Past Colby Book Prize Winners

The Colby Book Prize was endowed in 2006 in memory of Robert Colby by his wife, Vineta Colby, distinguished scholars and long-time members of RSVP. The Colby Prize is intended to honor original book-length scholarship about Victorian periodicals and newspapers, of the kind that Robert and Vineta Colby themselves produced during their careers.

Our previous Colby Book Prize winners are listed below, with links to the publishers’ pages where available.

2026

Undercover: Victorian Investigative Journalism in Fact and Fiction (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Stephen Donovan and Matthew Rubery

From the awards’ committee: “This page-turner of a book is the work of many years of deep, rigorous research. Drawing on a broad range of provincial and London newspapers between the 1860s and the First World War, it offers a revisionist history of undercover journalism that proves emphatically that investigative journalism began many years before Stead’s notorious exposé of 1885. It is a book that asks new questions about the impact of undercover journalism on readers, how it transformed fictional narratives and how it commented on precarity and mobility as well as poverty. Beautifully erudite and consistently illuminating, it is a book that will continue to influence the field of periodical studies for decades to come.”

Shortlisted

Maria Damkjær, Fiction on the Page in Nineteenth-Century Magazines (Oxford UP)

“Fiction on the Page is an original and ambitious book. It offers a fresh and compellingly written account of the fillers, adverts and indeterminate/hybrid content (e.g., advertorials) and serves as a launching pad for a sophisticated rethinking of genre within the nineteenth-century magazine and beyond. A book that repays re-reading, Damkjær’s study will undoubtedly inspire new methodological approaches to Victorian periodicals and encourage researchers to rethink the failures as well as the successes of editing. This is an important work of scholarship that will undoubtedly influence the field.”
Anne-Julia Zwierlein, Lecturing Women in British Fiction, Periodicals and Public Orality, 1870-1910 (Routledge)

“This book offers a thoroughly researched account of the lecturing woman. Drawing on periodicals, the archives of lecture institutions, novels, life-writing, suffrage literature, rhetorical manuals and many other sources besides, it offers a satisfyingly interdisciplinary study of gender, speech and democracy in the late nineteenth century. The book directs our attention to the forgotten figure of the woman speaker in fin-de-siècle print culture, showing the significance of women’s oral performance in text and image in penny and feminist weeklies.”

2025

Two awards were given in 2025.

British West Indian Newspapers and the Abolition of Slavery (Routledge, 2024)

Andrew Lewis

Of Lewis’s book, the award committee notes, “Decades of meticulous research underpin this largely unknown account of the diversity, richness and volatility of the British West Indian press in some of the most politically charged decades of the abolitionist campaigns. It traces the communication networks of the press through many stages, from the obtaining of type and paper to circulation, but also foregrounds the fascinating role of the ‘masterless’ Caribbean in shaping press culture. This remarkable and quietly revelatory book will be of significance to those working outside periodical studies as well as promising to make an important contribution to media history.”

Model Women of the Press: Gender, Politics and Women’s Professional Journalism, 1850-1880 (Routledge, 2024)

Teja Varma Pusapati

Of Pusapati’s book, the committee wrote, “This is an original, archivally rich and narrative-changing account of women journalists that overturns many of the stories we have told ourselves (about anonymity, amateurism and the origins and rise of women’spolitical journalism). While it has a tight period focus, its arguments are expansive, and it moves thoughtfully between genres, from feminist magazines to war reportage. This is an impressively argued work of scholarship that promises to make a lasting contribution to the field.”

Honorable Mention

Alexis Easley (ed.), British Writers, Popular Literature and New Media Innovation, 1820-1845 (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

(N.B. Jennie Batchelor, as a member of the adjudicating committee and author of a chapter in the volume edited by Easley, recused herself from all discussions and decisions pertaining to that volume.)

2024

The Edinburgh History of Scottish Newspapers, 1850-1950 (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)

W. Hamish Fraser

According to our awards committee, Fraser’s text is “comprehensive, meticulously researched and argued and impressively wide in scope.” It is “an invaluable book for the specialist on Scottish newspapers and the long nineteenth-century periodical press as well as the general reader.” This is an engaging study which offers a comprehensive account of Scottish Newspapers and its political, social, and economic contexts.

Honorable Mention

Graham Law, The Periodical Press Revolution: E. S. Dallas and the Nineteenth-Century British Media System (Routledge, 2023)

2023

The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History (Edinburgh University Press, 2022)

Jennie Batchelor

Batchelor’s book is ‘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.

Shortlisted

Andrew King (ed.), Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press: Living Work for Living People (epub, Routledge, 2022)

Honorable Mention

Matthew Wale, Making Entomologists: How Periodicals Shaped Scientific Communities in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022)

2022

Empire News: The Anglo-Indian Press Writes India (SUNY Press, 2021)

Priti Joshi

The Colby committee praised Empire News as “a valuable, innovative and timely study that brings to life the circulations of English language newspapers published in mid-century India with an immaculate level of care and attention to archival detail.” This book “compellingly illuminates the ways in which the empire was not a monolithic construct of the press, but an often contradictory space of competing voices, shaped by the journalistic need for copy, access to sources, and volatility in the business of press production.”

Honorable Mention

Alison Mould, Medical Identities and Print Culture, 1830s-1910s (Palgrave, 2021)

Book cover of Priti Joshi's Empire News. Includes title and stylized image of crumpled newsprint

2021

Two awards were given in 2021.

The Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Palgrave, 2020)

Elizabeth Tilley

In this monograph, Elizabeth Tilley focuses on monthly and weekly periodicals, selecting representative journals to give an overview of Irish periodical literature throughout the century, a subject that certainly deserves this type of focused attention. Her research (funded by a Curran Award in 2015) is impeccable, and her analysis is nuanced and detailed. Tilley often chooses to address little-known periodicals (domestic, trade, popular press, etc.), demonstrating their contributions to the Irish periodical field and their interactions with regional and national politics and economics, as well as showcasing their relevance to British periodical culture.

As part of this study, Tilley has included a lengthy appendix that gives an overview of the Irish press during the period and provides an excellent resource for both scholarly research and teaching. In this way, Tilley’s volume is both monograph and scholarly edition, a notable and important resource for the field of nineteenth-century periodical studies.

The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press: Volume 2, Expansion and Evolution, 1800-1900 (Edinburgh University Press, 2020)

David Finkelstein, Editor

As part of a three-volume series from Edinburgh University press, David Finkelstein’s compendious collection includes contributions from forty-eight authors who address the development of British and Irish periodical culture throughout the nineteenth century. It is a remarkable resource that both draws from previous scholarship and contributes new knowledge to the field, with a wide range of topics and perspectives, and with welcome attention to diversity and transnational connections. The combination of overview essays accompanied by narrow and pointed case studies give the volume an impressive breadth and depth. It will be valuable for a wide range of readers, from those who are orienting and contextualizing as they first come to periodical studies, to those who are already specialists in the field.

David Finkelstein’s fine work editing and introducing the volume surely reflects a herculean effort, supported by original and engaging work by the forty-seven authors, who include both established and upcoming scholars. RSVP is pleased to honor the work of all the writers as well as the editor, who together have made a contribution to nineteenth-century periodical studies that will remain a standard for many years to come.

2020

The European Illustrated Press and The Emergence of a Transnational Visual Culture of the News, 1842-1870 (Routledge, 2019)

Thomas Smits

The prize committee noted that “this study of “visual news culture” across European, UK, and Australian newspapers is an outstanding book that both points the way forward for more research and offers readers an immediate new way of thinking about the commercial networks, visual appeal, and social influence of the illustrated press. Smits demonstrates control of vast amounts of material across national boundaries. The work refocuses research on ways of thinking beyond the “comparative” and offers a clear definition of what “transnational” might mean for future study. It offers an intelligent awareness of the dialogue between traditional archive research and the use of digital resources and provides a clear methodology that is original, with useful, transferable insights that will no doubt have a transformative impact on the field of periodical and newspaper study.”

Honorable Mentions

Iain Crawford, Contested Liberalisms: Martineau, Dickens and the Victorian Press (Edinburgh University Press, 2019)

Alexis Easley, Clare Gill, and Beth Rodgers, Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s -1900s: The Victorian Period, part of The Edinburgh History of Women’s Periodical Culture in Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2019)

Book cover of "The European Illustrated Press and the Emergence of a Transnational Visual Culture of the News, 1842-1870" by Thomas Smits

2019

A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855-1900 (OpenBook, 2018)

Andrew Hobbs

The selection committee described the book as “field-defining”, commending the ways in which it “convincingly challenges enduring assumptions that London newspapers acted as the national press in the Victorian period.” They commended its “meticulous research, originality, and significance for future scholars” of the provincial press in Britain, noting that it was also “written with imagination, flair and infectious enthusiasm” which “brings the nineteenth century press to full, vibrant, pulsating life.”

2018

Researching the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Case Studies (Routledge, 2017)

Alexis Easley, Andrew King, and John Morton, Editors

The committee describes the focus of the book on methodology and case studies as “fresh and original,” and “useful for both experienced scholars and those new to the field.”

Honorable Mention

Joanne Shattock, ed. Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

(N. B. Andrew King, as both chair of the committee and as as one of the editors of the winning volume, abstained from the decision making process.)

2017

The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers (Routledge, 2016)

Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton, Editors

The committee describes the book as “a standard reference work” that offers “cutting-edge, comprehensive scholarship by experts in each area”. The volume was seen as “wide-ranging and diverse” in ways that stepped beyond Great Britain to consider British newspapers and periodicals in relation to North American, European, Australian and Asian publications.

2016

Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street (Routledge, 2015)

Mary Shannon

This book discusses, for the first time, the proximity of the offices of Charles Dickens, G. W. M. Reynolds, and Henry Mayhew, in mid nineteenth-century London. Wellington Street (home to nearly thirty newspapers and periodicals, as well as a theatre and the musical and theatrical press) was a highly significant location for metropolitan print culture because it was a hub of relationships, influences and connections between writers, booksellers, editors, publishers, theatre managers and audiences, and readers. The book uses archival research, literary criticism, and literary geography to explore Wellington Street at different times of the day and to reveal the ways in which its print networks fostered connections between the discourses of journalism, literature, and drama. It reassesses the intersection between print culture, popular culture, the built environment and urban experience, and reveals the links between Wellington Street and the print culture of colonial Melbourne.

Honorable Mention

Marianne van Remoortel, Women, Work and the Victorian Periodical: Living by the Press (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015)

2015

Empire, Race and the Politics of Anti-Caste (Bloomsbury, 2014)

Caroline Bressey

Caroline Bressey’s book is innovative and conceptually engaging. It challenges metropolitan-centric modelings of transnational and trans-Atlantic traffic in ideas, people, and publications, an carefull contextualizes a pair of periodical case-studies. In engaging prose, the beautifully illustrated book makes original and powerful use of two micro-histories to address a big-picture issue — nineteenth-century antiracial activism in and beyond Britain and the US. Noting the multiple ways that ideas of geography shape the structure and inform the discourse of the book, the committee singled out its attention not only to periodical communities but also to the social networks supporting these periodical communities.