<i>The Review of English Studies</i> at 100: Origins and Early Years

A learned profession can be presumed to get the technical journals that it deserves.'This is the opening sentence of F. W. Bateson's somewhat peppery assessment of the Review of English Studies published in the newer rival journal Essays in Criticism in 1956, a piece to which I shall return. 2 But I begin with it because it helpfully raises the question of the relation between learned journals and the scholarly communities they are intended to serve.As various areas of enquiry began to become more professionalized in Britain from the late nineteenth century onwards, periodicals were established for the publication of specialized research in their respective fields, thereby helping to create and sustain a sense of disciplinary identity.The Law Quarterly Review was founded in 1884, the English Historical Review in 1886, both the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and the Classical Review in 1887, the Economic Journal in 1891, and so on.The foundation of the Modern Languages Quarterly in 1897 was a further example of this pattern, though a slightly complicated one in that it embraced work in all the major European languages, English included.When re-launched as the Modern Language Review in 1905, the journal bore the subtitle 'A quarterly journal devoted to the study of medieval and modern literature and philology'; in its early issues medieval and philological contributions were prominent, but writing on post-medieval English literature also found a place, with the first number, for example, containing pieces by W. W. Greg on Lyly and A. C. Bradley on Shelley.English was not, as is often assumed, a particularly late developer among the disciplines.Its institutional establishment had small beginnings in the first half of the nineteenth century, which then expanded to have a place in most universities' offerings by the late nineteenth century, becoming