On or about December 1910

Virginia Woolf famously observed that “on or about December 1910 human character changed” — by which she meant to locate the shift to modernism at the end of the reign of King Edward VII and the beginning of the reign of King George V. To assist teachers and students studying this transitional moment, the MJP will offer images of individual issues of British and American periodicals from 1910 and 1911. We expect to be adding these in the spring and summer of 2007 until we have a substantial number. Unlike our digital editions, however, these will be images backed up by text produced by a mechanical OCR process, and WILL NOT BE PART OF THE MJP SEARCHABLE DATABASE, though local searches may be performed on them. Such searches, however, will be less reliable than those in the main MJP collection. These samples are here mainly to provide a perspective on what was being thought, said, pictured, and advertised in both Britain and America at the moment when “human character changed …”

Please note that, in addition to the issues in this special collection, there are other magazines from 1910 and 1911 among those in our regular archive. We recommend, in particular, that The New Age for December 1910 be investigated--especially the Letters section, which has a number of reactions to the Post-Impressionist show that was one of the indicators of an emerging modernism in December, 1910.