Enough of the third person, though. I've loved old magazines since childhood, when I discovered my family's stash of vintage Life Magazines and Saturday Evening Posts in a closet. I've loved Victorian art for nearly as long; my dad, a graphic artist, would sometimes take me shopping at the art store, and I'd stock up on Letraset sheets of Victorian page decorations.

I grew up surrounded by books. In a pre-marital class, we were asked what sort of store we thought our spouse-to-be would be. My hubby-to-be looked at me and said "Old English Bookstore." Now he looks at our shelves and simply shakes his head. Since then I've spent quite a bit of time in Old English Bookstores - in 2007 we achieved a life-long dream of being able to live, for a time, in England. (Which is how this site came to be born, as I'll explain below.)

I've been writing professionally for more than 40 years, and host Writing-World.com, a popular website for writers. I also host TimeTravel-Britain.com, a site focusing on historic British travel destinations. I currently serve as housekeeper to a cat whose sense of entitlement would put a Victorian peeress to shame.

How It Began

VictorianVoices.net was born in a tiny used bookstore in Hastings, England. I didn't know then that I was holding a future website in my hands; I just knew that I'd stumbled across a really, really old book for something like $10. The book turned out to be a copy of the magazine All the Year Round, edited by none other than Charles Dickens. And suddenly, I was hooked on Victorian magazines.

That addiction found endless fuel in another Hastings bookshop (Boulevard Books, if anyone happens to visit), where I came across what was to become the start of my first real "collection": a couple of bound volumes of The Girl's Own Paper. (I'd actually gone in looking for The Strand!) I soon discovered that one could find these tattered volumes of Victorian periodicals in just about any bookshop in England - even in thrift shops! And since my budget was limited, the more tattered, the better.

But tattered books (often reeking of mildew) can be a bit hard to read, so I began to scan my treasures. Later, I scanned them simply because it became obvious that my home had no room for dozens of oversize volumes of Victorian magazines! And as I scanned, the idea began to dawn that I could make this material available to other lovers of Victoriana.

And so this website was born. It was always my goal to get my entire article collection online - so while VictorianVoices.net actually launched several years ago (originally as MostlyVictorian.com), it's taken quite a few years longer than I expected to achieve that ultimate objective. Now, I'm happy to say, VictorianVoices.net is truly the Internet's largest topical archive of Victorian magazine articles.

If you have any questions or comments about VictorianVoices.net, please contact me!