This open notebook documents the updating of Price One Penny: A Database of Cheap Literature, 1837-1860 thanks to the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals’s 2020 Field Development Grant. Launched in 2010, this digital project focused on early Victorian book history is turning 10 and celebrating with a facelift as well as back-end changes and process automation to ensure sustainaility.
The notebook discusses first the design and execution of digital projects. It also dives into the penny bloods’ role in the mid-nineteenth-century at the nexus of the popular culture of various Western countries (the United Kingdom, France, and the United States) and between different media (literature, theatre, and the visual arts).
The digital humanities posts are meant for those charged with maintaining a mature project —especially a MySQL database with a PHP website— and researchers embarking on a project on their own, without a programming team, particularly students. The posts introducing bio- or bibliographical finds are of interest to scholars researching Victorian literature, theatre, and illustration; French romans-feuilletons; and American cheap literature.