Some of the best-selling weekly newspapers from the nineteenth century have yet to be digitised. Tit-Bits, Answers, Pearson's Weekly, and Ally Sloper's Half Holiday all sold hundreds of thousands of copies each week and had an enormous influence on Victorian culture. I occasionally tweet example from my own bound volumes of these periodicals and I've lost count of the times that people have asked me where they can find them online.

As well as being packed with entertaining content, these papers also conducted a lot of competitions and other forms of reader interaction - this often resulted in readers' names and addresses being published next to their letters.

I particularly recommend:

Tit-Bits (from 1881) - a weekly paper made up of cuttings from the 'best books, newspapers, and periodicals in the world.' Enormously influential & established the formula followed by Answers and Pearsons.

Answers (from 1888; originally titled 'Answers to Correspondents) - conducted on the TIt-BIts model, and founded by Alfred Harmsworth, who would later go on to found the Daily Mail and become the first major press baron.

Ally Sloper's Half Holiday (from 1884) - a weekly paper devoted to the picaresque adventures of one of the first recurring comic strip characters. Hugely popular in late-Victorian & Edwardian period. Bound copies are held by the British Library, but are very hard to buy privately - there's a big collectors' market surrounding Sloper.