A large-scale reference work covering the journalism industry in 19th-Century Britain.

Scandal existed long before celebrity gossip columns, often hidden behind the closed doors of the Georgian aristocracy. But secrets were impossible to keep in a household of servants who listened at doors and spied through keyholes. The early mass media pounced on these juicy tales of adultery, eager to cash-in on the public appetite for sensation and expose the shocking moral corruption of the establishment. Drawing on a rich collection of original and often outrageous sources, this book brings vividly to life stories of infidelity in high places – passionate, scandalous, poignant or tragic – and reveals how the flood of print detailing sordid sexual intrigues, created a national outcry and made people question whether the nobility was fit to rule.

First published in 1972, this set of 9 volumes contains all contemporary British periodical reviews of the first (or other significantly early) editions from 1793 and 1824 of works by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. In addition, a few later reviews are supplied, as well as a substantial number of reviews of other contemporary figures, including William Godwin, Robert Southey, Samuel Rogers, Thomas Campbell, Thomas Moore, Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Introductions to each periodical provide brief sketches of each publication as well as names, dates and bibliographical information. Headnotes offer bibliographical data of the reviews and suggested approaches to studying them. The index serves to locate authors and titles reviewed, reviewers, sources of quotations, other people and works mentioned and other proper nouns of interest. This comprehensive set will be of interest to those studying the Romantics and English literature.

First published in 1972, this volume contains contemporary British periodical reviews of Lord Byron and Regency Society Poets, including Rogers, Campbell and Moore, in publications from the New Annual Register to the Yellow Dwarf. Introductions to each periodical provide brief sketches of each publication as well as names, dates and bibliographical information. Headnotes offer bibliographical data of the reviews and suggested approaches to studying them. This book will be of interest to those studying the Romantics and English literature.

'This book should be regarded as rescue work. It salvages from pre-Victorian periodicals from the limbo of forgotten publications, and exhumes from long undisturbed sources a curious collection of women who, at a time when it was considered humiliating for a gentlewoman to earn money, contrived to support themselves by writing, editing, or publishing... sometimes even supporting husbands and children as well... The women who emerge make a motley gallery; but over the years that I have been getting to know them, they have won my respectful affection. More, indeed. To me they are all heroines...' Alison Adburgham, from her Foreword Magazines addressed to women have a long history in English, and have been subject to condescension for just as long. Alison Adburgham's groundbreaking volume, first published in 1972, rescues the so-called 'scribbling female' from such scorn, not least by documenting just how hard was the struggle for women writers to live by the pen.