`Simply a great work of reference. Future scholars will wonder how anybody managed without the Wellesley Index. It will quietly change the whole nature of Victorian studies.' Christopher Ricks, New Statesman `It is now impossible to think of Victorian literary and historical studies without the benefit of it ... this is a very remarkable achievement indeed ... the complete set will be a monument to the Houghtons foresight, pertinacity and skill.' TLS

This annotated bibliography of nineteenth-century British periodicals, complete with a detailed subject index, reveals how Victorian commentaries on journalism shaped the discourse on the origins and contemporary character of the domestic, imperial and foreign press. Drawn from a wide range of publications representing diverse political, economic, religious, social and literary views, this book contains over 4,500 entries, and features extracts from over forty nineteenth-century periodicals. The articles cataloged offer a thorough and influential analysis of their journalistic milieu, presenting statistics on sales and descriptions of advertising, passing judgment on space allocations, pinpointing different readerships, and identifying individuals who engaged with the press either exclusively or occasionally. Most importantly, the bibliography demonstrates that columnists routinely articulated ideas about the purpose of the press, yet rarely recognized the illogic of prioritizing public good and private profit simultaneously, thus highlighting implicitly a universal characteristic of journalism: its fractious, ambiguous, conflicting behavior.