Acknowledgements

In spring 2020 at the Ryerson Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH), the technical assistance of Alexandra Pospisil, who designed this site and translated the data into a viable format, has been transformative. CDH Project Manager Reg Beatty supported Ms Pospisil’s work and CDH co-directors Lorraine Janzen Kooistra and Jason Boyd backed the project wholeheartedly. 

Two research fellowships provided welcome opportunities for consolidating the project – a Visiting Fellowship in summer 2011 at the Universität Freiburg’s Historische Lebenswelten in populären Wissenkulturen der Gegenwart group (sponsored by Sylvia Paletschek, Barbara Korte and Doris Lechner) and a Visiting Fellowship at Clare Hall, Cambridge in 2012.

The research was initially funded by a Standard Research Grant from SSHRC, awarded in 2007 for the project “Public History in Print Culture: England’s Past in Victorian Periodicals” (no. 410-2007-0020).  The grant funded the employment research assistants – all of them MA students of the University of Windsor’s Graduate Program in History: Lorene Bridgen, Conal Calvert, Meganne Cameron, Mark Conté, Erica Lyons, Sean Morton, and Natalie Rubino.

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals extended an invitation to present their Michael Wolff Lecture in September 2005 in Washington DC. It was a first opportunity to think about the publishing of history in the periodical press (under the title “Narratives and Editors: History and Historians in Victorian Periodical Research”) and RSVP’s enthusiastic response was vitally important to the way the research developed.

HBooks would not have been possible without the online publication, by ProQuest (British Periodicals) and Gale Cengage (Nineteenth-Century Periodicals), of subscription-based digital editions of numerous 19th-century British periodicals. These databases have transformed the study of the Victorian periodical press, but they, in turn, would not have been possible without decades of scholarship beginning with the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (5 vol, University of Toronto Press, 1965-1988) which is available online through ProQuest.