With the eight additional periodicals indexed in this fourth and last research volume, the bibliographical and biographical research of the editors and collaborators of the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals will have identified altogether nearly 12,000 authors as the anonymous or pseudonymous contributors to forty- three major British monthlies and quarterlies. Volume IV's selection serves the series' overall goal of fairly representing the diversity in purpose and content as well as the literary excellence of British periodical journalism between 1824 and 1900; it also offers in this single volume much of the wide range of religious, political, social, literary, and commercial motivations underlying the efflorescence of publications of high quality in that society.
In this volume, at opposite ends of the political spectrum are the initially radical and Benthamite Tail's Edinburgh Magazine and the Anglo-lrish, vehemently Tory Dublin University Magazine. The short-lived Dark Blue, with its constellation of distinguished authors, was, like the Dublin University Magazine, the result of ambitious collegiate entrepreneurship, but, emerging in 1871, was almost exclusively devoted to literature and aesthetic criticism. Also included in this volume are two more important quarterlies, the Congregationalist British Quarterly Review and the Methodist London Quarterly Review. Although of sectarian foundation, each aspired successfully to address, from the perspective of its own religious convictions, a general readership with a wide variety of interests and curiosities. Finally, in the category of the frankly popular, family-oriented monthly featuring fiction and general-interest articles, magazines whose purpose was quite as much to entertain as to inform, there are Bentley's Miscellany, first edited by Dickens, and, towards the end of our period, Longman 's Magazine.
Volume IV conforms to the format of the first three volumes. In Part A an introductory essay on the publication history of each periodical is followed by each issue's Table of Contents, including the authorial signature, the Index attribution, and the evidence for that attribution. Part B provides bibliographies of the identified contributors together with identifying biographical data and the source of that data. Part C is an alphabetical bibliographical table of identified and unidentified pseudonyms and initials. An extensive appendix of corrections and additions updates the contents of Volumes I, II, and III.
