RSVP is known for its congenial and cooperative membership. We value sharing resources of all kinds with anyone interested in nineteenth-century Victorian periodicals. We hope our readers will find many useful resources here to help them in their research, satisfy their curiosity, and lead to additional avenues of exploration.
Teaching Materials
We’ve compiled a few teaching materials such as syllabi, assignments, and modules/workshops on how to use Victorian periodicals in the undergraduate classroom. If you have any teaching materials or lessons you’d like to share, please contact the Webmaster.
Open Access Digital 19th-Century Periodicals
Patrick Leary has compiled a rough list of digitized 19th-century periodicals that are freely available online. Although there’s no true substitute for the kind of cross-title searching that one can do with the big commercial collections from Gale and ProQuest, digital facsimiles like these nevertheless have many research and classroom uses of their own, even when, as is often the case, the runs are incomplete. It helps to know what titles are out there, in what form, and where they are. Many thanks to John Mark Ockerbloom and his team at the University of Pennsylvania for the assistance of their Open Books project.
RSVP Bibliography
What’s new in periodicals research? RSVP members compile a biannual bibliography of the latest resources for research on nineteenth-century Victorian periodicals. RSVP’s bibliography was originally published annually in the Victorian Periodicals Newsletter. It is now brought out bi-annually in Victorian Periodicals Review.
VanArsdel Bibliography
First compiled by Rosemary VanArsdel in 1999, the VanArsdel Bibliography lists some of the most definitive secondary reference sources on Victorian periodicals and its related fields.
The Curran Index
The Curran Index is reference database of the many anonymous contributors to nineteenth-century British periodicals. Named after Eileen Curran, one of the original editors of the ground-breaking Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, this ongoing project seeks to build upon the Wellesley Index by identifying previously unknown authors whose stories, poems, and articles appeared anonymously in nineteenth-century British periodicals.
The Wellesley Index
The Wellesley Index was one of the first comprehensive databases to list the authorship of nineteenth-century articles, and compile a bibliography of articles written by each contributor. Citations of evidence are provided to support attributions of authorship, along with brief biographical and vocational details. Forty-five important monthly and quarterly titles are included, covering the period from the beginning of the Westminster Review in 1824 to the end of the century. The exception to this is the Edinburgh Review, which is indexed from first issue, in 1802. The Wellesley does not index poetry. Please note that an individual or institutional subscription is necessary to access the Wellesley Index.
C19: The Nineteenth Century Index
C19: The Nineteenth Century Index draws on the strength of established indexes such as the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (NSTC), the Wellesley Index, Poole’s Index, Periodicals Index Online and the Cumulative Index to Niles’ Register 1811–1849 to create integrated bibliographic coverage of over 1.7 million books and official publications, 70,000 archival collections, and 22.7 million articles published in over 2,500 journals, magazines and newspapers. C19 Index now provides integrated access to 13 bibliographic indexes, including more than three million records from British Periodicals Collections I and II, together with the expanded online edition of the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (DNCJ). Please note that an individual or institutional subscription is necessary to access the C19 database.
Victoria Research Web
The aim of the Victoria Research Web is to assist scholars, at whatever stage of their studies, in making their way through the complex and ever-changing landscape of research resources pertinent to the long nineteenth century. The various sections of the VRW are intended to supply advice and links to help Victorianists find the practical information that they need to do their work, whether it’s an online database, an archive catalogue, a bibliography, a listserv address, a cheap place to stay in London, or a journal’s submission guidelines. This resource was created and is maintained by our very own Patrick Leary.