Modern Greece in the Victorian Periodical Press, 1821-1897

“Modern Grece in the Victorian Periodical Press, 1821-1897” is a bibliographical aid to researchers of nineteenth-century Greece. It presents a selection of primary sources drawn from the Victorian periodical press that relate to Modern Greece and the Greeks. Short stories, poems, articles based on travel memoirs, book reviews, essays, and political commentaries are here available to guide the researcher into an extended –though not exhaustive– gallery of representations of the young kingdom, and follow its transformation from an Ottoman dominion to a modern state.

The focus is on publications of the Victorian period, stretching from the 1840s to the turn of the century. An exception was made for the 1820s, the decade of the Greek Revolution which culminated in the foundation of the independent Greek State in 1830. This section commences with Greece during the 1820s through the pages of a remarkable literary periodical, The New Monthly Magazine.

In terms of genre, the periodicals selected include reviews as well as magazines of a literary and /or political orientation. Therefore, one will come across texts that, in style and content, were originally intended for varied if not distinct readerships: high-brow and popular, politically-minded and literary, grave and satirical, they appear here to offer a kaleidoscopic vision of the perceptions and writings on Greece.This variety informs today’s readers about the complexities of “Greece” as an idea and its shifting nature across genre, time, and space.

Space here bears two significations. First, the one related to Greece. Second, the geographical origin of each publication: England, Scotland, and Ireland are here present, offering their views on Greece, always connected to their topical anxieties and preocuppations.

The periodicals included are The New Monthly Magazine, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, The Dublin University Magazine, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, the National Review (the periodical edited by Bagehot & Hutton Holt, 1855-1864), The Cornhill, Macmillan’s Magazine, The Fortnightly Review, and The Contemporary Review.

For each publication we focus on a certain decade, for example, we look at The Dublin University Magazineduring the 1840s—where we come across a number of Greek themed stories—and Macmillan’s Magazineduring the 1870s, with its focus on archaeology and the Eastern Question.

Publications overlap, especially during periods of international crises that brought Greece to the fore. For example, for the 1850s and 1860s, one may look at Fraser’s Magazine, the literary Cornhill, and the more political quarterly National Review. The researcher may thus acquire a broader scope of the ideas circulating about Modern Greece that cut across genres. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the iconic publication in its genre, is offered from the 1830s till the end of the century.

For each periodical, there is a separate page, with a bibliographical list and a link to download a scanned version of each entry in pdf format.

This bibliographical aid is greatly indebted to the pioneering multivolume work Houghton,Walter (ed.). 1988. Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900 (vol. 1-4). University of Toronto and Routledge, as well as the equally important The Curran Index to Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, eds. Lars Atkin and Emily Bell. 2017-present. https://www.curranindex.org/.

For the attribution of authors, when these are not indicated in the original text, we have consulted both bibliographical indices and the author’s name appears in brackets.

Throughout we have used volumes housed in university libraries, primarily the libraries of the Pennsylvania State University, the Michigan University, the Indiana University, and the University of California. The volumes were digitized by Google and are freely available through the Hathitrust Digital Library.

The digital files offered here may be used solely for research and academic purposes and not for commercial purposes.