Countless shelves of nineteenth-century periodical literature contain a vast range of disparate subjects providing windows onto a world at once familiar and strange, distinct and occult. The periodicals played important roles in informing the thought, general knowledge, political views, and literary tastes of nineteenth-century Britain. A large proportion of the many periodical writers were women who have been forgotten, their biographies unwritten and likely to remain so. A great many Scottish names appear in The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals but as yet relatively few of these have even been positively identified as Scottish women. We do know, however, that several Scots made substantial contributions to nineteenth-century periodical literature and, through their many writings, to the literary culture and society of Britain. Though some were better known as novelists, these workers in words all plied the trades of the periodicals: journalism, literary criticism, travel writing, and reviews of a diverse range of books across several subject boundaries. Such work is all too easily submerged by other literature and forgotten, a testament not to its limitations alone, but to our own. Among the most notable Scottish viragos of the periodical press were Christian Isobel Johnstone, Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Dempster, and Constance Gordon-Cumming. It is the journalism of these women that I want to introduce and celebrate. I have chosen to discuss them by starting with the most recent first.

Constance Gordon-Cumming

Little seems to be known about Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming (1837-1924), a Scottish traveller involved with the Church Missionary Society who published some sixteen books and pamphlets concerning her travels. She also contributed some thirty-six articles to Blackwood's Magazine (Maga) and other journals. With considerable journalistic skill she investigated religious practices, customs, history, work, and at times cast a romantic haze of adventure and scenic splendour over the places she visited in Japan, China, America, Ceylon, India, Scotland, and several other countries. In her 1882 article, ‘Across the Yellow Sea’, she recounts an adventurous journey from Peking to Nagasaki. After telling of her dangerous voyage she gives a brief account of the rise of Christianity in Japan during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, bloody in persecutions and martyrdoms.