What is the Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals?
Although scholarly studies of individual periodicals have been published from the 1930s onward, interest in the nineteenth-century periodical press intensified in the 1960s with the publication of the first volume of The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals in 1968, along with the establishment of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, and the founding of the Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, later the Victorian Periodicals Review. Detailed information exists on certain key periodicals, notably the forty or more included in the five volumes of the Wellesley Index, and publications like Punch, or the Boy’s Own Magazine which achieved celebrity through a long publishing life. But for many of the thousands of titles which comprise the nineteenth-century periodical press little information exists on the personalities who founded and directed them, and still less on their editorial policies, frequency, price, changes of title and physical properties — page size, numbers of colu
