ABSTRACT
For the student of nineteenth-century literature who is likely to be directed by syllabuses or teachers to canonical, high culture texts, the periodical press offers a pithy conspectus of the diversity of Victorian writing. Writing for the press was ‘in the family’, his father having worked as a parliamentary correspondent on the British Press; and Dickens’s earliest published writing was as a reporter for The Mirror of Parliament, a paper owned by his uncle. However, unlike Dickens and Thackeray she did not elect to remain in active relation to the periodical press after 1859, and she eschewed any part in founding or editing periodicals subsequently or even contributing. The problem was access to the male space of publishing and the male coteries and informal formations associated with the periodical press, such as the Punch table, the Fraserians, or the Metaphysical Society associated with the editor and networks of the Contemporary Review until 1877, and then the Nineteenth Century.
