Introduction

In the course of my work as co-editor of the Athenaeum Indexing Project I spent hours in the company of the 'marked file', the editor's copy of the Athenaeum (1828-1921) which reveals the names of the anonymous reviewers of this Victorian weekly (see figure 1.1). From about 1830, the year Charles Wentworth Dilke assumed control over the paper's management, up to 1919, when the new editor, John Middleton Murry, introduced signed reviews, the successive editors (or their assistants) scribbled the name of every contributor in their copy of the weekly. Only a limited number of volumes during the early years of its existence, and some of the contributions published in the war years, were left unmarked. ¹