Despite the seductions of the Institute for the leisure of the theory classes any historian worth his grants knows literature to be an indispensable source. How much would we know about the England of Gloriana, of Anne, of Victoria, without Shakespeare, the Spectator, and “Locksley Hall?” A lot no doubt, but how much poorer we should be without them. Not to overdo chivalry the pages that follow view Jeremy Bentham's England through the spectacles of Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) whose place as a novelist may unsafely be left to those undertakers of reputations, the professors of literature, but whose value as a document may best be gauged by a historian. Indeed Peacock is a historian, the better for being a satirist. Whether all historians are satirists must be decided by others, but surely all satirists are historians. Compared to parliamentary papers, mercantile ledgers, the Benthamite corpus, Peacock's slim volumes may seem to afford an historian no more than a trial run. Yet such is far from the case. The problem for the initiate is not paucity but riches. The shafts of his satire leave scarcely a contemporary fad or fancy in darkness. What is more, it takes very little sensitivity to appreciate how brightly those shafts light up many posturings of our own day. The words, “for the initiate,” are deliberately chosen: to capture Peacock's flavor one must comprehend his intellectual milieu. To this area there is no better key than contemporary periodicals wherein the words, the phrases, often the very rhythms find echo in his novels. Having absorbed the first, one grasps the second, one understands what Peacock was saying when he knows what was being talked about when he said it.

Anthony Munday was a protege of John Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Leicester himself was a member of the progressive Protestant nobility in Elizabethan England, which sought to turn completely away from Rome and toward Geneva. These progressives wanted vernacular translations of great works such as the Bible and the classics. They aimed at founding an English and Protestant tradition of literature.

In 1579 Philip II of Spain continued to press for an alliance with Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth seriously considered marrying the Due d'Alencon. Such a marriage would cement ties between England and France. The leading progressives, Leicester, Walshingham and Cecil could tolerate neither one of these Roman Catholic alliances. Thus, Leicester intensified his patronage of Puritan propagandists.

When the Campion controversy arose in 1581, it proved a boon to Leicester and the progressives. Here was an opportunity to garner Elizabeth's support, if they could prove that Jesuits and Roman Catholics were plotting regicide and the return of England to Roman Catholicism.

Between 1581 and 1584 Munday produced a series of pamphlets designed to arouse English opinion against “popish recusants.” This essay deals with one of these pamphlets: A discoverie of Edmund Campion and his confederates, their most horrible and traiterous practices against her majestye's most royal person and realm. … In this essentially propagandistic tract, Munday equates priestly activity of the Jesuits with subversion. This equation was based upon a Parliamentary statute of 1581, which declared that priests sent from abroad to convert Englishmen were guilty of treason.

The passage is from the preface to George Eliot's novel Felix Holt the Radical, written between 1865 and 1867. It describes a world which the writer knew intimately; she grew up in it, and it provided the setting for much of her best work. George Eliot's father, Robert Evans, whose influence profoundly affected the novelist's development, was born in Staffordshire two years before the beginning of the American War of Independence. He was apprenticed to the family trade of builder and carpenter, and rose through “his large knowledge of building, of mines, of plantations, of various branches of valuation and measurement” to become agent to Francis Newdigate of Arbury in 1806. Newdigate had interests in the North Warwickshire coalfield and in the canal navigations which, before the coming of the railway, had played such an important part in the development of the region. It might be inferred from this that he was among the most advanced landowners of the day. Progressive notions in estate management, however, went hand in hand with an enlightened, but profoundly conservative paternalism in political and social affairs: an attitude shared by his steward, whom Marian Evans remembered to have pronounced “the word ‘Government’ in a tone that charged it with awe, and made it a part of my effective religion, in contrast to the word ‘rebel,’ which seemed to carry the stamp of evil in its syllables.”

Justification is no longer necessary for the importance of research in Victorian periodicals, nor for the clear and very special window which periodicals offer into the life and thought of the nineteenth century. The pressing problem is how best to use the plethora of resource which exists, and how to render useful to the scholar the mountains of material which remain essentially un-catalogued. If we accept as a temporary definition of a Victorian periodical “a serial publication, issued more than once a year, part (at least) of whose run falls within the span 1824-1900,” we find documentation to show that at least 16,000 of these periodicals were published during the Victorian era, and it is by no means certain that that figure is exhaustive. Within this framework can be found every conceivable variety of opinion, debate, political posturing and social commentary. If one were able to select one year, say at mid-century, and sample from each of the 16,000 periodicals what a kaleidescopic glance into an era would be provided. Since this is neither practical nor likely to happen until the humanists' use of computer skills becomes more sophisticated, it remains for the literary and historical scholars to develop other means of mastering the diffuse, and at times elusive, material.

In the past twelve years a number of distinguished men and women, both in the United States and in England, have applied themselves to initial problems of periodical research and as a result there have been at least four outstanding milestones laid on the pathway. The first of these, the very prestigious accomplishment by Professor Walter E. Houghton, of Wellesley College, was the establishment of the 15-20 year project, The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (WI), the first volume of which appeared in 1966. (The second volume is projected for 1971, and the third for 1976, with the question of a fourth undecided.) This project was born about 1958, of Houghton's own frustration in trying to make use of periodicals while writing The Victorian Frame of Mind. As a result, he and his wife, Esther Rhoads Houghton, set out to provide a new tool to study Victorian men and ideas.

The main source of the criticism of the political leadership of Daniel O'Connell during the last three years of his life emanated from inside his own Irish Repeal Party. These attacks crystallized around the conflict that arose between the moral force tactics of O'Connell and the more militant and republican and separatist critics of these policies. The indictment of these critics, who became known as the Young Ireland group, has not been seriously challenged by Irish national historians since. Oliver MacDonagh admitted that before 1843 O'Connell had “blazed the trail at Westminster” and had begun the political enlightenment of the masses, involving the Church in his movement. Yet “in the end he failed ingloriously. After 1843 his creation began to disintegrate until two decades later his purposes and techniques seemed almost to have vanished.”

O'Connell's flexible and pragmatic genius during his prime has remained unquestioned. Then he forged, out of the defeat and division of the Act of Union, a political link between the Irish Catholic Lower Nation and the English Protestant Upper Nation, and thereby created the first Irish parliamentary party that could speak with a national voice. What, then, was the basis of these imputations against his last three years? An answer to this question may be provided through a study of O'Connell's particular application of his moral force tactics during his last three years. Two major events will be selected to pinpoint these policies of O'Connell and the conflict within Repeal that ensued. The first occurred in 1843 at Clontarf where O'Connell made a firm declaration on the physical limitations of his objectives. For this he has been reproached for his insincerity and timidity when threatened by the British government. The second occurred in the debate over the College Bill in 1845 in the Repeal Association. There the ideological emphasis of his moral force tactics, namely, his Catholic alliance, was criticized as too divisive and outdated for the Irish national movement. Thus, to O'Connell was attributed both the failure to show bold leadership in a moment of national peril, and an unrealistic and autocratic inability to overcome the sectarian and religious division within Repeal.