As a ‘general cultural periodical’ offering reviews on a wide variety of subjects, including literature and, more specifically, religion, arts and sciences, the Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen is a major source of information on publications that appeared in the Dutch Republic (and later in the Kingdom of Holland and its successor, the Kingdom of the Netherlands). For many years it was the country’s leading periodical, serving as a model for others and as a butt of criticism for the people behind the new magazine De Gids, which first appeared in 1837. Despite competition from this newcomer, the Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen (VLO) managed to survive until 1876.
In view of the magazine’s leading position and wide range of topics, works by women authors published in the Netherlands were likely to be mentioned. Unfortunately, we do not yet know to what extent works by any author were reviewed in the VLO. No percentages are known as the magazine has not yet been studied in detail.
In the course of its long existence, the VLO underwent a number of name changes. As this doesn’t make library searches for paper copies any easier, a list is given below of the names it had and the corresponding dates:
1761-1767: Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen
1768-1771: Nieuwe Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen
1772-1778: Hedendaagsche Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen
1779-1785: Algemeene Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen
1786-1790: Nieuwe Algemeene Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen
1791-1812: Algemeene Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen
1813-1876: Vaderlandsche Letter-Oefeningen, of tijdschrift van konsten en wetenschappen
The magazine produced a tremendous number of pages for perusal, about 500 per year, making a total of some 60,000 pages over its 115 years’ existence. A veritable mountain of paper, so it is very fortunate indeed that the former NIWI (Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services) - now Huygensinstituut - launched a project some years ago to publish the entire VLO on the Internet through the ‘e-Laborate’ programme. This initiative will greatly facilitate the study of the magazine itself and allow the creation of a much-needed (and sadly lacking) general framework to link the information obtained from its individual issues.
What we do know is that the VLO was started by the Haarlem minister Cornelis Loosjes and his brother Petrus Loosjes, that Jacob Yntema became editor in 1813 and that the Revd J.W. Bok was its last editor. But as it is not yet known who all the other contributors to the magazine were ? most articles were published anonymously ? we cannot simply assume that there were no women among them. Towards the end of its publishing history in the 19th century, articles were often signed with initials, which to some extent have been traced back to writers who also published elsewhere. One of them was indeed a woman, Elise van Calcar, who signed with ‘E.’ a 1856 review of a work by the important novelist Mrs Bosboom-Toussaint.
Each of the VLO’s volumes consisted of two sections, ‘Boekbeoordelingen’ (Book Reviews) and ‘Mengelwerk’ (Miscellany). We decided to focus on the book reviews, as, for our survey, we were primarily interested in information about the reception of women’s writings. We did include some publications from the ‘Mengelwerk’ section, mostly by less well-known authors.
The survey yielded a list of 1,129 articles (as at April 2007). A collaborative project between ‘e-Laborate’ and WomenWriters entitled De VLO en de Schrijvende Vrouw (The VLO and women writers) enabled us to do more than just provide the metadata on these articles in the WomenWriters database. Each record now also contains a direct link to the text itself, i.e. to a scan of the original page with an automatic transcription by OCR (Optical Character Recognition), edited where needed (the editing is still underway); the whole is included in ‘e-Laborate’. The scans are provided with notes; these are primarily intended for those who are not accessing the VLO through the WomenWriters database: the biographical and bibliographical information they contain has mostly been derived from this database, and are to be considered as an enrichment of the article’s text. The project entitled De VLO en de Schrijvende Vrouw was funded by the SURF-foundation, Utrecht (2004-2006).