This is the most recent of several collections that have developed from the annual Research Society for Victorian Periodicals conference, in this case the 2000 meeting. Like other similar collections its virtue is that it provides the reader with a quick entry into several thoughtful and diverse recent interpretations. As with many collections, however, the brevity of the chapters means that the reader is teased with intimations of new directions rather than presented with any bold new large-scale interpretations.

While topically diverse, all twelve essays, eleven of which are written by literary critics, engage with the political role of the press, broadly understood. With differing emphases, they demonstrate the press's function as an arena for constructing competing discourses or narratives about public life and “issues of the day,” some of them primarily through text analysis, others with a greater emphasis on behind the scenes processes by which various periodicals were shaped.

While it has long been observed, for example, that under Queen Victoria the monarchy became ceremonial and representative rather than governing, John Plunkett's essay (adapted from his superb Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch) demonstrates Victoria and Albert's early use of the illustrated press to define a new royal role that Plunkett calls “civic publicness.” The relationship between monarch and media was, of course, symbiotic, with the royal couple serving not only as political symbols but also as celebrities whose images could sell papers. Ian Haywood examines the radical press's efforts to construct inclusive traditions centered on particular, often painful, remembered moments, such as Peterloo. These chapters, among others, demonstrate the press's role in creating narratives and counternarratives about the meaning and makeup of the political nation.

Several chapters demonstrate the role of periodicals in providing a venue for competing identities. In investigating the antagonistic response of the Dart, a Liberal Birmingham paper, to proposed schemes for using Welsh mountain water to supply Birmingham in the early 1890s, Aled Jones shows how the press constructed metropolitan identity in opposition to a Welsh other. He shows, further, that the controversy over the water scheme reveals an untidiness that is obscured by unitary narratives of civic progress. Patricia O’Hara's chapter similarly shows the directly political consequences of discursive contests, demonstrating the conflicting portrayals of agricultural laborers that undergirded the Third Reform Bill. Julie Codell focuses not on any specific policy controversy, but on debates over the character of Indian society and British colonial administration. She disputes the tendency among scholars to juxtapose Western and oriental identities in a neat dichotomy, showing instead that colonial authors often positioned themselves simultaneously as British and Indian.

Other chapters address the form and function of Victorian journalism at the level of medium. Graham Law examines newspapers as the site of serial fiction in the 1840s, paying particular attention to the Sunday Times and Illustrated London News. He not only deeply contextualizes debates over the appropriateness of this use of newspaper space but also presents them as precursors to similar debates around the New Journalism half a century later. Laurel Brake contrasts the efficacy and boldness of W. T. Stead's “Maiden Tribute” campaign against child prostitution in 1885 with not only the timidity but also downright complicity of the Liberal/radical press four years later when confronted with the discovery of a male brothel in London's Cleveland Street. She argues persuasively that the contrast between an apparent triumph of “government by journalism” in the former case—the Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed—and its failure a few years later can be explained by the events’ differing relationship to prevailing gender discourse.

One of the most difficult but crucial questions to address when examining historical periodicals is their relationship with readers; several of the authors in this volume explore this question in admirable ways. Barbara Onslow examines Florence Fenwick Miller's columns in the “Ladies’ Page” of the Illustrated London News, revealing how she constructed an interactive public around feminism and fashion while employing a fictitious persona. Johanna Smith presents Eliza Cook's Journal, published from 1849 to 1854, as a text that successfully addressed multiple audiences in seemingly conflicting ways, and she concludes by speculating that Eliza Cook was a lesbian and that one of the prevailing readings of her journal, by one strand of its audience, was as a lesbian text. Sheila Rosenberg contextualizes debates in the Westminster Review on marriage and divorce, published between 1885 and 1891, showing that editor John Chapman was a long-standing supporter of feminist causes. Despite allowing dissatisfaction with marriage to be expressed, however, Chapman stopped short of sanctioning sexual license, largely out of concern for readers’ sensibilities, while many of the more controversial opinions were relegated to an “Independent Section.”

While several of the chapters explore the periodical as an agent in fashioning modernity, perhaps the best exemplar of this theme is Mark Turner's sophisticated dissection of The Yellow Book, an 1890s journal Turner calls “experimental” (139). In illuminating the paper's use of visual play to capture urban modernity, Turner insists that there was no one urban experience in its pages, but rather a “multiple and ambiguous” city; he suggests that this fragmentation constitutes the journal's “truly modern aspect” (158). Patricia de Montfort's chapter presents modernity from a different angle, the intersection of consumerism and celebrity. It examines James McNeil Whistler's use of the World to attain celebrity status and create a distinct persona, an enterprise in which his professional goals dovetailed with the New Journalism's consumerist emphasis on personality.

This collection will naturally be most useful to a specialist audience of media historians; not surprisingly, it complicates its scholarly terrain intricately rather than rendering the field more manageable. Yet these chapters are analytically interesting and well crafted, and this volume is a deeply impressive example of its genre.