers might encounter while studying these journals: the lack of a comprehensive bibliographic list and the presence of conflicting information across sources.
The VPTJD presents detailed information on each journal issue—including notes on editors, publishers, and even publication frequency and pricing—and cross-links journals based on common editors or publishers. This aspect of the database makes it valuable because “many [periodical] titles lived and died quickly, within a year or even a few months of their initial publication,” Horrocks says. “Others hung on despite intense competition, [sometimes] acquiring new editors, publishers, and titles to preserve their niche in the Victorian media ecology.”
Preserving Victorian-Era England
To make the VPTJD as comprehensive and accurate as possible, Horrocks and Croxall constantly update the site to include newly discovered journals and to correct errors found in previously posted entries. In each of these entries, Horrocks makes sure to “maintain original terminology, punctuation, and spelling wherever possible, even when doing so may seem inconsistent or inaccurate.” VPTJD’s setup also encourages its users to contribute corrections and additional information, helping to enhance the accuracy and completeness of the database.
The VPTJD ultimately came together as a direct result of Horrocks’s efforts to find information on trade journals and Croxall’s dedication to organizing the data. Horrocks recalls, “[Croxall] and his student team coded the database so that it could do everything I wanted it to. They’re also responsible for all the search functions, the usability, and the overall look of the pages,” Horrocks says. “Working with Brian Croxall to put it together was a really great experience. . . [it’s] something I'd never imagined doing.”
Explore the Victorian Print Trade Journals Database here!