Welcome to British Periodicals and Romantic Identity primary source archive. While most sources used in the research of this books are posted, we will continue to add a few.

Welcome to the DiscoverArchive of the primary sources for British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The Literary Lower Empire, my book published by Palgrave Press (2009). Because the book concerns periodicals, many of the sources are (or at least were) hard to come by without access to a substantial library and plenty of time to wait for Interlibrary loans. This archive contains nearly all of the primary materials which I have cited in British Periodicals and Romantic Identity; the omissions are readily available materials that are ancillary to my arguments, such as poems by Alexander Pope. During the time I have been researching and writing this book, many primary source materials have come online through Google Books and other databases, and in assembling this, we have made use of those works, although in most cases, I have consulted the original texts. I would like to thank Brian Rejack, Lauren Wood Hoffer, and Ronee Francis, the Digital Collections Archivist, for their extensive efforts in bringing this together. I am also grateful for a grant from the College of Arts and Science, Dean Carolyn Dever, and the office of Associate Provost Dennis Hall for Graduate Education and Research at Vanderbilt University.

The works available here are electronic copies of the original work, with several exceptions, where I thought the utility of a first-rate scholarly edition was a superior choice. Because of his excellent header and introductory notes, we have scanned certain reviews from Donald Reiman's The Romantic Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of the British Romantic Writers (Garland Press, 1972), which reproduces the major reviews of Byron in precise facsimile copies. I would like to thank Professor Reiman for his generosity in allowing us to reproduce the following materials: Reviews of Hours of Idleness by the British Critic (RR 232), the Critical Review (RR 604), the Eclectic (RR 700), Le Beau Monde (RR 76), Monthly Literary Recreations (RR 1658), and The Universal Magazine (RR 2309); reviews of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by the Monthly Magazine (RR 1662) and the Monthly Review (RR 1730); the review of The Giaour by the British Critic (RR 238); and the review of The Waltz by the Monthly Review (RR 1737); and finally reviews of Don Juan by the British Critic (RR 337), Monthly Review (RR 1830), and the Scot’s Magazine (RR 2217).

Similarly, we have availed ourselves of Gillian Hughes's excellent edition of James Hogg's The Spy: A Periodical Paper of Literary Amusement and Instruction: Published Weekly in 1810 And 1811, (Edinburgh University Press, 2000) by reproducing her notes in addition to the numbers that I discuss. I would like to thank Professor Hughes, Claire Abel, the marketing and rights manager of the Edinburgh University Press, as well as the Edinburgh University Press for their generosity in allowing us to reproduce numbers 1, 2, 7, 18, and 52, including a facsimile reproduction of the first and last numbers.

Finally, we have reproduced Byron's letters from Leslie Marchand's great 12-volume edition of of Byron's Letters and Journals (John Murray and Belknap Press, 1973-1982), and have included his superb explanatory notes. We thank Harvard University Press for granting us permission to reproduce these. These are the versions I consulted for the book, although they were cross-checked against earlier versions when available.

Volumes supplied by Project Gutenberg are generally searchable; those provided by Google Books cannot be searched here, but can be searched directly from Google Books. Of course, both of these collections continue to increase their holdings.

The decision of how to organize this material was daunting, as we had so many possibilities. We have opted to list the works under five basic categories. Each of these is described above: Advertisements, Images, and Miscellaneous; Journals; Letters; Pamphlets and Books; and Poems. All these collections can be searched by author and relevant titles, as well as by a limited number of keywords.

In some cases, the readily available electronic edition was slightly different from the version that I consulted during the initial research, but the slight gain in accuracy did not seem to justify the labor of scanning the original; this does mean that the citation pages in British Periodicals and Romantic Identity will not always correspond with the versions here, which are provided for the purpose of a greater exploration of the actual texts in their own right.

This is an experiment in providing to readers an easily available glimpse at the texts which, within British Periodicals and Romantic Identity, appear only in relatively brief quotations and paraphrase. I hope this will enable interested scholars to challenge and expand upon my work, and contribute to the expansive and expanding discussion of British Periodicals of the Romantic Period.

Mark Schoenfield, Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

Collections in this community

  • Advertisements, Images and Miscellany

    Advertisements, Images, and Miscellaneous : This includes advertisements for James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a [Self-]Justified Sinner, two satirical prints relevant to the Banking Crisis of 1797, some ...
  • Journals

    Journals: In cases where I have discussed one or two articles, I have reproduced only those articles. If I have discussed three or more articles in an issue, we have presented the entire issue, with bookmarks to those ...
  • Letters

    Letters: Depending on the authors, these letters have been taken from early printed versions of the letters, including Samuel Smiles's A Publisher Among His Friends, Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter Scott, and R.C. Dallas's ...
  • Pamphlets and Books

    Pamphlets and Books: In some cases, these books represent collected volumes of periodical materials that the author produced, and in others, volumes which relate to the periodicals in a variety of ways.
  • Poems

    Poems: Most of these rhyme and are relatively easily available in other versions. They are reproduced here more for completeness than usefulness. Other poems, when they appear in a periodical, are reproduced under.

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