Victorian Periodicals Review

This article focuses on Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory at a time when the newspaper press was undergoing a period of adjustment from the world of the Victorian press to the print culture of the mid-twentieth century. It reflects on the ways in which the Directory represented that change between 1900 and 1939. It stresses the value of seeing the Directory as an agent shaping the way the press was imagined and defined, and it asserts the importance of studying directories in their own right as texts articulating the interplay between readers, the state, and a diverse periodical industry.