We ask contributors to prepare accepted contributions in basic HTML, which is nothing more than another layer of punctuation. If computing terrifies you, don’t worry; this has little to do with computing per se. The editors will take care of the alphabet soup of computer codes at the top and bottom of the document.

1. Begin each paragraph with "<p>" and end it with "</p>". Note 1: Any text preceded and followed by a line space, such as an item in a bibliography or timeline, constitutes a paragraph. Note 2: Please leave no spaces between "<p>" and the text.

2. Start each paragraph in long quoted passages with <p class="lq>, and end it with </p>.

<p class="lq"> </p>
<p class="lq"> </p>
<p class="lq"> </p>

3. Each bibliographical item counts as a paragraph. Please format each item as follows: <p class="bibl"> </p>.

Hardy, Thomas. “On the Western Circuit.” Life's Little Ironies: A Set of Tales, with Some Colloquial Sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters. London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1894. 87-122.

Not sure how to format an entry? When in doubt, follow the guidelines given in the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition. Our page on handling quoted material includes examples of common bibliographic forms.

4. When citing pages, use parentheses in the main text but brackets for material between <p class="lq"> tags.

Example 1: The Burmese, like the British, were simultaneously extending their dominions, and when they bumped into each other, "their political dynamics clashed." The problem from the British point of view was that a "Burman monarch had universalist claims" (52).

Example 2:

Yes: only time will tell, he continues, whether

a great and solid World-State has been produced, or that an ephemeral trade-empire, like that of old Spain, rose to fall again; either that a solid union between the West and East, fruitful in the greatest and profoundest results, was effected in India, or that Clive and Hastings set on foot a monstrous enterprise which, after a century of apparent success, ended in failure. [196]

5. Use the following tags for subtitles: <h3>Bibliography </h3>

6. Use italic fonts for titles of books, plays, paintings, sculpture, and ships. Please do not use <i> before each title and </i> after it. Instead use the following tags that describe what something is rather than what it looks like:

Charles Dickens’s <span class="book">Bleak House</span> = Charles Dickens’s Bleak House

John Everett Millais’s <span class="painting">Ophelia</span> = John Everett Millais Millais’s Ophelia

<span class="ship">Titanic</span> = Titanic

William Shakespeare’s <span class="play">Hamlet</span> = William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Sir George Frampton’s <span class="sculpture">Peter Pan</span> = Sir George Frampton’s Peter Pan

Submitting Revised Materials

Revisions of material accepted for publication should be emailed to jackie@victorianweb.org. Copy and paste your work into the email.

If you know how to save your documents as "text only" using the "Save As" option in the "File" menu of most word processing programs, you can also send the document (saved in this manner) as an e-mail attachment.

Otherwise, please do the following:

Do not send attachments (apart from the exception described above).

House Style


Last modified 11 October 2021