Abstract
Prose, of varying length, tone, purpose, and style, made up the vast majority of periodical content throughout the nineteenth century. It was the vehicle for conveying news, assessing cultural, political and social events, offering personal opinions, and entertaining readers. The variety of competing prose discourses in the nineteenth-century periodical provides a rich field for research but is not always the easiest terrain to navigate. Structuring an analysis of these prose forms inevitably gives rise to questions about readership and precedence. We find ourselves asking how we should read across these competing voices, how do we prioritise, and how did nineteenth-century readers do so? Which is more important: the editorial which allows us to orient the periodical’s political outlook, the cryptic “Notice to Correspondents” advising an individual in difficulties, or the serialised fiction that attracted the eye of the casual reader? Furthermore, do we see these different pieces of prose in periodical issues as competing with one another for attention and even survival; or does this Darwinian language of struggle gloss over the connections and correspondences between an issue’s separate units? A scholarly analysis of prose forms in nineteenth-century periodicals cannot recreate the reading practices of previous centuries, nor can it hope to trace all the connections or contradictions that exist between the pieces of prose in a particular run of periodicals. It can, though, explore the most prominent prose forms across the nineteenth-century press and give a sense of how they fitted into the larger context of the periodical issue and the publishing world.