How to Get Started with Periodical Poetry Research
Linda Hughes in Conversation with Gillian Walters
This interview is the second in a new series where representatives from RSVP’s graduate student community talk with established senior periodicals scholars about their respective journeys in periodicals research. Interviews focus on how they got started, challenges they overcame, and what advice they would want to pass on to researchers relatively new to the study of Victorian periodicals.
The subject of our second interview is Linda K. Hughes. Linda is a former President of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (1997-1999), Senior Advisory Council member (2001-present), and currently serves on the Board of Directors (2024-2026). With every text that she approaches, Linda follows the mantra “context, context, context” and always starts with the question: “What’s going on in this or that?” Her groundbreaking 2007 article for Victorian Periodicals Review (VPR), “What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies” directly inspired a new critical field and countless scholars, including myself (Gillian Walters), who have since considered the importance of poems within periodicals. Her VPR article “SIDEWAYS!: Navigating the Material(ity) of Print Culture” demonstrates Linda’s continually innovative approaches.
Linda has a longstanding association with the Society, and she remains a highly active and valued member. Linda has been attending annual conferences since 1987, where she continues supporting and guiding scholars. If you meet Linda at an RSVP conference or DigiEvent, which she also regularly attends, you will note her infectious enthusiasm and passion for periodicals as she continues to champion the importance of periodical poetry within the wider landscape of nineteenth-century studies.
I first met Linda Hughes at RSVP’s “Currents in the Periodical Press” conference in Stirling 2024, where she patiently listened and provided invaluable suggestions relating to my own research into periodical poetry. It was an absolute honour and privilege for me to interview Linda about her experiences as a senior scholar.
The following conversation, centered on the past, present, and future of “Periodical Poetry Research,” between Linda Hughes and Gillian Walters took place via Zoom on 16 January 2026. It will appear in three serial installments over March, April, and May 2026. It has been edited for length and clarity.
The Past: Foundations of Periodical Poetry Research
Gillian Walters: Thinking back over your research career, what first drew you towards poetry within Victorian periodicals?
Linda Hughes: Well, I wrote a dissertation on poetry, so I was already a ‘poetry person’ but not exclusively. I’ve written on the novel and so forth, but I already had that orientation. I was an advocate of poetry. It seemed to me it was too important to be marginalized as it was at the time.
There was an overwhelming emphasis on the novel, and the standard story was that poetry had been so important in the Romantic era, with the big six men, though Blake was much less known; then came the serialization of Dickens and everything else and poetry receded. I just thought, I’m not so sure. So I was already on the lookout, being a little skeptical about that implicit argument.
GW: How did you begin to approach periodical poetry at a time when it was such an under-valued aspect of periodical studies (and poetry studies)?
LH: By chance … I requested a directed reading on Victorian prose as a graduate student from my professor Howard Fulweiler. I had this big old thick, heavy book, Charles F. Harrold and William D. Templeman’s English Prose of the Victorian Era (1938), and guess what? Almost everything in it was first in periodicals. I had at least an awareness that periodicals have been very important with a lot of major Victorian work.
Then there was The Victorian Serial (1991). Michael Lund and I started working on that book in about 1983. We met when Mike wrote to me because he’d seen an article of mine on Tennyson’s Ulysses in Victorian Poetry, and he noticed where I was teaching, and it was his hometown. We both ended up at NEH Summer Seminars in 1980. He was at Stanford and I was at Berkeley. We met for lunch and it turns out we were both very influenced by reader response theory. The fact that there are always these inherent gaps and so forth. And he started talking about his project on the serial novel.
And I got it! How could you possibly have the same reader response to a novel spread over eighteen months, like Dickens’s serial works, as opposed to reading it in a single sitting, or in a week, or even in two weeks? So, we kept talking, and he said, “Let’s do a book together”, and I said, “Well, I’m all in to do the poetry, and I’ll work with you as well on the novel.”
It was truly collaborative. We would do some individual drafting, and then we put our drafts together and had an hour-long phone call. We ended up with a grant that let us visit each other four times, supported by NEH, though that came later. We decided the first thing we had to do was look at reviews of serial parts.
The Birth of a New Field in Victorian Studies
GW: Your ground-breaking article for VPR on “What the Wellesley Left Out” effectively inspired a new field. How did you begin to define and explore this new area, and what was your methodological approach?
LH: My research involved visits to Colindale [the British Library’s Newspaper Archive was formerly located in Colindale, North London, UK until its closure in November 2013]. The only way I could track reviews in major quarterlies, monthlies, but also in Sunday papers and down-market publications, like the Weekly Dispatch, was in hard copy. My exploration really had a lot to do with reading those reviews and seeing how widespread they were. Method. Let me tell you, it was page-turning. And as I kept seeing the remarkable number of reviews across periodical titles and class formations and niche audiences, this was telling me that poetry is not marginal to Victorian culture.
At one point, I had this ‘harebrained’ notion that I was going to look through library catalogue records of what patrons checked out. I thought maybe I could prove that patrons checked out Victorian poetry volumes as often as novels. That turned out not to be true. But, I learned something new about serialization by looking at The Portico Library and The London Library borrowers’ records, namely, some patrons would take out six
“What that periodical research did was start to verify my notion that poetry was not as marginalized as so much of the theorizing and scholarship might have us believe.”
numbers of Pickwick at a time, or David Copperfield; they were binge-reading. What that periodical research did was start to verify my notion that poetry was not as marginalized as so much of the theorizing and scholarship might have us believe.
GW: Was there a particular resource, archive or scholar that inspired your early research into periodical poetry? How did you conduct your research into periodical poetry before digital archives made them more accessible?
LH: I was not in a tenure-track position for the first six years of my postdoctoral career. I did not walk into a Victorian job and as such I was not allowed to teach my specialty. I was teaching composition, like so many graduate students today. I decided to use Arthurian works in my sophomore composition because that involved governance, ideals, politics, romance; and a number of arguments could be made that students could participate in.
On the Vital Importance of Archival Research
I did run across Kathleen Tillotson’s article ‘Tennyson’s Serial Poem’ [Mid-Victorian Studies (London: Athlone Press, 1965): 80–109] very early on; so that was one thing that was in the back of my head. But the archives, I think, were so important for me as I was getting started. Colindale was vital. It was all there was until they shut it down with the opening of the new British Library. I also worked in the British Museum Reading Room and looked at periodicals like the Illustrated London News in the North Gallery. Both archives were incredibly important.
The University of North Texas is just about an hour away from Texas Christian University (TCU), my home university. And J. Don Vann (I don’t know how lively a name that is today, but he was very well known in the ’80s) compiled the bibliography of Victorian Novels in Serial (1985). He also did some of the guides to periodicals and had amassed a wonderful range of Victorian periodicals at UNT. And I could go there and read a lot without having to go to London.
My own library, at TCU, had Punch and Cornhill in the original volumes in the main reading room. You could just go grab and look at them, which became very important to some things I did later. I also started using them in my teaching. TCU had a full microfilm set from the British periodicals and they had some microfiche. I looked at it all.
They also had other Victorian periodicals on the shelf as well as some American versions, which were not helpful because they had the wrong pagination: I always wanted to cite the original. TCU also had a wonderful interlibrary loan department: I got the hard copy of the London Journal around the time I was working on the Wellesley Index essay. It is huge and somebody loaned it to TCU! Looking at so many different periodicals and turning pages started forming the ideas that came to fruition in my later article “SIDEWAYS.”
So, I was still accessing hard copies and page turning, and seeing, as I went along, more and more and more poems. There are so many poems in these periodicals. So, I would say the archives were crucial to me.
The Affordances of Digital Research
GW: How has the advent of digital indices, resources, and surrogates impacted your research?
LH: When digitization came along, because TCU is a private university and very well-funded, I could access both the Gale and the ProQuest databases from the get-go. I am so aware now of how uneven access to those wonderful databases is. I love Patrick Leary’s updating of the Open Access 19th-century Periodicals that periodical scholars today can use. I just think that’s so important.
I accessed a digital database, ProQuest in this case, to write my article “Inventing Poetry and Pictorialism in Once a Week: A Magazine of Visual Effects,” for a Victorian Poetry issue edited by Lorriane Janzen Kooistra in 2010. I still wanted to think about Punch, but also this Bradbury and Evans periodical that was a result of Dickens and his separation. In essence: what was it doing with poetry? And…it’s lavish. I mean, of course, Dickens never had illustrations in his periodicals. So, here it was with these lavish illustrations. But the challenge was to track how they were being handled, where did they appear, what was their frequency. It was before there were indexes for illustrations. In fact, that’s still a problem. (I know Alison Chapman is working on that with the Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project, but it’s still a problem.)
Despite digitization enabling access to Once a Week through the ProQuest digital database, I still needed to approach my research by going through Volume 1 of the journal facsimile page by page online: I simply couldn’t make the argument any
“In my case, it always starts with the question: ‘What’s going on in this or that?’”
other way. It wasn’t about data, it was about understanding how a new mode of printing poetry was coming into being, something that then got carried over to Cornhill, and so forth. But do not misunderstand me, I couldn’t have done that project without the digital version.
But I was also using the old method. I could only do that because I had a digital run of the entire Once a Week publication record in facsimile. I use the digital databases all the time now, of course. I still, in my work, tend to have a research question and then I pursue it through the periodicals rather than working with big data. In my case, it always starts with the question: “What’s going on in this or that?”
The more I saw, the more I started also thinking about some theoretical issues, especially in some of those weekly papers — it was so easy to find the poems. It still is if you’re looking at a hard copy or even a digital copy. Sometimes they have indexes like The Cambridge Review, the university magazine that started the same year Amy Levy matriculated to Newnham College. And those first two years, 1879 to 1881, while she was in residence have been very important for my research, and it has a poetry index, but she used different signatures: sometimes it was AL, sometimes it was A. Levy. It was hard to use the index, then. I could get the weekly in PDF, but it’s not digitized.
GW: How did your early work on The Victorian Serial (1991) influence your later work on periodical poetry?
LH: The quick answer to your first question is tremendously. That is how I got to Aberystwyth, for my first RSVP conference in 1987. I’ve been attending ever since. It was just foundational, looking at hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of periodicals and seeing the pervasiveness.
Of course it wasn’t on every page. But there was hardly an issue, until maybe the late 1880s, when publishing started to turn more to things like titbits and popular media after the 1870 Education Act. But prior to that, it was hard to find an issue that wasn’t going to have some poetry in it, including a periodical like The National Reformer, the atheist journal; James Thompson published City of Dreadful Night in serial parts in that.
In 1989, I even did a trip to the British Library in London and Colindale. I was going to track how many serial poems there were. I had already run into these with Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House, because that last book of his, The Victories of Love, the last of four books of Angel in the House, was serialized in Macmillan’s Magazine. I wanted to find out just how many of these serial poems there were.
What happened on that trip, though, is that I was looking at The Universal Review (1888-1890) and in there is this serial poem in two parts by a Graham R. Tomson, whom I had never heard of before. I said, “Who’s he? His work doesn’t seem to be any worse than other poems at the time,” and some were really interesting. Well, of course, “he” was a she, using one of her early pen names before becoming Rosamund Marriott Watson. And I got sucked into that biography [Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters, 2005], which took me 13 years.
I could not have done that work either, without having had periodical access, including some databases, to track what was going on with her career, with her reception. So, I never finished that record of Victorian serial poems, but there are a lot of them. The work that’s being done now led by Alison Chapman and her associates in the Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry project, and by the [Natalie] Houston- [Lindsy] Lawrence- [April] Patrick team overseeing the Periodical Poetry Index, are finding some of these.
GW: Do you think periodical poetry might offer a different way of thinking about forms of serial print culture?
LH: I’m just going say that everybody who’s working on Victorian periodical poetry now already gets it. They’re part of the choir. What I think has happened less is that those who focus on news, politics, science, and the novel … I don’t think it’s really been totally folded into the general outlook and the perspective on the difference it makes that those poems are occurring next to all those other issues and questions we have.
A prominent periodical scholar in the last year, in my hearing, mentioned poems in a periodical they were studying and said of them, “Who cares?” And of course, you should care, because the editors cared. And the readers cared, or those poems would not be there. How do we take that into account? How do we think about the culture and the literary production, but also the serial print production, if we’re not taking those poems into account? We are not saying it’s all great, but it’s meaningful.
