My students are putting on a book exhibition using books from my colllection!

New end of the year update to At the Circulating Library: just passed 26,000 titles (third of the way through English Catalogue volume 4), plus hundreds of new author biographies. Enjoy!

Just entered the 26,001st novel into the ATCL database! Update coming soon…

The #2025MVSA is off to a great start this morning with the opening plenary panel!

Conference “Genealogies” – 2025 Conference Website April 3-6, 2025, hosted by Purdue University Fort Wayne, IN. “Darwin’s Finches,” or “Galapagos Finches” [colorized]. Journal of…

Getting ready to welcome everyone to the #2025MVSA conference at @purduefw.bsky.social starting today!

midwestvictorian.org/conference/

In Memoriam: Remembering Brian Maidment – RSVP A tribute from RSVP president Priti Joshi to past president and long-time member, Brian Maidment, who passed away January 28, 2025.

The great historian of the early 19th-c. comic press, Brian Maidment, died last week. He was as deeply appreciated for his personal kindness as for his brilliant work, and I treasured his friendship. @pritijoshi.bsky.social has written a lovely tribute: rs4vp.org/in-memoriam-... #C19

Wonderful photo!

A copy of my book, Eve, Martin Paul, The Digital Humanities and Literary Studies (Oxford University Press, 2022). It has a pink circle on the front with the cover text in it.

Not at MLA because dialysis stops me travelling (urgh) but chuffed that @kfitz.info sent me this picture from the event :)

The Inheritance of Evil, or the Consequences of Marrying a Deceased Wife’s Sister, by Felicia Skene, published in London in 1849

That… is not a very good title.

The Curran Fellowships – RSVP The Curran Fellowships are travel and research grants intended to aid scholars studying British magazines and newspapers from the long nineteenth century in making use of primary print and archival so...

For any scholar working on the 19th-c. press, a Curran Fellowship can be a big help. Everybody is eligible, and the application is blessedly straightforward. This year's deadline is next week: Wednesday, January 15. Recommendation letters due Jan 22. rs4vp.org/awards/curra... #19th-c

My book, Fiction on the Page in Nineteenth-Century Magazines, is out now with Oxford University Press!

academic.oup.com/book/58989

It’s a book about page fillers, product placement, and strange hybrid fiction. It asks how the page of the magazine became a spur for new, odd genres.

Conference Seminars 2025 MVSA Conference Seminars are small, with eight to ten participants each. Participants exchange work to read ahead of the 2025 conference and meet in a closed, collaborative session to discuss overl…

PLEASE APPLY to Midwest Victorian Studies conference seminars. Three options: Lit History/Genealogies; Plant Humanities; Work-in-Progress, led respectively by Alison Booth, Lindsay Wells, and me. Apps due Jan 5; conference April 3-6 @ Purdue U Ft Wayne. Full CFP & app details (easy process!) below.

Announcing our winter special issue: "Nobody Cares but Everybody Should: Toward a Shared History of the Novel." 12 short essays engage with truisms in novel studies. Thanks to Sarah Allison & Megan Ward (@sarahdallison.bsky.social, @megaplex.bsky.social) for guest editing & to all the contributors!

6 Days to MLA! 12 Truisms About the Novel Debunked. Day 7: Freytag's plot pyramid is the deep structure underlying all narrative. To find out what's NOT true, read
@dallasliddle.bsky.social
in Studies in the Novel: muse-jhu-edu.oregonstate.idm.oclc.org/issue/54034 w/ @sarahdallison.bsky.social

New update to ATCL! We are now up to:

• 25,221 titles (+1,221 for the year)
• 5,970 authors (+391 for the year)
• 250+ new author bios
• new setting and genre tags
• new downloadable datasets

This year, we finished English Catalogue v3 (1872-80) and began v4 (1881-89)

#victorianstudies

8 Days to MLA! 12 Truisms About the Novel Debunked. Day 5: The Victorian novel is an English novel. To find out what's NOT true, read Sierra Eckert in Studies in the Novel: muse-jhu-edu.oregonstate.idm.oclc.org/issue/54034 w/
@sarahdallison.bsky.social
+
@studiesinthenovel.bsky.social

9 Days to MLA! 12 Truisms About the Novel Debunked. Day 4: The bound commercial novel is a Victorian phenomenon. To find out what's NOT true, read Lindsey Eckert in Studies in the Novel: muse-jhu-edu.oregonstate.idm.oclc.org/issue/54034 w/ @sarahdallison.bsky.social + @studiesinthenovel.bsky.social

11 Days to MLA; 12 Truisms About the Novel Debunked. Day Two: The typical Victorian novel was published serially. To find out what's not true, read
@3volumenovel.bsky.social
in a special issue of Studies in the Novel: muse-jhu-edu.oregonstate.idm.oclc.org/issue/54034

title page Studies in the Novel, Special Issue, Nobody Cares but Everybody Should: Toward a Shared History of the Novel, Guest Editors Sarah Allison & Megan Ward

Attn, attn: The very special issue of Studies in the Novel

Nobody Cares but Everybody Should: Toward a Shared History of the Novel

is OUT!

so lovely to co-edit w @megaplex.bsky.social and big thanks to @noragilbert.bsky.social & Tim Boswell @studiesinthenovel.bsky.social

Very elaborate masthead for the Pictorial Times. It is from issue one, Saturday, March 18th 1843.

The beautiful Pictorial Times is this week's #MastheadMonday. Founded in 1843 by Henry Vizetelly & Andrew Spottiswoode, in reaction to the success of the ILN, in 1848 it merged with the Lady's Newspaper. Digitised by the BL & free-to-view here: www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/titles/picto...

It is fun to see that Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" was serialized that same month

You are very welcome! I am very proud of that feature.

The Curran Fellowships – RSVP The Curran Fellowships are travel and research grants intended to aid scholars studying British magazines and newspapers from the long nineteenth century in making use of primary print and archival so...

Curran Fellowships are now open for applications (due Jan 15, letters Jan 22), and they can be a big help to anyone researching any aspect of the 19th-c. British press. Topics pursued by past winners have ranged far and wide: rs4vp.org/awards/curra...
Details here: rs4vp.org/awards/curra... #19th

Infectious diseases killed Victorian children at alarming rates — their novels highlight the fragility of public health today Between 40% and 50% of children didn’t live past 5 in the US during the 19th century. Popular authors like Charles Dickens documented the common but no less gutting grief of losing a child.

Important lessons from old books: "Victorian novels chronicle the terrible grief of losing children. Depicting the cruelty of diseases largely unfamiliar today, they also warn against being lulled into thinking that child deaths can never be inevitable again." theconversation.com/infectious-d...

In the 1840s, Albert Smith and Angus B Reach teamed with David Bogue to create a small craze for pocket-sized illustrated comic booklets. An old friend, knowing how much I like them, just gave me some that were bound together. Starting with Reach's "A Natural History of Bores," cuts by HG Hine.

If you're in New Orleans #MLA25, join us at the RSVP roundtable on "The Challenge of Periodical Studies" with Maria Damkjær, Fionnuala Dillane, Katherine Malone, Jim Mussell, and your truly. Session #350, Friday, Jan 10, 3:30pm

Masthead is the Evening Star. The newspaper’s title appears in basic block capitals. The numeration tells us this is issue one, published on Monday 25th July 1842, and it lists the price at two pence.

It’s #MastheadMonday. Here’s the Evening Star (1842-43), Feargus O'Connor's attempt to establish a daily London Chartist newspaper after the success of the weekly Northern Star (1837-52). It lasted less than a year. Digitised by the BL & free to view www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/titles/eveni...

F. E. M. Notley's supernatural story “Striking Midnight” was published in The Argosy in December 1881. When the candle flame burns blue, a ghost approaches…

#BookWormSat

Digital Victorians: Author Paul Fyfe and Ryan Cordell on Nineteenth-Century Media and the Digital Humanities | Rare Book School Join author and SoFCB Senior Fellow Paul Fyfe and interviewer Ryan Cordell for a conversation about Fyfe’s book Digital Victorians: From Nineteenth-Century Media to Digital Humanities (Stanford Univer...

Wanna come to my party? Having a convo with @ryancordell.bsky.social about *Digital Victorians* in a series about new books in critical bibliography. Thurs 12/12 12:00p EST. Details and register here: rarebookschool.org/all-programs...

Martin Chuzzlewit cover wrapper

David Copperfield cover wrapper

A Tale of Two Cities cover wrapper

Mystery of Edwin Drood cover wrapper

We experience Victorian novels now as Culture™️ Objects with heft and capital "L" Literary Significance, but for a large part of the century they were sliced up into small chapter fragments and illustrated in ways likely closer to how we think about comic books today!