The North American British Music Studies Association

Update to the Curran Index

This post came from Patrick Leary to the Victoria Listserv, and may be of interest to those working with 19th-century periodicals.

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I am very pleased to announce a major new edition of the Curran Index.  Editor Gary Simons has made enormous progress in uncovering and publishing the identities of contributors to major Victorian magazines, now including a number of titles that were never part of the original Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals.  Gary details his latest findings here:
http://www.victorianresearch.org/2015_Dec_Curran_Index_rev.pdf

Those not familiar with the Curran Index will want to read the introductory material on the website, and have a browse through the listings: http://victorianresearch.org/curranindex.html  Under Gary’s editorship, the Index has expanded hugely since Eileen Curran and I first put it online over a dozen years ago, and now provides listings for about 7,500 contributions by some 1,000 authors.  I would encourage anyone who works with 19th-century British periodicals to make use of — and where possible to contribute to — the work of the Index, which is in essence a continuation of the mission of the Wellesley.  The foundational argument of this ongoing project is simply stated: knowing who wrote what matters.  I would argue further that finding out who wrote the articles, poems, and stories in the Victorian press, which was so largely governed by the custom of anonymity, matters now more than ever, as the enormously varied output of that press has now become so much more accessible and explorable than it has ever been.

If you are working on a particular author and believe that you have identified one or more previously unattributed works that were published in 19th-c. magazines or newspapers, please consider making those findings available to other scholars through the Curran Index.  Gary Simons would love to hear from you; he can be reached at gsimons1946@yahoo.com  By the same token, please drop him a note if you have any comments or suggestions about the Index.  As with so many scholarly research projects, feedback of any kind is hard to come by, and always very welcome.