
Fortunately, following the work of these early scholars, resources such as The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (1966-89), The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals (1997), Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, 1802-1906 (1963), and the listing of newspaper and periodicals in the third volume of The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1969) have simplified the scholar's task of locating and classifying nineteenth-century periodical material. At the moment, empirical studies that focus on aspects of material culture-such as histories of specific titles, statistics on circulation and cost, and detailed information on editors and contributors-live comfortably alongside more theoretically inclined works that f ocus on the text a s a signif ying p ractice contributing to charged power relations.