Table 21.1, marking a continual rise in the number of trade and professional periodicals over the nineteenth century, summarises the narrative of this chapter. While a rise in itself is only to be expected given the well-known rise in population and literacy over the period, by recording for each year how many periodicals were being published in the various categories (not just the new ones but those continuing as well), the table shows the varying densities of the categories in print space occupied by the nineteenth-century trade and professional press. Of course, the table raises pressing questions, not least what in reality it refers to, how it was created and how reliable it is. This chapter seeks to address these questions by first offering a brief review of previous work in the field, where I show that what is missing is precisely such an overview as Table 21.1 presents, before explaining how the dataset that underlies it was fashioned and what we can learn from it.

‘Representative Journals’

In 1860, taking its cue from three articles published the previous year (‘Cheap Literature’, 1859; ‘British Press’, 1859; [Dallas] 1859a), the anonymously written Newspaper Press of the Present Day devoted the third chapter of its ‘statistical’ history to ‘class journals … which might more properly be called representative journals, because they represent not only classes but professions, arts, occupations, almost every ramification of study and industry’ (Newspaper Press 1860: 33). The volume claimed there were 125 such journals ‘for the most part … established within the last twenty-five or thirty years’, and the number was growing all the time (Newspaper Press 1860: 34). It listed the various classes thus:

In fact, the chapter included other classes as well – ‘Court and Fashionable World’, for instance; it subdivided some (‘Religious’ becomes ‘Church of England’, ‘Roman Catholic’, ‘Wesleyan’, ‘Unitarian’ and ‘Jewish’) and mashed others, like ‘Railway — Engineering — Architectural — Building’ and ‘Medical — Surgical — Chemical’, into single undifferentiated paragraphs.