You who are reading this article, though you are now sharing my thoughts, do not know me as an embodied human being any more than I can possibly know you. (In fact, as I write this, you do not yet exist.) 1 All periodical research has a point of entry-a specific question or find that triggers a journey into the archives. In her recent essay "The Body in the Archive: Reading the Working Woman's Reading," Margaret Beetham recounts how a 1947 novel about an illegitimate working-class girl prompted

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... her to visit the National Co-operative Archive in Manchester to find out what periodicals nineteenth-century working-class women read and how they read them. 2 Similarly, what led us to write this essay in honour of Margaret's eightieth birthday was a biographical sketch of a woman named Lillie Harris in the September 10, 1891, issue of Hearth and Home . We discovered the sketch through a full-text search for "lady editor" in the Gale Cengage Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals database as part of a project on female editorship, but the article also revealed something we were not looking for. Harris had worked as an investigative journalist and visited Whitechapel at the height of the Jack the Ripper case: At the end of 1888, when the atrocious Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel were the engrossing theme of conversation, it occurred to Miss Harris, who was then on a visit to London, that a series of articles describing the scenes of the murders would prove of interest to the public. Accordingly, accompanied only by a detective, she visited the slums of Whitechapel at midnight, her startling experiences being recorded in a very sensational series of articles published in the Sheffield Telegraph. These were so eagerly sought after that the entire editions of the papers were at once sold out. 3 Thanks to a digitised version of the Sheffield-based Weekly Telegraph in the British Newspaper Archive, we soon found a series of four articles entitled "Slumming in Whitechapel," published between October 27 and November 17, 1888. The first two were signed "A Protected Female," and the final two "An Amateur Detective." What if we had come across the anonymous articles in the Weekly Telegraph first and wondered about their authorship? Would the quest for who was hiding behind the signatures ever have led us to Lillie Harris? In the absence of a named author, the title of the series would have been our most important clue. On the odd chance of finding an attribution, we would no doubt have run a full-text search for the phrase "Slumming in Whitechapel" in various digitised periodical databases. Our hopes would soon have been dashed. The Hearth and Home sketch identifying Harris as the author would not have turned up among the search results, simply because it does not mention that the series was called "Slumming in Whitechapel"; it only mentions the Sheffield Telegraph (rather than the Weekly Telegraph) as the newspaper in which it appeared. The search, in fact, yields no relevant results at all in the Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals database, nor do similar searches in ProQuest's British Periodicals and Google Books. This little thought experiment not only touches on current methodological issues of digitisation, serendipity, and the limits of digital search methods, but it is also relevant from a historical point of view, as contemporary readers would have had similar points of entry into the periodical press. Readers of the Sheffield Weekly Telegraph had access to the full "Slumming in Whitechapel" series, but Harris's name remained undisclosed to them. Conversely, readers of the London Hearth and Home learned about the night-time visit to Whitechapel in the larger context of Lillie Harris's life and career, without necessarily having read the articles themselves.