Retrieving a world of fiction: Building an Index — and an Archive — of Serialized Novels in Australian Newspapers, 1850-1914

Two and a half decades ago in this journal Elizabeth Morrison made an impassioned and persuasive case for creating an index to serial fiction in Australian (or Australasian) newspapers. Such an index, she argued, would reveal much about the connections between British, Australian, American and New Zealand literary cultures, and specifically, the influence of these other national literary cultures on Australia's. Indexes of fiction in specific Australian newspapers and magazines had been created prior to Morrison's article, as she acknowledged, and others have been published since, all making important contributions to our understanding of literary and print culture. While this large number of projects - over more than four decades - indicates the desirability of Morrison's agenda, their history and current state foregrounds what have been major obstacles to achieving this aim. The most obvious of these - demonstrated by the two methods Morrison employed to sketch out the index's parameters - is the formidable scale of the task. To understand its breadth, Morrison performed a "cross-sectional check" to explore which of Victoria's one hundred or so newspapers, "issued on or about 31 August 1889, contained instalments of novels." This method uncovered twenty-eight separate novels - some published multiple times - as well as a pattern of independent publication in metropolitan dailies and weeklies, and syndicated publication in suburban and country newspapers. The second method, to explore the index's depth, involved "a diachronic study of serials in the Age from April 1872 (when it began to serialise fiction) until the end of the century," and identified sixty novels across this twenty-eight year period, mostly by English or Scottish authors, with a few American and Australian titles.