As our encounters with nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers are increasingly digital, the emphasis is often on what is lost: the feeling of paper, colour, the smell and, often most importantly, the ease of navigating around a format that we know well. Digitization addresses many of the methodological problems presented by the nineteenth-century press by bringing disparate sources together, archiving them in a fairly stable format, and making their contents searchable. Such gains, and they are considerable, are at the cost of a radical alteration in the materiality of the original periodicals and newspapers upon which such resources are based. In this paper I will argue that although digitization necessarily involves a reimagining of periodicals and newspapers as digital objects, what should not be lost are their forms.

This is will be a familiar argument for the readers of Victorian Periodicals Review and the members of its sponsoring organization, the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, but one that I think is worth repeating. Despite much influential work in periodical studies that addresses the forms of serials, the dominant critical approach to the nineteenth-century press still treats it an archive of content, waiting to be found. This attitude is one that will be fostered by the presentation of periodicals and newspapers in electronic resources: built on the model of the archive, many of these resources identify the individual articles as the main components of serials, separating them from the rest of the issue, volume and run in which they belong.¹ The issue of form is complex, however. As I have argued elsewhere, it is difficult, if not impossible, to posit an "original" form of the periodicals and newspapers that survive today.² The archive as it stands is marked both by the diversity of nineteenth-century publishing practices and the regimes of the countless archivists and librarians responsible for its [End Page 93] preservation. It is easy to fetishize the single issue as it was produced from the press, but publishers also produced prepared volumes that already lacked advertisements and other paratextual matter. Equally, although the unbound single issues that remain hint tantalizingly at the matter that has been lost in bound volumes, the bound volume itself was offered as a posited end-point for serials and has successfully conserved things like prefaces and indices, material that was often issued separately from single issues. However, form, produced and reproduced with every issue, is an integral part of what constitutes the genre of serials. It is both the means through which the identity of a title is established from issue to issue and the way in which it orders the abundance of changing events in the world to make them available for consumption. As the least material of structures, form represents the space where the nonhuman and human worlds meet: a property of things and a property of thought, form permits us to order the world as well as recognize its hard edges and behaviour. Its minimal materiality—form appears impersonal, an empirical fact—means that it is easily reproducible, both across the nineteenth-century press and in digital form today. Through a reading of the 1870 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), in particular John Tyndall's famous speech "Discourse on the Scientific Use of the Imagination," and a brief analysis of periodical form in one particular digital resource, the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (NCSE), I argue that form was the way in which nineteenth-century serials imagined what they did not know. If we fail to capture the diverse forms of the nineteenth-century press as we model them digitally, we lose the relationship between nineteenth-century culture and the world that necessarily exceeded it.

The Athenaeum's report on the 1870 meeting of the British Association in Liverpool was mixed: "Sections have all been well attended, and the papers read above the average in merit," they reported, but "no extraordinary discovery in the realms of philosophy has been announced."³ The annual meetings of the BAAS—prestigious, predictable, ostensibly accessible—were important news events, providing scientific content...