Victorian magazines were written by a tiny elite

A closer look

Think anonymous Reddit trolls are a modern plague? The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals exposed 19th-century Britain's worst-kept secret: all the highbrow intellectual magazines were written by the same tiny circle of elites hiding behind pseudonyms. This massive academic undertaking spent decades unmasking these cowardly authors, revealing that Victorian literature was basically just a few wealthy guys violently reviewing their own friends' books.