1st Edition
Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press Living Work for Living People
Extending the limits of the award-winning Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and Newspapers (2016) and its companion volume (and also award-winning) Researching the Nineteenth-Century Press: Case Studies (2017), Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press: Living Work for Living People advances our knowledge of how our identities have become inextricably defined by work. The collection’s innovative focus on the nineteenth-century British press’s relationship to work illuminates an area whose effects are still evident today but which has been almost totally neglected hitherto.
Offering bold new interpretative frameworks and provocative methodologies in media history and literary studies developed by an exciting group of new and established talent, this volume seeks to set a new research agenda for nineteenth-century interdisciplinary studies.
1. Introduction: Living Work
Andrew King
2. Information Put to Work: Provincial Newspapers as Publishers of Specialist Business and Work Information
Andrew Hobbs
3. Taxonomies and Procedures: the case of ‘Trade and Professional Periodicals’
Andrew King
4. The Page as a Stage: Male Opera Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Press
Anna Maria Barry
5. ‘Watch Case Secret Springer, Printer and Publisher:’ The Many Work Identities of Richard Willoughby, Editor of the British Workwoman Magazine.
Deborah Canavan
6. ‘In the Hospital + Out of the Hospital’: Nurses and Nursing in Margaret Harkness’s Periodical Publications
Flore Janssen
7. 'Higher than Snuff dealers’: The Bookseller and the Formation of Trade Identity
Rachel Calder
8. Trade Custom and the Courtesy of Acknowledgement: The Practice of Copying in the late-Victorian Confectionery Trade Press
Stephan Pigeon
9. Agricultural Journals in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
Elizabeth Tilley
10. The Limits of Work: the Early Years of the Bankers’ Magazine (1844-1995) and the Banking Institute (1851-3)
Andrew King
Biography
Andrew King is Professor of English at the University of Greenwich. He has published widely on nineteenth-century print media and popular reading, including two award-winning volumes with Alexis Easley and John Morton: The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Newspapers and Periodicals (2016) and Researching the Nineteenth-Century Press (2017). He is currently co-editor of Victorian Popular Fictions, the organ of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association (of which he was President 2019–22), and runs BLT19.co.uk, an open-access site dedicated to nineteenth-century Business, Labour, Trade and Temperance periodicals.
Shortlisted for the 2023 RSVP Robert and Vineta Colby Book Prize
"[We are] impressed by the combination of weighty original research shown here with some ambitious conceptual models concerned with the classification and exploration...of the press... [The introduction] is a highlight of the collection, with its incisive scheme for understanding the multiple relationships between work and liberalism."
--RSVP Robert and Vineta Colby Book Prize Panel
"[This volume] is a vibrant, invaluable contribution to the study of the Victorian periodical press… this volume reveals how an impressive, dizzying range of trade and professional periodicals documented the work lives, practices, and controversies of an assortment of industries, and also dramatically transformed those industries.
While so many of us were isolated at home, realising the extent to which our workplaces were social and cultural spaces and wondering if they ever would be again, King and colleagues documented ‘the living work’ done by Victorian people and their periodicals. The result is a powerful vision of the Victorian world with great resonance for our own."
--Rebecca Nesvet, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay
