George Eliot’s Middlemarch is famed for its well-rounded characters, yet the unfortunate Edward Casaubon, a pedantic clergyman more devoted to his research than his intelligent wife Dorothea, remains deeply unsympathetic. He is the worst kind of researcher: piling up his notes, but never quite getting round to writing his intended masterpiece, “The Key to All Mythologies”. If Middlemarch had been set a few decades later, however, Casaubon might have found the perfect outlet in Notes & Queries. This weekly periodical, founded in 1849 by William Thoms, a clerk in the House of Lords, provided a platform for enthusiastic amateur scholars — including himself — to share antiquarian finds and sources (“notes”) or raise questions arising from them (“queries”). These exchanges then often stimulated further running discussions over subsequent issues.

The journal quickly found a place in the congested publishing landscape of Victorian Britain, tapping into the rising antiquarian interest in the British Isles that had begun in the seventeenth century. A growing number of amateur researchers, focused on discovering the physical evidence of the past — whether in surviving manuscripts or excavated archaeological finds — came together to form local and national societies. The pace of their labours increased as the industrial revolution took effect, driven by the fear that the depopulation of the countryside would result in the loss of an irreplaceable connection to the past.

A sign of the journal’s success, and of its central place in British antiquarian discourse, was the publication in 1858 of Choice Notes from Notes and Queries — a stand-alone “selection of the more curious articles” from the journal. The subject of the volume was “History” and was to be the first in a proposed series, although only one more volume followed a year later, devoted to a topic Thoms himself had created a name for: “Folk-Lore”.

In the introduction to his debut volume, Thoms declared its objectives to be correcting factual errors that had crept into the historical record, while also providing entertainment for readers in “low spirits” or “waiting for company”. From our twenty-first century perspective, the volume also offers insights into our Victorian forebears’ attitudes to the past, and especially their fascination with Britain’s great and good.

In an age where a “Great Men of History” school was emerging, it’s no surprise Choice Notes focuses on the peculiarities of the reigns of British monarchs. Areas of interest range from the pedantic — pinpointing when various reigns actually began — to the morbid, such as the finer details of a well-known king or queen’s demise. A detailed account is offered of the chair (in Conington Church in Huntingdonshire) which was “traditionally said” to be where Mary, Queen of Scots sat prior to her execution, followed by an earnest discussion on the whereabouts of Mary’s severed head. Other sepulchral debates include the location of the decapitated Anne Boleyn, to the resting place of James II. One correspondent, offering evidence that his body was actually in France, suggested it would be restored to Westminster Abbey after the return of a Catholic to the British throne. Unsurprisingly, given the journal’s love of the macabre, the only executed British monarch (so far), Charles I, features too, though it’s not the whereabouts of his corporeal remains under discussion, but the identity of the hooded executioner who wielded the axe.

Despite the prevalence of monarchs, however, the historical personage who features most in Choice Notes on History is Oliver Cromwell, perhaps representing the strong emotions he still elicited. Salacious discussions range from Cromwell’s “private amours” to claims that certain tracts outlined his rumoured dealings with the devil. Various contributors to Notes & Queries expend ink not only on the location of Cromwell’s burial place, but also the precise whereabouts of his skull, including an “L. W.”, who writes: “In answer to J. P., I beg to inform him that the skull of Cromwell is in the possession of W. A. Wilkinson, Esq., of Beckenham, Kent, at whose house a relation of mine saw it…”

With its mix of alleged testimony, unquestioned manuscript sources, and sometimes questionable claims, Choice Notes (and thus Notes & Queries) is highly representative of the popular approach to history in Britain in the nineteenth century. By the 1900s, the antiquarian tradition that Notes & Queries showcased appeared unscientific to a new generation of historians. But its approach did not go completely out of fashion; the journal itself still exists today, in a slightly amended form. Moreover, as academics such as Patrick Leary have observed, Notes & Queries’ collaborative production pointed the way to large-scale multi-authored projects such as the Oxford English Dictionary and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Contemporary commentators have also compared Notes & Queries to our online world. As a crowd-sourced, virtual community of anonymous writers, it’s hard not to see something of Notes & Queries in the growth of internet message boards, social media feeds, and Reddit threads. The ethos is clearly seen in Wikipedia, given many contributors’ fascination with facts and clarifications. Indeed, perhaps in that platform’s legion of anonymous editors, are some latter-day Edward Casaubons, eschewing the writing of their masterpieces and finding a more practical home for their acquired knowledge.