About

The Index will identify the authorship of thousands of anonymous contributions to the journal Notes and Queries (1849–) and where possible provide the essential biographical information of the contributors. In addition, by providing complex searching and filtering options, the public interface to the Index will permit researchers to make sophisticated queries about the history of literary knowledge.

Notes and Queries has a unique importance in the history of literary knowledge. For almost a century — from November 3, 1849, when it was first published, until at least April 1, 1939, when Oxford University Press began to publish it and it started to become a more typical professional and academic journal, it was the most important “medium of intercommunication” for “literary men, artists, antiquaries, genealogists, etc.” (1849–1863), for “literary men, general readers, etc.” (1863–1923), and then for “readers and writers, collectors and librarians” (1924–).

In the pages of Notes and Queries, especially in its first half century, we can see modern scholarly practices in the study of the humanities being worked out, notably in philology, lexicography, bibliography, textual editing, and art history. Essential groundwork was laid there for enduring and critically important reference works: The Oxford English Dictionary (as it is now known), the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the English Dialect Dictionary, and the publication program of the Early English Text Society. The nineteenth century, it is well known, was a period when amateur knowledge was disciplined and transformed into professional knowledge. In these processes, antiquarianism became history or archaeology, folklore yielded to anthropology, bibliophilia took on the modern forms of textual editing and bibliography, and connoisseurship became art history. Or rather: professional and disciplinary forms of those knowledge emerged alongside the amateur and non-professional forms that would now be deprecated. Some forms of knowledge (genealogy and heraldry, for instance) never became university-based, or only partially (as with folklore studies or parochial history). The change in the nature of knowledge so that by the second half of the last century it would be virtually identified with university-sponsored research is an obstacle to understanding how it was undertaken in previous periods.

Notes and Queries is a uniquely effective proxy by which to study the knowledge practices of the “literary men” (and women) and the “general reader” of the Victorian and Edwardian ages. It charts this transformation in its equal welcome of amateur and professional contributors (often, because of the use of pseudonyms, impossible to distinguish) and in the changes in the subjects which garner the most attention and scrutiny. Furthermore, the topics inquired over, the kinds of questions asked, disputes over the extent of authoritative knowledge, the implicit range of references and languages, all constitute rich and vital questions in the history of knowledge and the history of literature. However, one major obstacle to making use of the journal as an object of study has always been the large number of anonymous contributors. This anonymity has prevented the kind of prosopographical inquiry that would permit wide research into the identify of contributors, their gender, their social class, their educational backgrounds, their geography, and the nature of the networks which they inhabited.

A marked file corresponding to 69 of the 79 volumes published between July 1876 and December 1915 is currently housed at the library of the University of Newcastle. One marked volume from July to December 1897 is now at the library of the University of Colorado. In these volumes the contributors who did not sign their own name have been identified in copies owned by the editorial staff of Notes and Queries. Because these volumes exist, it is possible to create a substantial index identifying the pseudonyms and initialisms of these contributors. Moreover, Ian Jackson (1951–2018), who initiated the project of identifying the Notes and Queries pseudonyms four decades ago, demonstrated great ingenuity and wide reading in being able to identify additional contributors in volumes outside the scope of the marked file. The study of Victorian literature was transformed a half century ago with the publication of Walter Houghton’s Wellesley Index of Victorian Periodicals 1824–1900 (5 vols, 1966–1979). Making use of marked files for dozens of Victorian reference works, this landmark reference work identified hundreds of anonymous Victorian contributors. Its systematic attributions altered our understanding of Victorian authorship and of hundreds of Victorian authors themselves. The Wellesley Index has continued to inspired further research along its lines, for example the online Curran Index to Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and the ongoing work of the members of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. The Index of the Pseudonyms and Initialisms of Notes and Queries is a further contribution in attribution, focusing on a journal not included by Houghton and Curran, and standing somewhat apart from those which they did include, insofar as it has tens of thousands more contributions than any of the literary journals previously de-anonymized, and because its scope is so much more extensive. Moreover, the Index will include information about the gender and location of its contributors, further expanding the range of questions that can be investigated. In an electronic form, moreover, complex searches will be enabled that were not possible within the print format.

Information in NQ Indexes

Index of Contributors

Index of Articles