Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical 9781474418355

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Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical

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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys Recent books in the series: Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction: Mapping Psychic Spaces Lizzy Welby The Decadent Image: The Poetry of Wilde, Symons and Dowson Kostas Boyiopoulos British India and Victorian Literary Culture Máire ní Fhlathúin Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Literary Form Frederik Van Dam Dark Paradise: Pacific Islands in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination Jenn Fuller Twentieth-Century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine, 1891–1930 Jonathan Cranfield The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity Marion Thain Gender, Technology and the New Woman Lena Wånggren Self-Harm in New Woman Writing Alexandra Gray Suffragist Artists in Partnership: Gender, Word and Image Lucy Ella Rose Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture: Synergies of Thought and Place Kevin A. Morrison The Victorian Male Body Joanne-Ella Parsons and Ruth Heholt Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art Fariha Shaikh The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism Eleonora Sasso The Late-Victorian Little Magazine Koenraad Claes Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century Matthew Ingleby and Matt P. M. Kerr

Dickens and Demolition: Literary Allusion and Urban Change in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Joanna Hofer-Robinson Artful Experiments: Ways of Knowing in Victorian Literature and Science Philipp Erchinger Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical Caley Ehnes The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage Renata Kobetts Miller Forthcoming volumes: Her Father’s Name: Gender, Theatricality and Spiritualism in Florence Marryat’s Fiction Tatiana Kontou The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities Patricia Pulham Olive Schreiner and the Politics of Print Culture, 1883–1920 Clare Gill Dickens’s Clowns: Charles Dickens, Joseph Grimaldi and the Pantomime of Life Johnathan Buckmaster Victorian Auto/Biography: Problems in Genre and Subject Amber Regis Culture and Identity in Fin-de-Siècle Scotland: Romance, Decadence and the Celtic Revival Michael Shaw Gissing, Shakespeare and the Life of Writing Thomas Ue The Arabian Nights and Nineteenth Century British Culture Melissa Dickson The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth Century British Literature, 1851–1908 Giles Whiteley

For a complete list of titles published visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture web page at www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ECVC Also Available: Victoriographies – A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790–1914, edited by Diane Piccitto and Patricia Pulham ISSN: 2044–2416 www.eupjournals.com/vic

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Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical

Caley Ehnes

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cuttingedge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Caley Ehnes, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 1834 8 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 1835 5 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1836 2 (epub)

The right of Caley Ehnes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Figures Series Editor’s Preface Acknowledgements

vi viii x

Introduction: Poetry, Popularity and the Periodical Press

1

1. Middle-Class Audiences, Literary Weeklies and the Inaugural Poem: Household Words, All the Year Round and Once a Week

22

2. The New Shilling Monthlies: Macmillan’s Magazine and The Cornhill

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3. Devotional Reading and Popular Poetry in Good Words

105

4. The Poetics of Popular Poetry in the Argosy

154

Conclusion: Where Do We Go From Here?

191

Appendix: Biographies of Significant Contributors, Illustrators and Publishers Works Cited Index

197 208 229

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List of Figures

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2

Figure 1.3

Figure 1.4

Figure 1.5

Figure 2.1

Figure 2.2

Figure 3.1

Figure 3.2

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‘Once a Week’ by Shirley Brooks. Illustrated by John Leech. Once a Week. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.) ‘Once a Week’ by Shirley Brooks. Illustrated by John Leech. Once a Week. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.) Illustration by John Leech for ‘Scarborough – 1859’ by H. Once a Week. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.) ‘First Love’ by R. F. Sketchley. Illustrated by F. Walker. Once a Week. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.) ‘A Score of Years Ago’ by W. L. W. Illustration by John Leech. Once a Week. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.) ‘A Musical Instrument’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Illustrated by Frederic Leighton. Cornhill. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.) ‘Manoli’ by W. M. W. Call. Illustrated by Frederick Sandys. Cornhill. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.) ‘The Toad’ by L. C. C. Illustrated by J. D. Watson. Good Words. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.) ‘The Christmas Child’ by Isa Craig. Illustration by Thomas Morten. Good Words. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.)

42

44

46

47

48

86

92

123

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List of Figures

‘How Wondrous are Thy Works, O God!’ by John S. Blackie. Illustrated by W. P. Burton. Good Words. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.) Figure 3.4 ‘August: An Autumn Picture’ by G. Montbard. Good Words. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.) Figure 3.5 ‘Love’ by M. Illustrator unknown. Good Words. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.) Figure 3.6 ‘Love in Death’ by Dora Greenwell. Illustrated by Fredrick Walker. Good Words (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.) Figure 3.7 ‘Love in Death’ by Dora Greenwell. Illustrated by Fredrick Walker. Good Words (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.) Figure 3.8 ‘Autumn’ by H. M. T. Illustrated by J. W. McWhirter. Good Words. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.) Figure 3.9 ‘The Coming of Spring’, by Dinah Mulock Craik. Illustrated by J. W. McWhirter. Good Words. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.) Figure 3.10 ‘The Two Streams’ by L. C. C. Illustrated by H. Boyd. Good Words. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.) Figure 3.11 ‘Hugo. – 1845’ by Dora Greenwell. Illustrated by W. Linney. Good Words. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.)

vii

Figure 3.3

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Series Editor’s Preface

‘Victorian’ is a term at once indicative of a strongly determined concept and an often notoriously vague notion, emptied of all meaningful content by the many journalistic misconceptions that persist about the inhabitants and cultures of the British Isles and Victoria’s Empire in the nineteenth century. As such, it has become a byword for the assumption of various, often contradictory habits of thought, belief, behaviour and perceptions. Victorian studies and studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture have, from their institutional inception, questioned narrowness of presumption, pushed at the limits of the nominal definition, and have sought to question the very grounds on which the unreflective perception of the socalled Victorian has been built; and so they continue to do. Victorian and nineteenth-century studies of literature and culture maintain a breadth and diversity of interest, of focus and inquiry, in an interrogative and intellectually open-minded and challenging manner, which are equal to the exploration and inquisitiveness of its subjects. Many of the questions asked by scholars and researchers of the innumerable productions of nineteenth-century society actively put into suspension the clichés and stereotypes of ‘Victorianism’, whether the approach has been sustained by historical, scientific, philosophical, empirical, ideological or theoretical concerns; indeed, it would be incorrect to assume that each of these approaches to the idea of the Victorian has been, or has remained, in the main exclusive, sealed off from the interests and engagements of other approaches. A vital interdisciplinarity has been pursued and embraced, for the most part, even as there has been contest and debate among Victorianists, pursued with as much fervour as the affirmative exploration between different disciplines and differing epistemologies put to work in the service of reading the nineteenth century.

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Series Editor’s Preface

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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture aims to take up both the debates and the inventive approaches and departures from convention that studies in the nineteenth century have witnessed for the last half century at least. Aiming to maintain a ‘Victorian’ (in the most positive sense of that motif) spirit of inquiry, the series’ purpose is to continue and augment the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary approaches, and to offer, in addition, a number of timely and untimely revisions of Victorian literature, culture, history and identity. At the same time, the series will ask questions concerning what has been missed or improperly received, misread, or not read at all, in order to present a multi-faceted and heterogeneous kaleidoscope of representations. Drawing on the most provocative, thoughtful and original research, the series will seek to prod at the notion of the ‘Victorian’, and in so doing, principally through theoretically and epistemologically sophisticated close readings of the historicity of literature and culture in the nineteenth century, to offer the reader provocative insights into a world that is at once overly familiar and irreducibly different, other and strange. Working from original sources, primary documents and recent interdisciplinary theoretical models, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture seeks not simply to push at the boundaries of research in the nineteenth century, but also to inaugurate the persistent erasure and provisional, strategic redrawing of those borders. Julian Wolfreys

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Acknowledgements

This book could never have been completed without the support of a number of people who I would like to thank and acknowledge. First and foremost, I would like to thank Alison Chapman and Lisa Surridge, both of whom helped to guide this project from its inception and provided continual support during the composition of my dissertation, upon which this monograph is based. I would be remiss if I also did not thank my external readers Mariel Grant and Linda K. Hughes, whose comments helped shape some key revisions. In addition to the above, I am extremely grateful to the University of Victoria Library, Special Collections for providing access to all the periodicals discussed, allowing me to reproduce page images from the material in their collection, and creating such a warm, collegial atmosphere for research. Financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria, specifically the Hugh Campbell and Marion Alice Small Fund for Scottish Studies and the Centre for the Study of Religion and Society, provided me with the resources needed to complete the initial research for this project. The book that you are reading was largely written and revised while teaching full-time at the College of the Rockies in Cranbrook, British Columbia, Canada. To say this has been a challenge would be an understatement. As such I am grateful for the moral support of my colleagues, especially Avery Hulbert and Nathan Dueck; the financial support of the faculty association’s professional development fund, which allowed me to complete the research required for my section on Macmillan’s Magazine; and the library staffs’ unfailing willingness to hunt down my sometimes obscure interlibrary loan requests. I am also thankful for my students, who constantly remind me why teaching the stories from our past matters. Special thanks are owed to Lindsey Seatter and Caroline Winter who made some last minutes scans for me, ensuring the presence

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Acknowledgements

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of several key illustrations. I must also thank my fellow Victorianists Kylee-Anne Hingston, Paisley Mann and Amy Coté. This book would not exist without these ladies. Their unwavering support and belief in me as a writer kept me going. Every writer needs a group of cheerleaders in their pocket. I am also deeply indebted to Kandice Sharren, who acted as my beta reader despite having her own dissertation to complete. Her feedback helped me see the forest through the trees and made several chapters of this book better. In this vein, I would also like to extend my thanks to the anonymous readers of my sample chapter for Edinburgh University Press. Your comments and engagement with my work challenged me and made me a better writer. My chapter on Good Words is much stronger for your generous feedback. Last but not least, I must thank my family for their love and support throughout this entire process – from PhD to monograph. So, thank you to my parents, Randy and Sharon; my brother and sisterand-law, Justin and Rachel; and my niece Mabel, who was born at the tail-end of this project and provided much-needed snuggle breaks and smiles.

Permissions My discussion of inaugural poetry in Chapters 1 and 3 first appeared as ‘Inaugural Poems: Branding the Mid-Victorian Literary Periodical’ in Victorian Review, 43.1 (Spring), 2017, pp. 184–7 Copyright © 2017, Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada. Portions of my discussion about ‘L.E.L.’s Last Question’, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the poetess first appeared as ‘“Her Spheréd soul shall look on them”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Pose of the Poetess, and “L. E. L.’s Last Question”’, in Women’s Writing (September) 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/ 10.1080/09699082.2017.1373908. Copyright © 2017, Taylor & Francis. Portions of Chapter 2, ‘The Modern Mode of Poetry and Illustration in Once a Week,’ first appeared as ‘Navigating the Periodical Market: Once a Week, Poetry, and the Illustrated Literary Periodical’ in Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, 123 (Spring), 2013, pp. 96–112. Copyright © 2013 Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature.

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Portions of Chapter 3, ‘Devotional Reading and Popular Poetry in Good Words’, first appeared as ‘Religion, Readership, and the Periodical Press: The Place of Poetry in Good Words’ in Victorian Periodicals Review, 45.4 (Winter), 2012, pp. 466–87. Copyright © 2012 Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. Special thanks to Special Collections, University of Victoria Library for granting permission to reproduce images from periodicals held in their collection.

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For my parents

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Introduction: Poetry, Popularity and the Periodical Press

And there’s the extract, flasked and fine, And priced and saleable at last! Robert Browning, ‘Popularity’ ([1885] 1997: 280)

The history of periodical poetry begins in the early nineteenth century, running parallel to and intersecting with the conventional history of Victorian poetry and poetics. Each decade of the nineteenth century saw the rise of a new kind of periodical, which created new and specific publishing opportunities for both professional and amateur poets. Bradbury and Evans’s Once a Week (July 1859–April 1880), for example, published established poets such as Alfred Tennyson alongside unidentifiable amateurs or ‘outsiders’ as the periodical’s second editor, Edward Walford, referred to them in an 1857 letter (Buckler 1953: 537).1 While this book focuses on the literary periodicals of the 1860s (periodicals that published high-quality texts, some of which entered the canon), the initial rise of the periodical as the dominant publisher of poetry occurred much earlier with the collapse of the market for books of poetry. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, consumers were no longer buying volumes of original poetry by a single author. As a consequence, publishers were no longer willing to risk publishing single-author poetry volumes (see Erickson 2007). Instead, both poets and publishers turned to the literary annual, a genre which built on the pre-existing audience for commonplace books (see St Clair 2004: 224–9). The production of the literary annual in the 1820s and 1830s irrevocably redefined the way Victorian readers consumed poetry, altering ‘the place of the poet in Victorian literary culture’ (Ledbetter 2007: 13). Essentially, the poet became part of the mass-produced literary culture defined by serial novels, periodical publications and decorated gift books. The rise of the literary annuals (and the illustrated shilling

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monthlies that followed) thus reaffirmed the divide between popular, mass-produced literature and the reified poetry of small-run poetry volumes. The critical discourse that evolved in response to this relocation of the poet and poetry into periodical culture reverberated throughout the nineteenth century, influencing the cultural and critical perception of periodical poetry as trite and sentimental well into the twentieth century.2 Literary periodicals represent only one outlet for the Victorian poet, however. Local and national newspapers, working-class publications (stamped and unstamped), religious periodicals, and family-orientated magazines all published poetry alongside the literary periodicals run by the era’s established publishing houses. As George Saintsbury notes in A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1896), ‘not a very small portion of the most noteworthy nineteenth-century poetry’ originated in the era’s periodical press (166). The numbers support Saintsbury’s observation. For example, as of 5 November 2016, the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry indexed 7,605 poems by 2,099 authors in sixteen periodicals ranging from working-class periodicals such as The Chartist Circular to fin-de-siècle literary publications like The Yellow Book (Chapman 2010). The data on newspaper poetry provided by Andrew Hobbs and Claire Januszewski is even more telling. According to their research, the weekly publication schedule of local newspapers means that ‘more of them were printed than any other type of publication containing poetry throughout the nineteenth century’ (65). They estimate that around 4 million poems were published in local newspapers over the course of Victoria’s reign; ‘[a]t least half of these poems were reprinted from elsewhere, but between a third and a half of them were original and locally produced’ (2014: 65). For the first half of the century, the poetry that local newspapers reprinted came from books as well as other newspapers and periodicals, especially those originating in London. However, ‘from mid-century on, most reprinted poetry came from periodicals, rather than from other newspapers and books, confirming,’ Hobbs and Januszewski argue, ‘the importance of periodicals in the publishing of Victorian poetry’ (2014: 75).3 Based on such data, to ignore the periodical poetry is to accept an incomplete and false history of poetry as a genre. In Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion, Kirstie Blair observes, ‘to begin reading the forgotten works of Victorian religious poetry is to realise how much remains to be read, how large a class of works read by a considerable number of people has effectively faded from view’ (2012: 5). The same can be said of periodical poetry. This book cannot attempt to provide a comprehensive survey of Victorian

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periodical poetry. As Alison Chapman and I have previously argued, the sheer volume of verse published in the periodical press means that ‘[p]eriodical poetry is methodologically resistant to whole-scale, comprehensive mapping . . . , for the poems are deeply contingent upon their particular print context in a number of ways that make the field difficult to synthesize’ (2014: 5). As such, this book offers a strategically narrow but deep study of periodical poetry that focuses on a representative sampling of mid-Victorian literary periodicals produced for the era’s middle-class readers, including Household Words, All the Year Round, Once a Week, Macmillan’s Magazine, the Cornhill, Good Words and the Argosy. Reading the poetry published across periodical titles and formats in this way answers Jennifer Phegley’s call for research that considers ‘the ways in which seemingly disparate magazines worked with the same basic formula to carve out specific family markets based primarily on class status’ (2016: 292) while also highlighting the legitimacy of the patterns noted through a large-scale analysis of over 400 poems. I am particularly interested in exploring how poetry functioned as part of a publication’s early branding.4 My study of the patterns, poetics and readerships of this group of middle-class periodicals allows me to propose a provisional theory of mid-century periodical poetry and poetics in which I reframe the questions asked by previous scholars about the material relationship between the periodical press and canonical poetry to consider the significant role that periodical culture played in the development of Victorian poetry and poetics both within and outside of the periodical press. The decision to focus on prominent literary periodicals from the 1860s is a response to recent scholarship on periodical poetry, which has seemingly turned away from the literary periodicals of the midVictorian era to focus on newspaper and local poetry – see Blair (2014), Hobbs (2012), Hobbs and Januszewski (2014) and Rose Novak (2012) – as well as specific editorial practices and the poetry published in fin-de-siècle magazines – see Hughes (2016b, 2017) and Ledbetter (2014).5 There is also a significant body of scholarship on working-class periodicals and poetry that explores the ways such poetry captured the history and resistance of an under-served culture: Blair’s latest work (2016) focuses on working-class poetry in the Scottish press, and long before Linda Hughes’s call for scholarship on Victorian periodical poetry, Florence Boos (1995, 2001, 2003) was writing on working-class women poets in the periodical press. In light of this ongoing and active research, the relative absence of sustained scholarship on the literary periodicals of the 1860s is notable.

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While the circulation numbers and readership of periodicals such as Macmillan’s Magazine and the Cornhill represent only a fraction of Victorian readers (Hughes n.d.; Law 2000),6 such publications were, nonetheless, ‘a major force in the publishing industry’ (Phegley 2016: 287), printing much of the canonical fiction and non-fiction of the period.7 Canonical and non-canonical poets participating in the periodical market, from Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti to the unknown L.C.C. of Good Words, produced their poetry as part of and in response to the demands of the very same readership consuming the era’s prose. Ultimately, the centrality of literary periodicals to the careers of prominent poets in the era suggests that such periodicals played an important role in shaping contemporary understandings of poetic form and the purpose of poetry for middle-class readers and poets alike.

Why Periodical Contexts Matter: Barrett Browning and The Ladies’ Pocket Magazine As mentioned earlier, this book focuses on mid-Victorian literary periodicals (or shilling monthlies, as they are also called); however, I want to begin with a brief analysis of the periodical culture of the 1830s and the republication of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘L.E.L.’s Last Question’ in the Ladies’ Pocket Magazine.8 Barrett Browning’s elegy for the infamous poetess Letitia Elizabeth Landon, or L.E.L., opens with a direct quotation from Landon’s final poem, ‘A Night at Sea’ (1839), which was published posthumously in the New Monthly Magazine for January 1839.9 The poem answers and modifies Landon’s plea for her friends back home to remember her as she remembers them, turning it into an exploration of the poetess figure and the literary notoriety that accompanied Landon’s poetess persona and led to her social banishment through marriage. Ultimately, Barrett Browning rejects the poetic model offered by Landon, turning away from such ‘mortal issues’ (58) to the ‘vocal pathos’ of Christ, ‘HE who drew / All life from dust, and for all, tasted death’ (60–1). The poem closes with Christ repeating L.E.L.’s last question, ‘Do you think of me as I think of you?’ (63), as Barrett Browning creates a new space for poetic and social inquiry, one that responds to consequential issues, such as religion, rather than celebrity and the false promise of love songs. Barrett Browning’s decision to submit ‘L.E.L.’s Last Question’ to the Athenaeum indicates that she wanted her poem to appear in

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a particular kind of periodical: a serious literary publication, ‘the most influential of the Victorian literary reviews’ (Johnston 1998: 34). Here, the poem functions like the newspaper poems studied by Natalie Houston (2008), providing an alternative and more emotional response to the factual news of Landon’s death, which the Athenaeum reported on 5 January 1839. Surrounded by brief literary reviews, book notices, foreign correspondence and gossip, the poem documents one poet’s response to the death of another. Its embeddedness in a periodical known for its literary reviews simultaneously emphasises Landon’s reputation as a prominent poet in the period, supports the critical perspective offered by the speaker of ‘L.E.L.’s Last Question’, and elevates Barrett Browning’s own stature by giving her a critical voice in a popular literary review.10 The literary reputation of the Athenaeum reinforces the argument made throughout the poem, demonstrating how nineteenth-century poets strategically used the periodical press to craft their public poetic identities. A few months after the appearance of Barrett Browning’s poem in the Athenaeum, ‘L.E.L.’s Last Question’ was published in the first part of the Ladies’ Pocket Magazine for 1839. In contrast to Barrett Browning’s deliberate placement of her poem with the Athenaeum, there is no evidence that Barrett Browning knew of the Ladies’ Pocket Magazine, let alone made the decision to submit her work there. Established by Joseph Robins in 1825, the Ladies’ Pocket Magazine, which originally appeared in monthly parts, exemplifies for Cynthia White a ‘new type of “feminine” literature’ designed ‘solely to entertain, being composed of fiction, fashion and miscellaneous light reading of a superficial kind’ (White 1970: 41). The Ladies’ Pocket Magazine incorporated elements traditionally associated with the literary annual alongside features of the era’s popular women’s magazines; poems from popular poets, including Letitia Elizabeth Landon (or L.E.L.), appeared next to household tips and recipes. The issue containing Barrett Browning’s ‘L.E.L.’s Last Question’ provides evidence of the magazine’s hybrid status as it interweaves sections on domestic issues and the fashions of London and Paris among the publication’s literary content. The content of the Ladies’ Pocket Magazine simultaneously amplifies and muffles the poem’s critique of the popular poetess’ identity and the feminine literary ideals that constrained Landon. The magazine locates the poem within the hyper-feminised discourses of the poetess figure, literary celebrity, fashion and the annual: the very discourses that Barrett Browning’s poem repudiates.

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The placement of two conventional, if not banal, fashion plates in the middle of the poem as it appeared in the Ladies’ Pocket Magazine effectively sutures ‘L.E.L.’s Last Question’ into the feminine world of fashion, visually reinforcing the magazine’s insertion of Barrett Browning into annual culture and the poetess tradition.11 These visual representations of ‘London Dinner and Evening Dresses’ undermine Barrett Browning’s critique of the poetess. They recast the poem’s conclusion by associating it with the fashionable images that Barrett Browning found morally and culturally degrading. Such images are a consistent feature of the Ladies’ Pocket Magazine. They are printed on thicker paper stock, which makes them stand out from the letterpress, and they depict the latest fashions described by the magazine, perhaps acting as patterns for the latest dress designs. Moreover, the space given to these images implies that they were one of the saleable features of the periodical. This emphasis on fashion over literary illustration further depreciates the value of the magazine’s literature.12 It is impossible to determine whether the layout of Barrett Browning’s poem was intentional or not; however, the lack of information about Robins’s editorial intentions does not matter when one reads the poem as part of a deeper print context, specifically that of the Victorian poetess and the culture of the literary annual. Regardless of intent, the placement of the poem after the obituary for ‘Mrs. Maclean’ (Landon’s married name) presents the poem as part of a broader cultural project interested in establishing Landon as a secular saint and identifying Barrett Browning as heir to Landon’s poetics and celebrity.13 Exploring the early publication contexts of Barrett Browning’s poetry enriches our current understanding of her development as a poet. They show how Barrett Browning attempted to negotiate the ideological power of the periodical even as publications such as the Ladies’ Pocket Magazine assigned her a poetic persona based on the reputation of her elder contemporaries. Barrett Browning would negotiate the politics of periodical publication throughout her career, and in the second chapter of this book, I read Barrett Browning’s ‘A Musical Instrument’ as it appeared in the Cornhill as engaged in conversations about poetic power and politics of periodical publication. This brief analysis of Barrett Browning’s appearance in the Ladies’ Pocket Magazine provides a concrete example to introduce the core assertion made in this book: periodical contexts are crucial to the study of Victorian poetry and poetics. The periodical contexts of the poem’s original publication and its reprinting demonstrate how

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the form of particular types of periodicals shapes the reception and meaning of the poems published within a periodical’s pages. In her work on form, Caroline Levine argues that ‘hierarchies matter to the act of reading, the vertical form of the hierarchy shaping our daily interpretive practices’ (2015: 87). In the case of periodical poetry, hierarchies of cultural value (see Bourdieu 1996) shape the interpretation and reaction to poems and poets, and historically, the poetry of mass-market literary periodicals has been considered firmly ‘middlebrow: a commodity for mass consumption’ (Kooistra 2011: 35) with little to no critical or aesthetic value.14

Puff-Poets: The Critical Reputation of Periodical Poetry The 5 March 1843 issue of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal offers one example of the type of criticism that popular poetry faced in the press. An essay from this issue titled ‘The Puff-Poets’ satirises the degradation and commercialisation of poetry. The anonymous author makes the link between periodical poetry and commercialism explicit with the suggestion that ‘the advertising columns may be looked upon as forming a national monument of poetic labour’ ([Unsigned] 1843: 73). Poetry, like the commercial and manufactured products taking over nineteenth-century Britain, is for sale, and this saleable poetry is overtaking that of ‘true art,’ threatening to become, much to the author’s horror, Great Britain’s new ‘school of national poetry’ (74). Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) displays a similar distaste for commercial poetry, which suggests she would not have been pleased with the publication of her poem in The Ladies’ Pocket Magazine. In a line that will be returned to several times in this book, Aurora states that as a modern poet, she must ‘work with one hand for the booksellers / While working with the other for myself / And art’ (Barrett Browning 1996: 302–5). Aurora views her contributions for the booksellers as trivial, resulting in a ‘frivolous fame’ (235). In these poems, she simply ‘played at art, made thrusts with a toy-sword, / Amused the lads and maidens’ (240–1), writing ‘To suit light readers’ (319). Barrett Browning’s exploration of the division between art and financial success in 1856 seemingly anticipates the divisions that define much of the early commentary on Victorian periodicals and poetry, further reinforcing that the field of Victorian poetry inherited the biases of nineteenth-century poets and critics. The critical view of periodical poetry as ‘trite or sentimental “filler” worth no one’s time’ (Hughes 2007: 91) sets up a binary between the

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poetry published in the periodical press and that published in the traditional single volume format. Interestingly, only poetry seems to be affected in this way by periodical publication. The canon of Victorian literature contains many novels and non-fiction essays that first appeared in the periodical press, and until relatively recently, only poetry was excluded from both the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (Hughes 2007: 91) and periodical studies. Indeed, prior to Hughes’s 2007 article ‘What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies’, scholars of the periodical press primarily focused on Victorian fiction, establishing its central role in consolidating the identity of Victorian periodicals and occluding poetry’s important contribution to periodical culture throughout the century.15 One reason for this erasure of periodical poetry lies in critical narratives of cultural capital. Periodical poetry is not produced in ways that align it with the modes of production adopted by those Pierre Bourdieu terms the avant garde (the producers of cultural capital); rather, it appeared in middlebrow publications, which existed as ‘socially neutralized product[s]’ that in their ‘ideal-typical form, [were] aimed at a public frequently referred to as “average”’ (2004: 125).16 According to Bourdieu, middlebrow publications ‘take no risks and create none for the audiences’; they simply build and mimic the established formulas associated with popular literature and other entertainments (2004: 84–5). As such, periodical poetry becomes aligned with the work of the imitative poetesses, including L.E.L., and amateur poets; it is not the work of poetic ‘innovators’ and thus not a subject for critical inquiry. Such cultural binaries and perspectives are themselves a product of the relationship between culture and power. The producers and consumers of individual poetry volumes (products of restricted production) claimed cultural superiority over the producers and consumers of periodicals and gift books (products of large-scale cultural production). Over time, this belief in the superiority of the products of restricted production became the dominant critical narrative, informing the cultural reception of popular literature.17 In response to this dismissal of periodical poems, much of the scholarship available on poetry and its presence in the periodical press has focused on questioning and repudiating the aesthetic judgements and preconceptions that largely erased periodical poetry from Victorian studies.18 Key to this is the direct and deliberate dismissal of the notion that periodical poetry functions as merely ‘trite or sentimental “filler” worth no one’s time’ (Hughes 2007: 91).19 Pioneering work by scholars such as Paula Bennett (1995),

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Linda Hughes (2007), Natalie Houston (2008) and Kathryn Ledbetter (2009) emphatically refutes this critical perception of periodical poetry as light verse and inconsequential filler, arguing for the centrality of poetry to periodical studies and vice versa. Hughes’s (2007) and Houston’s (2008) early work on periodical poetry and its surrounding white space, for example, highlights how poetry both participated in, mediated, and helped to define the new media of the nineteenth century,20 while Ledbetter (2009) and Bennett (1995) address the role that periodical publications played in the development of nineteenth-century women’s poetry. Other critics ignore questions of aesthetic value altogether choosing, instead, to focus on what the presence/absence of poetry in the periodical press can tell us about Victorian print culture from a particular title’s editorial policies (Hughes 2010b, 2016b, 2017) to the reception and circulation of poetry beyond the literary centre of Victorian London (Hobbs and Januszewski 2014). Finally, scholars such as Lorraine Janzen Kooistra claim a place for the aesthetics of periodical poetry within Victorian culture, arguing for the centrality of middlebrow culture and, thus, periodical poetry, to both the study of Victorian book history and poetry. For Kooistra, the book objects produced to satisfy the Victorian era’s developing middlebrow culture require further investigation as they ‘offer new ways of seeing and understanding [both] the high Victorian period’ (2011: 4) and the Victorian reader’s relationship with and experience of poetry. Essays by Linda H. Peterson (2016) and Hughes (2016a) in the Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth Century British Periodicals and Newspapers similarly argue that further study of the relationship between periodicals and poetry is needed to flesh out our understanding of Victorian poetry, culture and the periodical press. Adopting and modifying the methodologies offered by scholars such as Blair, Hughes, Houston and Kooistra, this book understands periodical poetry as responding to the form of the middle-class literary periodical. I use the theoretical model provided by Levine in both her 2006 essay ‘Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method of Cultural Studies’ as well as her more recent book-length work, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, to consider how the competing and complementary forces of genre, material production, cultural value, and the literary market shape the genre and reception history of Victorian periodical poetry.21 Levine understands literary, social and cultural forms ‘as ways of imposing order, of shaping and structuring experience’ (2006a: 635). The reproduction of Barrett Browning’s ‘L.E.L.’s Last Question’ in the Ladies’ Pocket Magazine

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acts as an ideal case study for this kind of analysis. As I argued earlier in this introduction, the cultural and social forms of the Ladies’ Pocket Magazine and L.E.L.’s reputation shaped and structured the reading experience of Barrett Browning’s poem, inserting Barrett Browning into a poetic order – that of the poetess – which the letterpress of the poem resists. Indeed, her decision to publish the poem in the Athenaeum reinforces the power of cultural and social forms as the review’s reputation imbues her poem with a critical value. Paying attention to form and its affordances means that ‘the cultural critic can’, and, I would suggest, should, attend to conflicts and overlaps not just among race, class, and gender but also among forms of knowledge, forms of narrative, forms of subjectivity, forms of space, forms of circulation, forms of community, forms of worship, forms of administration, forms of intimacy, and forms of thought. (Levine 2006a: 635)22

Periodical poetry had to respond to multiple cultural and social forms, especially those of class, gender, space, thought (by which I mean contemporary poetic theory), and the periodical press, and the poetic responses to these demands shaped the form of Victorian poetry – whether it is was published in the periodical press or not. The selection of periodicals and poetry discussed in this book responded to (and, in some cases, even defined) the social and cultural forms that made up the Victorian middle class. The middleclass audience of mid-Victorian England worked in the professions (non-manual work); had a ‘superior education’ than those of the working class (Altick 1998: 359); valued domesticity and moral order, viewing the ‘family as the central institution’ (Davidoff and Hall 2002: 31); and ‘disdained cheap weeklies, with a few exceptions like Household Words’, even though they ‘could not spare the two shillings or half-crown at which the principle monthly magazines were priced’ (Altick 1998: 359). These middle-class readers demanded respectable and affordable literature that gave them access to high literary culture without the expenditure. When this audience became the focus of the periodical market in the 1860s, the literary forms published as part of the periodical had to respond to the expectations and demands of this new readership, leading to the rise of so-called middlebrow culture. The poetry produced within this model became ‘a commodity for mass consumption, an object within Victorian material culture’ (Kooistra 2011: 35). Its

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production occurred outside the restricted and, in Bourdieu’s terms, avant-garde culture of the poetry volume. As such, while there are places where periodical and canonical poetry intersect, periodical poetry cannot be evaluated on the same terms as that produced under the conditions of restricted production. Rather, periodical poetry must be evaluated according to a different set of criteria: those governing the production of literary periodicals for the Victorian middle-class reader. It is here that Bourdieu’s theories of cultural production become important because they emphasise ‘the complex network of social relations that makes the very existence of the texts possible’ (2004: 10). In his introduction to a collection of Bourdieu’s essays on cultural production, Randal Johnson observes that, for Bourdieu, [t]o be fully understood, literary works must be reinserted into the system of social relations which sustains them. This does not imply a rejection of aesthetic or formal properties, but rather an analysis based on their position in relation to the universe of possibilities of which they are a part. (Johnson 2004: 11)

After all, notions of aesthetic value are culturally and historically contingent, informed by contemporary social and political hierarchies and ideologies, including those that governed the production of the mid-Victorian literary periodical. Bourdieu’s approach to the act of literary interpretation, like that of Levine, encourages the cultural and literary critic to pay attention to the forms and conditions of publication when evaluating literature. In his work on sentimental poetics, Jerome McGann argues that ‘adequate reading begins [ . . . ] by entering into those conventions, by reading in the same spirit that the author writ’ (1996: 4). The same thing can be said about popular poetry. It requires the reader to understand the cultural forms and modes of production at play in its composition and subsequent publication in the periodical press. Studies of the relationship between the Victorian periodical press, visual culture, and the production of the Victorian poet and reader have already contributed to new understandings of both poetry and the periodical press as responding to cultural modes of production. For example, both Hughes (2010b) and Kooistra (2014) persuasively demonstrate that the presence of illustrated poetry in a periodical signalled a periodical’s literary value (or, in some cases, its literary pretensions). As Kooistra, notes, ‘when pictures accompanied poetic verse (as opposed to scientific essays or serialized novels), the

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symbolic value [of the periodical] intensified’ as both poetry and the black and white wood engravings of the 1860s possessed immense cultural capital, combining two genres traditionally associated with restricted as opposed to mechanical reproduction: original art and original poetry (Kooistra 2014: 115). Paying attention to illustration also provides information about the way readers were trained to encounter and understand the function of poetry in the periodicals they read (Kooistra 2014). Scholarship on women’s contributions to the periodical press similarly addresses questions of readership. Kathryn Ledbetter, for example, focuses on the space that periodicals provided for the development of both female poets and readers.23 She traces how the sentimental, patriotic and domestic verse of women’s magazines ‘evokes a sense of power for women readers’ (2009: 9), implicitly building on Phegley’s (2005) work by claiming a place for periodical poetry in a critical discourse that tends to focus on how the fiction and essays of the periodical press shaped the woman reader.24 Her point, reminiscent of Hughes, is that poetry, whether it acted as filler or not, did take up important space in the periodical press. Ledbetter’s reading of women’s periodical poetry ‘within the physical and symbolic context of a woman’s periodical’ invites what she calls ‘a shift in perspective that upends traditional critical perceptions of Victorian poetry and cultural centres, situating it [Victorian poetry and culture] squarely in the mainstream of Victorian domestic life, rather than at the margins’ (2009: 118). This re-centring of poetry as part of the lives of Victorian readers informs the way I read the poetry published in periodicals such as Once a Week and Good Words. The literary periodicals of the 1860s made poetry a central part of middle-class life, contributing to the ideological development of the middle-class reader and their literary tastes. This construction of a periodical’s ideal reader through the publication’s contents was often self-serving on the part of Victorian publishers. The appearance of poems and even illustrations could serve as advertisements for future publications, even as they taught readers how to engage with new or developing forms of literary content. For instance, the production of illustrated poetry in periodicals such as Good Words ‘schooled Victorian readers in a verbal/visual literacy reinforced in the illustrated gift books that dominated poetry sales in the second half of the nineteenth century’ (Kooistra 2014: 135). Kooistra’s analysis clearly ties periodical poetry to the history of Victorian poetry and its material production, and her work on illustrated gift books and periodical further emphasises the need to engage ‘with the way material packaging affected poetry’s place in

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Victorian culture’ (2011: 3). Not only does the material presentation of poetry speak to contemporary trends in the consumption and production of literature, but the act of engaging with the material book, she argues, reframes the type of questions that can be asked about the poetry published in the popular press, allowing us to move beyond aesthetic valuation towards a consideration of the demands of commercial production. This book begins to formulate a more comprehensive theory of the relationship between the mid-Victorian periodical and poetic forms – and their respective aesthetics – as I read across periodical titles in an attempt to theorise how the affordances of the periodical press, an undoubtedly commercial form, affected the circulation, reception, composition and meaning of poetry in the 1860s. Each chapter examines the poetry and poetics of either a single periodical title or a group of related periodical titles in order to understand how the expectations of the periodical form, specifically the form of the literary periodical, and its poetry shaped the form and function of midVictorian poetry and poetics. As part of my discussion, my analysis of the poetry published in Household Words, All the Year Round, Once a Week, Macmillan’s Magazine, the Cornhill, Good Words and the Argosy addresses several key issues related to the publication of poetry in the periodical press: the power and influence of illustrated poetry in contemporary visual culture, the intended audience of the literary periodical and the issues that raised for editors and poets, networks of print, and the ways in which periodical poetry participated in contemporary debates about prosody. The chapters that follow thus re-draw the conventional map of Victorian poetics, offering an alternative history of Victorian poetry, one that argues for the genre’s central role in the development of Victorian poetry.25 In this book, the periodical poet is not a marginal poet: he, and especially she, occupies the centre of literary culture, producing the poetry read and consumed by the majority of Victorian readers. Chapter 1 begins at the centre of middle-class Victorian literary culture, focusing on the periodical publications helmed by Charles Dickens, Household Words and All the Year Round, and Once a Week, the periodical launched by Bradbury and Evans in an attempt to recover the market share they lost when Dickens ended his professional relationship with them. Building on Lorna Huett’s convincing argument about the lasting influence of Dickens’s literary weeklies, I use Dickens’s periodicals as paradigmatic examples of how the form and content of poetry published in the periodical press 1) responds to reader expectations and literary trends and 2) functions, in part,

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to consolidate a periodical’s brand. I propose that the poetry published in a periodical’s debut issue participates in an act of inauguration, announcing the periodical’s presence and defining/supporting the periodical’s editorial mandate. The continuity between Household Words and All the Year Round highlights how poetry functions in this way. So too does the discontinuity between Household Words and Once a Week. The inaugural poem published in Once a Week clearly distances the publisher’s new weekly from Dickens through the use of illustration and the emphasis on middle-class leisure and domestic life. These brief and strategically selective case studies of the inaugural poetry of Household Words, All the Year Round and Once a Week demonstrate how periodicals ‘shaped Victorian poetry’ by exerting pressure on the ‘length and content’ and ‘timing’ of the poems they published (Hughes 2010a: 91). The placement of poetry in Dickens’s weeklies modifies the metaphorical register of the poem; its meaning comes to metonymically represent the periodical as a whole. In Once a Week, the function of the inaugural poem is more obvious: it explicitly functions as an introductory editorial written in verse. The argument and reading strategies presented in this chapter provide the foundation for the case studies that follow as I turn to the poetry of Macmillan’s Magazine and the Cornhill in my second chapter. Just as Dickens’s successful mid-century experiments in periodical publishing redefined the weekly periodical for middle-class audiences, leading to its resurgence, Macmillan’s Magazine and the Cornhill effectively set the standard for the genre of the shilling monthly (Phegley 2004: 22). The initial success of these periodicals on the literary market inspired copycat publications. For example, John Sutherland describes the Broadway: A Monthly Magazine (1868–73) as ‘[a]n unsuccessful attempt by Routledge to emulate Smith, Elder’s Cornhill’ (1988: 84).26 Their popularity and influence means that Macmillan’s Magazine (hereafter Macmillan’s) and the Cornhill have received ample critical attention;27 however, while scholars have more than adequately established the important role these shilling monthlies played in the growth of the genre and the development/circulation of contemporary literature and fiction, few have considered how the stately, canonical monthlies of the 1860s participated in the production and circulation of mid-Victorian poetry and poetics. Together Macmillan’s and the Cornhill defined the genre of the shilling monthly, and the poetry published within the covers of these canonical magazines creates a portrait of the imagined (and ideal) middle-class reader and the professional author. This

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chapter focuses on how the opinions and tastes of editors and publishers defined the literary tastes and expectations of the periodical’s readers, shaping their experience of poetry both within the periodical and without – after all, Alexander Macmillan used his firm’s shilling monthly to develop authors he would later publish in the more expensive single-volume format. Moreover, by demanding a certain type of poetry, Macmillan and William Thackeray defined the role of the mid-Victorian poet. Scholarship on Macmillan’s (Vanarsdel 2000), its publisher (Worth 2003), and its most famous contributor, Christina Rossetti (Van Remoortel 2013), has already begun to explore the relationship between periodical publications and professional poetic practices. My discussion of Macmillan’s poetry picks up on these established threads, paying particular attention to the role that Macmillan’s played in the cultivation and development of the era’s poetic landscape. However, the bulk of this chapter focuses on the Cornhill and how Thackeray’s editorial presence, combined with the poetry published during his tenure, cultivated a specific version of the literary professional as an expert and paragon of middleclass culture and values able to write poetry fit, as Thackeray informs Barrett Browning, ‘not only for men and women, but for boys, girls, infants, sucklings almost’ (Ray 1946, vol. 4: 226).28 The periodicals referenced in the first two chapters highlight the intersection of the traditional canon of Victorian poetry, poets, and poetics with periodical culture. However, as Hughes (n.d.) and Law (2000) have both noted, the attention paid to the canonical literary periodicals of the 1860s, while still important to periodical studies, elides the larger cultural context in which such publications appeared. The final two chapters of this book thus consider the editorial polices and poetry of two prominent but understudied periodicals that used the formula established by All the Year Round, Macmillan’s and the Cornhill to develop their own specific markets based on class, gender and literary trends. Published by Alexander Strahan, Good Words and the Argosy catered to the same middleclass audience as their competitors, possessing all the signifiers of the shilling monthly (illustrations, book-like formatting, a mix of poetry, non-fiction prose and serial fiction). Indeed, the decision to transition Good Words from a weekly to a monthly publication in 1861 proves that the initial success of the Cornhill, and, to lesser extent Macmillan’s Magazine, influenced periodical formats in the 1860s. They differ, however, in their response to the era’s middle-class culture. While Macmillan’s and the Cornhill focused on defining and promoting ‘literature’ and literary ideals, Good Words responded to

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the period’s devotional culture and took advantage of the market for religious periodicals, while the Argosy attempted to capitalise on the rise of sensation fiction in the mid-1860s. The forms that structure and inform Good Words and the Argosy shape the poetry published in each periodical, and reading the poems of these periodicals in light of their surrounding periodical forms allows us to more fully engage with the conventions and forms periodical poets responded to. To borrow from Bourdieu, to fully understand the poetry of the periodical press, we must reinsert periodical poetry into the very systems and forms that produce it. For the poetry of Good Words, this means engaging with the devotional culture and poetics of mid-Victorian Britain. Chapter 3 returns to the concept of the inaugural poem, positioning the first issue of Good Words as foundational to any analysis of the function of poetry in this devotional periodical. As I move through the periodical’s many devotional poems, I trace the symbiotic and reciprocal relationship between the poetry published in Good Words and the literary identity of the periodical itself. The devotional forms (both cultural and literary) of the nineteenthcentury undoubtedly informed the development of Good Words as well as the type of poetry reproduced and circulated within its pages. However, as my analysis of the periodical’s poems suggests the contents of Good Words similarly contributed to and confirmed the periodical’s form as a devotional text. The layout, editorial content and dominant themes of Good Words all support the publication’s overarching argument that a literary work made of good words could and should act as a prompt for devotional thought and practices. Building on the work of Hughes (2007) and Houston (2008), I consider how the visual affordances of periodical poetry support the periodical’s devotional mandate. For Hughes, the white margins surrounding periodical poetry ‘simultaneously suggest[s] a shift from mundane to sacred or spiritual spaces in which contemplation can occur’ (2007: 103). I argue that the devotional framework of Good Words heightens this suggestion as the devotional form of the periodical overlaps with the form of the picture poem, complicating and enriching our understanding of illustrated poetry’s place in the ‘daily li[ves]’ of the era’s ‘mass readership’ (Kooistra 2014: 135). Chapter 4 turns from spiritual to sensational forms in its analysis of the Argosy. In this final chapter, I move away from discussions of periodical branding and forms to consider the poetics of periodical poetry. As a case study, the Argosy offers a new and valuable

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space for exploring the tensions inherent in women’s poetry, as female poets had to negotiate and manipulate the poetic forms made available (and deemed acceptable) for their gender. I examine how the poetry of Christina Rossetti, Isa Craig, Jean Ingelow and Sarah Williams deftly engaged with the conventions of sentimental poetry, modifying, adapting and challenging these forms to produce a new poetics, one defined both through and against conventional representations of the Victorian poetess and her sentimental poems. The verse written by these popular women poets facilitates my examination of how the seemingly sentimental utterances associated with periodical poetry in fact undermine the critical tendency to read mid-Victorian sentimental poetry as either simplistic or only valuable for its thematic and ideological elements. Just as the Ladies’ Pocket Magazine reinserted Barrett Browning back into the poetess tradition that her poem attempted to rewrite, so too has the understanding of periodical poetry as an inferior poetic form overshadowed the skill of the female poets who dominated the mid-Victorian literary periodical much like their poetess forebears. As the study of periodical poetry continues to develop, we must think critically about how we approach the poetry published in the most popular and, in some cases, the most obscure periodicals of the nineteenth century. While the importance of periodical literature has long been recognised in studies of Victorian serial fiction, periodical poetry remained ignored until recently. As a result, scholarship on Victorian periodical poetry must draw from previous work on the periodical press, serial publication and the Victorian reader.29 Even the language developed to discuss Victorian illustrations has its limits because the established terminology does not always work when discussing a periodical poem.30 Throughout this book, I approach the study of periodical poetry differently from previous scholarship, arguing that it should also be the study of Victorian poetics and periodical culture. This approach allows for the adaptation and application of existing methodologies, opening up a productive space in which periodical poetry can be discussed as poetry without apology. My analysis challenges the boundaries of a scholarly field that until recently was dominated by scholarship on elite canonical poets and those who published in conventional, non-periodical contexts. It asserts the fundamental importance of popular periodical poetry to our understanding Victorian poetics, and, in doing so, it argues that without a consideration of the vital importance of periodical poetry, Victorian poetry studies is quite simply anachronistic.

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Notes 1. Walford’s letter also reveals that the publication of literature by ‘outsiders’ was one of the publisher’s initial directives (Buckler 1953: 537). 2. The market for literary annuals lasted into the 1850s with the publication of the final issue of The Keepsake in 1857. With the demise of the annuals, poets writing for a middle-class, literary audience had three major publication outlets beyond the traditional poetry volume: the illustrated gift book; the illustrated poetry volume; and the literary periodical, which often, though not always, published illustrations. Illustrated gift books and poetry volumes such as Robert Willmott’s The Poets of the Nineteenth Century (1857), the Moxon edition of Tennyson’s Poems (1857), and Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) replaced the annuals in the literary market. However, they did not publish the same miscellaneous content as the annuals. To find a similar (although less ostentatiously produced) product, consumers turned to the literary periodical. My discussion of the Argosy in Chapter 4 explores the literary legacy of the literary annual in more detail. 3. Poems from Once a Week, for example, appeared in newspapers such as the Glasgow Herald, which reprinted Tom Taylor’s ‘Magenta’ (originally published in Once a Week on 2 July 1859) in the issue for 4 July 1859, and Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, which reprinted Memor’s ‘On the Water’ (originally published in Once a Week on 22 July 1859) for its 3 September 1859 issue. 4. My focus on the early years of the periodicals referenced throughout this book aligns with Jennifer Phegley’s methodology in Educating the Proper Woman Reader (2004: 12). 5. Digital projects also dominate scholarship on periodical poetry from Hobbs and Januszewski’s web project The Local Press as Poetry Publisher 1800–1900 to The Periodical Poetry Index and the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry (Chapman 2010). 6. And, indeed, many shilling monthlies published in the 1860s had short publication runs. The Day of Rest, for instance, lasted only three years, despite its attempts to match the success of Good Words, while Saint Pauls Magazine, edited by Anthony Trollope between October 1867 and June 1870, lasted only slightly longer, from 1867 to 1874. Like the Day of Rest, Saint Pauls Magazine represents ‘yet another of the imitative shilling monthlies launched in the wake of the Cornhill’s success’ (Dawson 2007: 134). However, unlike the Cornhill, Saint Pauls Magazine never made its publisher any money, and it struggled to reach a circulation of 10,000, leading to its demise. 7. Hobbs and Januszewski note that ‘from the early 1860s to until the end of the century the local paper became the most widely read type of publication carrying poetry’, overtaking the circulation numbers of those newspapers and magazines published in London (2014: 66). The prevalence

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of poetry in these local papers alongside their circulation numbers explains, to some extent, the turn away from literary periodicals. 8. According to the available bibliographic records, Barrett Browning’s elegy for Letitia Elizabeth Landon appeared only once in the periodical press, as part of the 26 January 1839 issue of the Athenaeum (The Brownings: A Research Guide). A search through Google Books quickly complicates the official record. 9. The manuscript for the poem is dated 15 August 1838 (Dilbert-Himes and Lawford 1997: 459). Landon died on 15 October 1838. Though I tend to agree with Angela Leighton’s assertion that Barrett Browning’s knowledge of Landon’s final question comes from the poem ‘A Night at Sea’ (Leighton 1992), there are actually two potential sources. A 28 January 1839 letter to Hugh Stuart Boyd from Barrett Browning’s sister Arabella suggests some published excerpts of Landon’s final letter home as an alternative source: I dare say you heard of Miss Landon’s last letter that she wrote to some friend in England, a day or two before her death – supposing it may not have been in yr. newspaper, I must tell you, that the question upon wh. these lines are written, were the last words of her letter. (Kelley and Hudson 1984: 346) 10. My use of the term ‘embeddedness’ comes from Hughes (2010b). 11. The active participation of women editors and contributors such as Hemans, Landon and Barrett Browning’s friend Mary Russell Mitford (to say nothing of the product’s perceived audience and fashionable bindings) led to what Patricia Pulham (2003) calls a feminisation of the product. 12. Because I could only access a digital copy of this particular issue of the Ladies’ Pocket Magazine, I had to rely on my knowledge of the periodical form in order to evaluate how that placement of Barrett Browning’s poem affected the meaning of the poem. I was, however, able to view several physical volumes of the magazine (dated between 1825 and 1836) held by Yale University Library. All physical descriptions of the magazine are based on this first-hand knowledge of the periodical and the scanned 1839 volume found through Google Books. I discuss the issue of digitalisation and digital archives in the conclusion. 13. For example, in a review of Barrett Browning’s The Seraphim and Other Poems, John Wilson inserts ‘our Elizabeth’ into a chronology of the poetess, identifying her as the child-like heir to the poetic fame of Tighe, Hemans and Landon (Wilson 1838: 281). 14. Hughes (2017) emphasises the problem with historical evaluations of poetic quality, reminding us that the definition of ‘“good” poetry is a vexed process informed by various and shifting ideologies, including class and gender’ (282). 15. Periodical studies by Altick (1998) and Huett (2009) write about the role that fiction played in the development and success of Dickens’s periodical endeavours. Turner (2002) links the Victorian era’s changing

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conceptions of time to the serial structure of the periodical and its fiction, and Patten and Finkelstein (2006) note that placing fiction as the lead item in a periodical issue ‘was [not only] in line with Blackwood policy of promoting new serializations by placing them at the top of the table of contents, [but] was in fact the usual arrangement at most journals featuring major fiction’ (162). Even Victorian authors identified serial fiction as crucial to the success of the literary periodical. Though he declared All the Year Round ‘the enemy’, George Meredith also advised Samuel Lucas, the first editor of Once a Week, to follow Dickens’s ‘system of making the principal tale commence the number’ (Meredith 1970: 63). 16. Bourdieu’s full description of the term middlebrow is as follows: ordinary commercial businesses whose concern for economic profitability forces them into extremely prudent cultural strategies, which take no risks and create none for the audiences, and offer shows that have already succeeded [ . . . ] or have been newly written in accordance with tried and tested formulae [ . . . ] shows of pure entertainment whose conventions and staging correspond to an aesthetic that has not changed for a century. (2004: 84–5) 17. For further information about the application of Bourdieu’s theory to the Victorian publishing industry, see Kooistra (2014). 18. Hughes points out that ‘[t]he presumptive association of poetry with “filler” is belied by the sheer extent of poems first published in Victorian periodicals that are now deemed canonical’ (2007: 92). For Hughes, the placement and layout afforded periodical poetry suggests that even those poems that never entered the canon cannot be disregarded as filler. She states, ‘[f]ar from serving as filler, poetry diversifies closely printed columns in dailies and weeklies and acts as a valueadded visual and literary feature’ (2007: 103). 19. I have emphasised the word merely here because some poems do appear to be filler due to their position on the page. See my discussion of Christina Rossetti’s ‘The Round Tower at Jhansi. – June 8, 1857’ (13 August 1859) in Chapter 1. 20. Hughes, for instance, suggests that the white margins surrounding periodical poetry function to ‘literally [light] up the page’ (2007: 103). For Houston, the production of this contemplative space in Victorian newspapers demonstrates ‘poetry’s capacity to offer emotional responses to current events in [a] different language than that of the daily news’ (2008: 239). Reading poetry as an alternative form of reportage allows Houston to effectively counter the critical tendency to dismiss newspaper poetry as topical ‘light verse’ (2008: 234) of little critical value. Charlotte Boyce’s essay ‘Representing the “Hungry Forties” in Image and Verse: The Politics of Hunger in Early Victorian Illustrated Periodicals’ offers a comparable argument, noting that representations of hunger in image and verse offered readers a perspective that ‘“factual” journalism did not’ (2012: 423).

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21. For more information on strategic formalism and the debate surrounding the theory, see Dever (2006), Levine (2006b), Rudy (2003) and Tucker (2006). 22. This definition of form is similar to that offered by the Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics, which defines form as ‘a term for the multiple systems that shape as well as convey information’ (Wolfson 2012: 497). 23. Of course, the transatlantic culture of reprinting complicates any distinction between British and American periodical poetry. For further information, see McGill (2003). 24. For example, Helen Groth describes how the construction of the cultivated woman reader continued into the 1890s. She writes, [d]eveloping a taste for poetry [ . . . ] became the perfect anecdote to the unsavoury effects of mass modern culture, a wholesome cure leading to a resurgence of a healthy feminine influence in an age of sterile mass production and consumption. (2003: 198) 25. As Johnson notes, Bourdieu’s theoretical model is ultimately ‘a relational mode of thought to cultural production [ . . . that] see[s] each element in terms of its relationships with all other elements in a system from which it derives its meaning and function’ (Bourdieu 2004: 6). 26. This emulation even included the periodical’s name, which was ‘derived from its publisher’s London address’ just like the title of the Cornhill (Sutherland 1988: 84). 27. See Dawson (2002), Phegley (2004), Maunder (1999a, 2000), Scott (1999) and Worth (1990, 2003), among others. An entire issue of Victorian Periodicals Review was dedicated to essays on the Cornhill in 1999. 28. As Thackeray’s commentary indicates, Barrett Browning was still trying to escape the expectations placed on her gender and spectre of the poetess thirty years after the publication of ‘L. E. L.’s Last Question’. 29. The seminal works on these topics include Hughes and Lund (1991) and Altick (1998). 30. These terms, as outlined by Surridge and Leighton (2008), include proleptic (anticipating events in the verbal plot and, on occasion, making the verbal text appear repetitive), analeptic (referring back to a scene in the written text, making the illustration repetitive and/or iterative), extradiegetic (representing scenes that do not appear in the verbal text), diegetic (a scene from the narrative) and interpictorial (referring to other well-known images or modes of visual representation).

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Chapter 1

Middle-Class Audiences, Literary Weeklies and the Inaugural Poem: Household Words, All the Year Round and Once a Week While shilling monthlies such as the Cornhill receive significant attention for their role in altering the shape of the mid-Victorian literary and periodical markets, the literary weeklies were some of the first publications to court and consolidate the period’s middle-class readers into a distinct readership. Over time, the weeklies became a significant presence in the periodical market, eventually putting pressure on the shilling monthlies (Law 2000: 25). The more modest price of periodicals such as Household Words, All the Year Round and Once a Week attracted a broad swath of middle-class and aspiring middleclass readers from those who could afford only the most modest luxuries to those who had greater economic freedom. The way Dickens and his publishers marketed and sold Household Words and All the Year Round shows their keen awareness of the different economic and class realities of the weekly’s potential readers. The weekly format of Household Words, for example, ‘required less outlay of cash and fit well with the social and economic rhythms of weekly wages and Sunday leisure’ (Brake 2016: 242). Consequently, the periodical’s twopenny price allowed it to attract two different audiences: the price of the publication made it ‘accessible to the working classes’ (Phegley 2016: 291), giving them access to the literature and cultural values embedded in publications aimed at a middle-class readership, while the weekly’s association with Dickens meant that the periodical remained ‘attractive to middle-class readers, who would have been particularly pleased with [this] link’ to the well-respected novelist (Phegley 2016: 291). Many weeklies, including Dickens’s, ‘also issued monthly editions with specially created advertising wrappers’ (Brake 2016: 243), targeting wealthier middle-class readers by invoking the cultural capital of the monthly publication, which felt and looked more like a book. Regardless of the format purchased by readers, the content of the mid-Victorian weekly – at least, as it was reimagined

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by Dickens – supported the social mandate of the rising and increasingly dominant Victorian middle class. Of all the periodicals considered in this book, Dickens’s Household Words is perhaps the most obviously political. Under Dickens’s editorship, Household Words published serial fiction, mostly social problem novels, and contemporary poetry alongside ‘politically orientated pieces on education and industrialism’ (Phegley 2016: 292). The periodical’s focus on social issues transformed the weekly into an organ for promoting Dickens’s social agenda. However, by the 1860s, there was a notable shift in Dickens’s approach to periodical publication. After his very public split from publishers Bradbury and Evans, which I discuss later in this chapter, Dickens reinvented Household Words as All the Year Round. Still sold at 2d per weekly issue, All the Year Round shifted gears slightly, ‘privileging high quality serial fiction and replacing’ the political essays of Household Words with ‘articles on science, history, and travel’ (Phegley 2016: 292). In other words, All the Year Round entered into direct competition with the era’s shilling monthlies, offering readers high-quality, family-friendly literature at a fraction of the price: at 9d, even the monthly editions of Dickens’s publications undersold shilling monthlies like the Cornhill. At the same time, Bradbury and Evans, in an attempt to make up for their loss of Dickens and Household Words, started publishing the illustrated weekly Once a Week. Like All the Year Round, Once a Week focused on publishing fiction, poetry, and general interest essays aimed at a middle-class audience. The presence of illustrations and the price (3d instead of 2d) represents the most obvious differences between the two publications. The price of Once a Week clearly leaves lower-class readers behind. It courts a solidly professional, middle-class audience: the presence of illustrations by notable artists such as Halbôt K. Browne clearly representing Bradbury and Evans’s attempt to woo the middle-class audience that Dickens’s Household Words had begun to cultivate. Household Words, All the Year Round and Once a Week are ideal case studies to begin my discussion of periodical poetry and poetics, because the poetry they published reveals how each title leveraged the cultural value of poetry to build their literary brand. These periodicals make this function of poetry even more apparent, given the deep aesthetic (and antagonistic) divide between Dickens’s periodicals and that of Bradbury and Evans. Focusing on the poetry published in the inaugural issues of Household Words, All the Year Round and Once a Week, this chapter considers how reading poetry across periodical titles raises fruitful questions about the nature of periodical

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poetry and its role in the press, establishing the principles and terminology that will guide my analysis of periodical poetry in the following chapters.1

Inaugural Poetry: A Preliminary Definition In her 2007 essay ‘What the Wellesley Index Left Out’, Hughes suggests that two of the ‘more pressing questions’ facing scholars of periodical poetry are ‘why original poetry mattered to Victorian editors and readers and what poetry can tell us about Victorian periodicals as a whole’ (Hughes 2007: 91). The study of what I am calling inaugural poetry offers one answer. Extending Hughes’s initial theorisation of poetry’s crucial role in the Victorian press, I contend that the inaugural poem deserves special attention for how it establishes the audience, literary value, tone, and brand of a publication. As I argue elsewhere (Ehnes 2017b), while some inaugural poems advertise their purpose in their title, either using the word ‘inaugural’ or identifying the poem with the periodical through an eponymous title, other poems only become inaugural poems when read as part of a periodical’s broader inaugural project. The first type of inaugural poem, what I call the explicitly inaugural poem, clearly functions to define the identity or brand of the periodical in which it is published, reaffirming and, in some cases, establishing the editorial precepts that govern a publication’s literary content. The second type of inaugural poem, the contextually dependent inaugural poem, also functions as an example of a periodical’s poetics and literary ethos, but only when it is read in context as part of the periodical’s broader inaugural project. Defining inaugural poems becomes even more difficult once you realise that inaugural poems, whether their titles identify them as such or not, can appear anywhere in a periodical’s first issue. In such cases, the first poem published in a periodical’s debut issue functions (at least in part) as that publication’s (usually contextually dependent) inaugural poem insofar as the poem participates in the branding process associated with introductory issues. Finally, inaugural poems can also appear at moments of transition. For example, when Alexander Strahan published the first monthly issue of Good Words in January 1861, he marked the debut of his restructured periodical with the poem ‘Good Words’ by L.C.C. (L.C.C. 1861a: 1–2).2 What all these ‘inaugural’ poems have in common is that regardless of their form or placement, they all perform an act of inauguration, formally introducing the periodical into public use.3

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Ultimately, as a sub-genre of periodical poetry, inaugural poems resist any attempt to confine them within a single definition because their form, poetics and even content vary, depending on the periodical in which the poem appears. The difficulty encountered when trying to define and identify the inaugural poem offers a potential explanation for the relative absence of scholarship on the role of inaugural poetry and the meaning of its presence in the Victorian periodical press. One exception is Alison Chapman (2014), who, in a post on the Victorian Poetry Network, suggests that the following questions need to be answered about inaugural poetry: ‘What features do different inaugural poems share? Are inaugural poems a poetic category all of their own? What do they tell us of the cultural value of poetry at a title’s launch? Do inaugural poems always have to be on the first page?’ The following analysis of the inaugural issues of Household Words, All the Year Round and Once a Week begins to answer these questions. My work on periodical poetry emphasises the category of the inaugural poem, suggesting that it is central to our understanding of the place of poetry in the periodical press. In scholarship about the periodical press and its ‘logical coherence’ (Phegley 2004: 12), the place of poetry is often overlooked. However, exploring the function of the inaugural poem re-centres poetry by considering how the ‘subgenre’ of inaugural poetry highlights the centrality of poetry to the construction of a periodical title’s coherent and marketable identity.

‘A Preliminary Word’: Household Words and the Domestication of the Literary Weekly The frequent appearance of poems that explicitly align with and support the editorial and literary ethos built through a periodical’s debut issue suggests that editors relied on inaugural poetry to establish their periodical’s brand and to speak for them with the same authority as Charles Dickens’s conductor in Household Words. So that is where this chapter begins. One of the first, and arguably most influential, literary magazines of the mid-Victorian period, Household Words rehabilitated the genre of the weekly periodical and its fiction (Huett 2009 and Lohrli 1973). Working with his current publishers Bradbury and Evans, Dickens’s new weekly periodical filled a void in the literary market, presenting middle-class readers with good-quality serialised fiction published ‘under the aegis of a celebrated novelist known in part for his depictions of idealised domesticity’ (Huett 2009: 136). The serial fiction of Household Words transformed the

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weekly periodical into a legitimate outlet for literature aimed at a middle-class audience, and within the next decade, the literary periodical became the primary vehicle for middle-class literature from the novel to the poem, priming middle-class readers for the rise of the shilling monthly. The branding of Household Words begins on the very first page. In bolded letters, the masthead, which remains the same throughout the periodical’s nine-year run, identifies the periodical as ‘conducted by Charles Dickens’, and each page thereafter reminds the reader of this fact as the periodical’s two-page spread displays a running head with identical wording. Though many of the periodicals published in the 1850s and 1860s were edited by literary celebrities, few, if any, had their names appear on the masthead, let alone the running head. The emphasis on and repetition of Dickens’s name explicitly identifies the periodical as a Dickensian publication, as part of his brand. As Huett suggests, this association with Dickens’s literary reputation is part of what made Household Words so successful.4 Dickens further emphasised his presence by speaking directly to his readers in the periodical’s first article, ‘A Preliminary Word’ (Dickens 1850: 1–2). In his preliminary word, Dickens outlines his editorial aims for the periodical. His statement clearly identifies Household Words as periodical for all members of the middle-class family. As the conductor of this venture, Dickens states that he has considered what an ambition it is to be admitted into many homes with affection and confidence; to be regarded as a friend by children and old people; to be thought of in affliction and in happiness; to people the sick room with airy shapes ‘that give delight and hurt not,’ and to be associated with the harmless laughter and the gentle tears of many hearths. (Dickens 1850: 1)

Dickens locates Household Words at the heart of the middle-class home, envisioning his audience as encompassing the full-spectrum of middle-class readers from child to elderly adult, and with this statement, he implicitly promises that the contents of Household Words will be appropriate for this domestic audience. However, while the editorial promises that the weekly will avoid unseemly content, it will nonetheless advocate for a greater sympathy between the classes. Its articles, Dickens informs his readers, will ‘bring the greater and lesser in degree, together, upon that wide field, and mutually dispose them to a better acquaintance and a kinder understanding’ (1). For Dickens-asconductor, this ‘is one main object of our Household Words’ (1). The contents of the periodical reflect his editorial agenda. For example, the

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first chapter of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Lizzie Leigh (1850: 2–6) follows Dickens’s preliminary word.5 Lizzie Leigh tells a story of forgiveness and redemption in which Gaskell rewrites the prodigal son narrative to replace the lost son with a fallen woman, the eponymous Lizzie Leigh. The short novella describes Lizzie’s reintegration into her family after a tragedy, and one of its main characters, Susan, demonstrates the kindness and understanding that Dickens’s conductor calls for in his preliminary word. She not only refuses to judge Lizzie for her fallen status, but she protects Lizzie’s child from the workhouse by adopting the child as her own. The periodical’s inaugural poem, Leigh Hunt’s ‘Abraham and the Fire-Worshipper: A Dramatic Parable’ (1850: 12–13), provides the periodical’s middle-class readers with another lesson in the acceptance of social others. Like most periodical texts, Hunt’s parable ‘gain[s] deeper meaning’ when read as part of Household Words because the context of the periodical gives it meaning (Phegley 2004: 12). In this case, the periodical context transforms Hunt’s parable into an inaugural poem; it simultaneously reinforces Dickens’s editorial agenda and introduces the periodical’s poetics, acting as the first of a series of poems that positions the periodical’s readers as benevolent givers (of sympathy if not any kind of material aid).6 Hunt’s version of this Persian parable (Kidwai and Newey 1996: 44) tells the story of Abraham, who, after dining with a Persian traveller, casts the fire-worshipper out of his tent for ‘Not reverencing / The God of ages’ (Hunt 1850: 12). Shortly after the traveller leaves, God appears before the biblical patriarch and admonishes him: Then didst thou do what God himself forbore. Have I, although he did deny me, borne With his injuriousness these hundred years, And couldst thou not endure him one sole night And such a night as this! (Hunt 1850: 12)

Abraham immediately repents his actions, only to find the traveller asleep, sheltered by a fold in the tent. As he views the fire-worshipper sleeping soundly with his head resting upon a lamb, Abraham reflects on his actions: O loving God! The lamb itself’s his pillow, And on his forehead is a balmy dew, And in his sleep he smileth. I, meantime, Poor and proud fool, with my presumptuous hands, Not God’s, was dealing judgements on his head. Which God himself had cradled. (12–13)

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Hunt’s version of the parable draws an implicit parallel between the lamb, the voice of God, and Christ, the ‘Lamb of God’ (John 1: 29). The allusion to Christ merges the Old Testament God of Abraham with the New Testament God embodied by Christ and reinforces the morals of the poem, which remind readers to act with Christian charity and compassion, and to recognise the hypocrisy of assumed moral superiority. True Christians, Hunt’s parable suggests, do not cast off the less fortunate; they behave in the manner of Christ, offering sanctuary and providing aid, not creating hardship. During the nine-year run of Household Words, Hunt’s ‘Abraham and the Fire-Worshipper: A Dramatic Parable’ was the only poem with the word parable in its title. The decision to publish a Persian parable as the first poem in Household Words is particularly apt in light of the publication’s investment in instruction and the promotion social change in thought if not in practice (Lohrli 1973: 15–16). Dickens’s focus on praxis and societal improvement in Household Words makes the recognisable and familiar form of the parable the perfect genre for this secular periodical’s inaugural poem.7 Susan Colón argues that Victorian parables demand what she calls an ‘embodied response to the challenge they pose’ (2012: 7). For Colón, ‘[t]he invitation to think very differently about something one thought one knew carries with it an invitation to act very differently’ (2012: 7). From the content of the periodical’s inaugural poem, we may infer that Dickens did not mean for his ‘articles warring against social evils and abuses’ (Lohrli 1973: 4) to be passively consumed by his middle-class readers. Rather, the middle-class readers of Household Words were to act according to the principles the periodical’s literature promoted. In Hunt’s parable, the criticism of Abraham’s sense of Christian superiority and his absolute rejection of infidel behaviours and peoples enacts what Colón identifies as a central feature of the Victorian parable: the ‘extravagant reversal,’ which juxtaposes ‘an ordinary situation, plot and set of characters with an extraordinarily, unpredictable turn of action’ (2012: 13).8 In ‘Abraham and the Fire-Worshipper’, the unpredictable turn occurs when God insists that the fire-worshipper, though ‘he did deny me [God]’ (Hunt 1850: 12), does not deserve to be cast out into the storm. Rather, the voice of God demands that Abraham provide the fire-worshipper with unconditional shelter for the night. Read in the context of Household Words, the poem encourages readers to put their charitable thoughts and aphorisms into action and actively help those who do not share the beliefs, wealth or education of the middle classes. The parable thus reinforces the message of Dickens’s editorial mandate and contributes to the branding of the periodical as one invested in social issues and change while implicitly highlighting

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the instructive nature of Household Words through the genre of the parable itself.9 Dickens continued to focus on social issues throughout the remainder of the periodical’s run, attracting prominent contributors and middle-class readers up to its very last issue in 1859. For instance, Edmund Ollier’s ‘A Lay of London Streets’ (1850: 36) encourages sympathy for an impoverished woman, whose appearance the speaker describes as follows: I see some locks of wandering hair, Like weeds in a neglected ditch; And, lower down, some heaving rags (Strapp’d here and there, yet partly free) From which two lean and naked arms Toss up, like wrecks upon the sea. (36)

The speaker identifies the woman’s appearance as a symptom of poverty, and he asks the reader for empathy: ‘Judge not too harshly of her fault, / The bitter growth of bitter fate’ (36). The fellow-feeling urged by the speaker echoes Dickens’s preliminary word, which called for a greater understanding between the readers of Household Words and the impoverished of London’s streets. Published four months later, Dora Greenwell’s ‘Likeness in Difference’ (1851: 524) goes even further. The speaker of the poem presents two young women, one ‘queenly’ and one destitute, as equals in her ‘tale of feeling’ (254). Throughout the poem, she constantly reiterates the similarity of their emotions and their experiences of love; the difference lies solely in their material circumstances. As the speaker observes, ‘Two tales that were diverse spoken, / Yet their import one, I knew’ (524). The poem brings the lesser and greater together (to borrow from Dickens), emphasising the shared humanity of all classes. The connection that Greenwell draws between the emotional experiences of the upper and lower classes fulfils the mandate of Household Words by bringing the classes together and creating a place for mutual understanding to occur. Subsequent poems published in Household Words offer even more models of understanding. For example, Adelaide Anne Procter’s ‘The Cradle Song of the Poor’ (1855: 560–1) invites cross-cultural understanding through the poem’s maternal figure, a working-class mother. The focus on maternal feeling in the poem builds an implicit parallel between the middle-class mothers reading Household Words and the speaker’s song. In effect, Procter transforms the lullabies of middle-class mothers into a tragic narrative of maternal despair: ‘Now, my darling, I, thy mother / Almost long to see thee die’ (560).

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The working mother’s wish for her child’s release through death is a common trope in periodical poetry written about working-class conditions. In Household Words, the mother’s wish for her child to escape the hunger and trials of poverty functions to raise awareness about the social evils plaguing Victorian society. John Critchley Prince’s ‘A Voice from the Factory’ (1851: 35–6) promotes a similar message, asking the periodical’s middle-class readers to pay attention to the social ills that surround them. Published in the 26 October 1850 issue of Household Words, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave’ (1850: 99) directly critiques the social and political structures of the period through an allusion to a well-known and relatively accessible art work.10 As John MacNeill Miller notes, Barrett Browning’s 1850 poem joined ‘a slurry of similar poetic tributes to Powers’s sculpture [that] had been published on both sides of the Atlantic’ (2014: 637). The presence of Barrett Browning’s poem in Household Words one month before its publication in Poems aligns ‘Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave’ with Barrett Browning’s other anti-slavery periodical poems such as ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ (2009a; published in the 1848 issue of the Liberty Bell) and ‘A Curse for a Nation’ (2009b; published in the 1856 issue of the Liberty Bell), suggesting that Barrett Browning actively pursued a public readership for her anti-slavery poems, one that extends far beyond the rather limited readership of nineteenthcentury poetry volumes.11 Reframing ‘Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave’ as a periodical poem first published in Household Words (rather than a poem first published in a poetry volume) affirms that Victorian poets were conscious of the role that the periodical press played in circulating political and social issues among the popular, middle-class readership targeted by Dickens in Household Words. Harper’s series of poems on the working class further emphasise the social and political agenda of Dickens’s periodical. Through his poems, Harper advocates for social action. In ‘The Claims of Labour’ (1851: 356), for instance, he lists what society owes its labourers. He writes: ‘Feed them with bread for which this their hands have wrote; / Weave from the sheep warm raiment for their wearing’ (356). But even more than physical goods, Harper argues that those with privilege and wealth should Teach every soul the lore of Christian truth, On which amid the peace of home to ponder; Train them in right from early budding youth; Close up the paths that tempt their feet to wander. (Harper 1851: 356)

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Harper’s programme of moral improvement encourages the reader of Household Words to work with the poor and to minister to them in order to prevent their fall into temptation. This directive to the reader conforms to Dickens’s initial understanding of his periodical’s purpose. As Anne Lohrli notes, Dickens advertised Household Words as a periodical of both instruction and entertainment. He intended the publication to inspire discussions of social ills, to raise up those who are down, and to improve the social conditions of mid-Victorian England (Lohrli 1973: 4). As argued throughout this chapter, much of the poetry published in Household Words explicitly supports this mandate, and Dickens continued to pursue this social agenda in the successor to Household Words – All the Year Round.

‘[T]he same hues that tinge the clouds behind us’ shape ‘the mists before’: From Household Words to All the Year Round The story of All the Year Round and, as we shall see, Once a Week, begins in June 1858 when Dickens published a statement in Household Words to explain his domestic difficulties.12 In this statement, Dickens presents his separation from his wife Catherine as a mutual decision made by two people who had endured an unhappy marriage for years.13 As part of a public campaign to control his image, Dickens asked Bradbury and Evans, with whom he had a close personal and professional relationship, to print this statement in their popular comic miscellany Punch (Buckler 1952: 924). They refused. Dickens was furious and quickly moved to dissolve his partnership with the publishing firm. For their part, Bradbury and Evans issued a statement on 31 May 1859 insisting that Dickens had never asked them to publish his personal announcement in Punch. Inserted into that month’s serial part of Thackeray’s The Virginians, a portion of their statement reads: ‘it did not occur to Bradbury & Evans to exceed their legitimate functions as Proprietors and Publishers, and to require the insertion of a statement on a domestic and painful subject in the inappropriate columns of a comic miscellany’ (Bradbury and Evans 2001). The statement goes on to cast Dickens as an unreasonable and selfish figure, who ‘injured a valuable property, in which others besides himself were interested’. Unsurprisingly, that December, Bradbury and Evans rejected Dickens’s offer of £1,000 for their share of the journal’s copyright, and the conflict over Household Words ended up in the Court of Chancery. On 26 March 1859,

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the court ruled for Dickens and Bradbury and Evans to sell Household Words at public auction later that May. Prior to the auction – on 30 April 1859 to be exact – Dickens commissioned a special advertisement that announced the cessation of Household Words and the launch of All the Year Round, which debuted that same day with the first part of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities opening the issue. The transition from Household Words to All the Year Round was seamless: Dickens simply transferred his stable of authors and his distinct editorial presence from one publication to the other. For instance, the layout of both publications is identical, using the same the double-column layout and running head ‘conducted by Charles Dickens’. The presence of Dickens’s name in the header on every two-page spread in every issue ensured that readers would link the periodical to Dickens’s name and reputation. In effect, Dickens’s name functions metonymically in both periodicals. First, it refers to his broader reputation as an author, a reputation that helped establish Household Words as a respectable middle-class publication. Second, its repetition throughout Household Words and, especially in All the Year Round, provides a sense of visual and editorial continuity between the two periodicals. The presence of the familiar phrase ‘conducted by Charles Dickens’ also extends the scope of the editorial agenda that Dickens established in the first issue of Household Words. The visual and verbal continuity between the weeklies implies that his new venture is but an extension of the old. Dickens confirms this vision of editorial stability in the prospectus he composed for All the Year Round. Published in the 28 May 1859 issue of Household Words, Dickens’s prospectus reassures readers that All the Year Round will continue the work of its predecessor, shedding light on social injustices and promoting sympathy and acceptance between those of a greater and lesser degree. He notes: That fusion of the graces of the imagination with the realities of life, which is vital to the welfare of any community, and for which I have striven from week to week as honestly as I could during the last nine years, will continue to be striven for ‘all the year round’. (Dickens 1859b: 601)

The poetry published in both Household Words and All the Year Round during this period of transition helps facilitate both the explicit link that Dickens attempts to draw between both periodicals, largely through the repetition of the phrase all the year round in poems, advertisements and editorial statements in Household

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Words, and the thematic or editorial consistency suggested in Dickens’s prospectus. For instance, a week after announcing the transition between the two periodicals, Household Words published a poem by Mrs MacIntosh titled ‘All the Year Round’ (MacIntosh 1859: 541). The connection between the title of the poem and Dickens’s new periodical venture was not happenstance. The appearance of MacIntosh’s poem ‘during the weeks when Household Words and All the Year Round were both being issued’ strongly suggests that title of the poem was ‘inspired by the title of the second periodical’ (Lohrli 1973: 350). The imagery and refrain used by MacIntosh further reinforces the connection between the two periodicals, encouraging readers to embrace Dickens’s new publication, which will, her poem suggests, continue the literary and social mission established in Household Words. The poem ‘All the Year Round’ opens with the speaker’s observation that All the year round: its changes but remind us Life has its ‘must’ and ‘may be’ as of yore; For the same hues that tinge the clouds behind us Colour the shavings of the mists before. (MacIntosh 1859: 541)

The speaker’s diction links the past to the present, and the image of an uninterrupted and unchanging horizon implies that the same ethos that informed the publication of Household Words will continue to ‘tinge the clouds’ of All the Year Round. MacIntosh continues to draw out the connection between both weeklies in the poem’s second stanza, which includes an implicit allusion to Household Words and allegorises the shift to All the Year Round through the language of youth and death. The stanza reads as follows: All the year round bridals forth, and hearses, Love-troth and battle-cry, the curse, the prayer, The slave’s low moaning, and the poet’s verses, Together reach the undulating air; Round the full household, here, one joyful mother Wreathes her rich love, a bower of living bloom, That Death hath never enter’d; there another Must plant hers, drooping o’er one little tomb. (MacIntosh 1859: 541)

Once again, the first line of the stanza evokes the title of Dickens’s new publication. Every stanza of the poem begins this way, implicitly directing readers towards All the Year Round. The pun on bridal,

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as a symbol of new beginnings (a bride) and transport/movement (bridle of a horse), conveys the sense of progression and momentum suggested by the ongoing transition from Household Words to All the Year Round. The list that follows alludes to the typical subject matter of the literary texts published in Dickens’s periodicals as ‘The slave’s low moaning’ joins ‘poet’s verses’. Furthermore, the new, forthcoming prayers and verses offered by the speaker of MacIntosh’s poem collide with images suggestive of the domestic spaces and cycles Dickens envisioned in the first editorial statement he composed for Household Words. MacIntosh’s poem thus collapses any distinction between Household Words and All the Year Round, positioning the two publications along a natural continuum of necessary progress. Indeed, the poems published in the first issue of All the Year Round implicitly continue and build on the work of MacIntosh’s poem. They function, like ‘All the Year Round’, to solidify the connection between the two periodicals, explicitly drawing on the themes explored in Household Words. The work done by poetry during this crucial transitional period demonstrates the importance of poetry, and especially inaugural poetry, to the branding of a literary periodical. However, before I turn to the inaugural poetry of All the Year Round, I want to pause over the composition of the periodical’s debut issue. The structure of the inaugural issue of All the Year Round closely mirrors that of Household Words. If we set aside the editorial statement that opens the first issue of Household Words, the literary content of each periodical’s first issue begins with serial fiction (Gaskell’s Lizzie Leigh in Household Words and Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities in All the Year Round). Light essays about love and middle-class life follow the lead serial. The inaugural (or lead) poem of each weekly appears after these essays at around the same place: Hunt’s poem begins on page 12; the inaugural poem for All the Year Round begins on page 10. Even the layout and material appearance of the periodical’s pages remains the same. Continuity between the two periodicals thus extends beyond thematic and typographic similarities to include the bibliographic structure and physical experience of reading each text. The similarities, however, do not end with the placement of each periodical’s inaugural poem. Edmund Ollier’s ‘The City of Earthly Eden’ (Ollier 1859: 11–13), the inaugural poem of All the Year Round, echoes the oriental subject matter, the depiction of hubris, and the parable form found in Hunt’s poem for the debut issue of Household Words, reinforcing Dickens’s assertion that All the Year Round is, at its foundation, a continuation of Household Words both structurally and thematically.

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Ollier’s ‘The City of Earthly Eden’ tells the story of Sheddad the Mighty, who ordered his vassals to build an Eden on earth. The first stanza of the poem echoes Satan’s story as the shah rejects God’s authority. He describes his will as stronger than that of God’s, stating: Let those who please wait the day The will of the crowd availeth not To expedite their promis’d lot; But my will is strong and stern as fate: And I on earth will emulate The pomp of that celestial state. (Ollier 1859: 11)

The shah not only assumes that he knows the will of God, as Abraham does in Leigh Hunt’s ‘Abraham and the Fire-Worshipper: A Dramatic Parable’; he acts as if he is God, building his own earthly Eden. This hubris, like that of the angels of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Ozymandias in Percy Shelley’s sonnet – which was also initially a periodical poem published in The Examiner on 11 January 1818 – leads to the shah’s destruction. He never gets to live in his paradise. The speaker describes how, upon the shah’s approach, there came ‘A cry of such might that it burnt like flame / Through the hosts of the monarch, and parch’d into sand / Every creature that heard it’ (Ollier 1859: 12). God casts down the shah and his retinue, and the poem closes with an anonymous chorus of speakers who relay the poem’s lesson: And the people beholding that effluence, say: ‘Sheddad the Mighty, thy doom was just! Dust thou liest within the dust; And all around thee thy myriads sleep, Heavily, darkly, dead, and deep, And nothing beside the wind dare creep Through the City of Earthly Eden.’ (Ollier 1859: 12–13)

The biblical allusion contained in these final lines references and rewrites Genesis 3:19, ‘for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’, reinforcing the lesson of Genesis for the periodical’s readers. This particular allusion resonates with the social focus of Dickens’s editorial agenda, which calls for literary works that will inspire the periodical’s middle-class readers to effect change in their communities, and a huge part of this change, Dickens-as-editor suggests, involves recognizing the humanity in all people across classes. Thus, while Ollier’s poem is not a parable per se, it nonetheless calls for the type of embodied response that Colón associated with the Victorian

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parable. The poem and its context call for the middle-class reader to recognise themselves in the shah, challenging them to understand that their positions of social and financial power in mid-Victorian London are temporary and fleeting and do not exempt them from the realities of human existence, including death. The poems that follow ‘The City of Earthly Eden’ further the lesson offered by Ollier’s poem, demonstrating how the poetry of All the Year Round functions as part of a cohesive whole that supports the editorial mandate of the periodical. In her essay on parables in Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Amy Coté observes that parables ‘do not present explicit lessons but rather prompt the reader’s engagement with moral problems by means of stories juxtaposed against one another’ (2014: 59). Ollier’s poem, while not a traditional parable, nonetheless takes on the resonances of the genre in the context of All the Year Round, where it appears juxtaposed against poems such as Bryan Waller Procter’s ‘Trade Songs’ (Procter 1859a,b,c,d,e).14 Procter’s series of trade songs appear in eight issues of All the Year Round from 30 April 1859 to 18 June 1859, and they address issues such as the poor laws and the reality of the workhouse while simultaneously drawing attention to London’s forgotten and/or ignored labourers, transforming them into heroes and emphasising their vital contributions to the British nation and the readers’ middle-class lives.15 The first two trade songs published in All the Year Round appear in the same issue as Ollier’s ‘The City of Earthly Eden’ (30 April 1859) and present readers with narratives about the workhouse nurse and the blacksmith.16 The focus on such working-class figures as the workhouse nurse aligns perfectly with the editorial agenda of Household Words and, by extension, All the Year Round. References to the workhouse appear frequently in both the fiction and non-fiction of Household Words, and, of course, Dickens published his essay ‘A Walk in a Workhouse’ in the 25 May 1850 issue of Household Words. While Dickens’s essay on the workhouse uses overwrought descriptions of the workhouse’s inmates and some biting satire to evoke a response from his readers, each of Procter’s poems emphasise the humanity of the working class. In ‘The Workhouse Nurse’, the speaker argues for the common humanity of the workhouse poor by appealing to the sympathy of the workhouse nurse. The speaker urges the nurse: Take the child upon your knee! Dearest infant, let it rest All night upon your breast:

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Sing a softening lullaby: Shield it from the tempest wild: Be a mother to the child. (1859a: 20)

The stressed syllables that begin and end almost every line in the poem transform each line into an imperative statement in tension with the speaker’s invocation of a lullaby in the first stanza. The dissonance between the poem’s metre and the more common iambic tetrameter of popular poetry, especially songs and lullabies, has a jarring effect, drawing attention to the poem and its call for empathetic action. The verbs that begin all but one line in each stanza further emphasise the exhorting tone of the poem. Procter’s decision to address the workhouse nurse, as opposed to having her speak about her experiences, transforms the didactic potential of the poem. The poem’s speaker has two audiences: the workhouse nurse and the middle-class reader of All the Year Round. In this way, the poem also urges the periodical’s middle-class audience to recognise the ‘soul within’ the workhouse child despite its swarthy black eyes and dark skin (Procter 1859a: 20).17 In other words, the poem encourages readers, and especially mothers, to recognise the common and shared humanity of the poor.18 The juxtaposition of such thematically similar yet structurally diverse poems in the same periodical issue encourages readers to confront contemporary moral issues such as the tendency to understand members of the working class as a sub-human other. Procter’s trade songs also function to assert the centrality of the working class to the nation. For example, printed directly under ‘The Workhouse Nurse’, Procter’s ‘The Blacksmith’ (1859b: 20) equates the blacksmiths of England with the nation’s ‘great warriors, / Great princes, and poets great’ (20). The poem suggests that these men of England contribute to the solid foundation of Britain, providing ‘shoes that are worn by strangers’ (20). They have, the speaker remarks, ‘a share (concealed) in the poor man’s field’ that ‘aids the poor man’s store’ (20). Namely, the Blacksmith’s work contributes to the respectability of the working class and its labourers. The speaker’s allusion to Proverbs 13:23 – ’Much food is in the tillage of the poor: but there is that is destroyed for want of judgement’ – reinforces the argument made throughout Procter’s trade songs: the poor do work to provide for themselves but that the unjust structure of mid-Victorian society – in which the periodical’s middle-class readers are complicit – threatens to destroy their pride and humanity. This is perhaps best demonstrated in Procter’s ‘The Street Sweeper’ (1859c: 36). In this poem, the speaker explains how he must beg, stating,

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Victorian Poetry and the Literary Periodical But the town is growing weary Of me and my dear; Yet I beg. Should it fail us in its bounty, We must throw us on the county, I and Meg. (1859c: 36)

And, of course, throwing himself on the county would mean a trip to the workhouse or removal from London as well as a loss of selfsufficiency and pride. Procter’s poem highlights the limited options available to the working poor in London, suggesting that the street sweeper’s persistent begging allows the man to retain his dignity in a way that the social supports of the era would not. Moreover, by giving the street sweeper a voice that explains both the necessity and desperation associated with the act of begging, emphasised through the poem’s repeated, matter-of-fact half lines (‘As I beg’, ‘And beg’, ‘I beg’, etc.), Procter encourages the middle-class reader to reinterpret the common figure of the beggar ‘At a crossing of the Strand’ (1859c: 36) and to understand how the social systems put in place by the members of the middle and upper classes are failing the poor. The social consciousness identified in the inaugural poems of All the Year Round demonstrates the important role that poetry played in developing the tone and thematic focus of the periodical. Unlike Household Words and, as we shall see, Once a Week, All the Year Round did not open with an editorial statement outlining the periodical’s purpose and literary style. Instead, it relied on its content and its association with Dickens to define its literary identity. As discussed, the poetry of All the Year Round played an important role in establishing the periodical’s ethos for its readership. However, as with all periodicals, it is in the interaction of various literary and social forms – the genre of the weekly periodical, Dickens’s reputation, poetry, parable, fiction and non-fiction – that All the Year Round (and other periodicals like it) takes shape. My work, therefore, does not intend to isolate poetry from the miscellaneous contents of the periodical. Rather, my study of the poems published during the first few years of a periodical’s run here and throughout this book aims to highlight the neglected role that poetry played in the popular literary market and to examine how periodical poetry interacted with the social and literary forms of the periodical press, including its middle-class readership (both existing and created) and illustration. The next section of this chapter focuses on the other periodical to rise from the ashes of Household Words, Bradbury and Evans’s

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illustrated Once a Week, examining how the publication’s illustrated poetry (re)defined Once a Week as light-hearted and entertaining periodical that both adopted and resisted the periodical format popularised by Dickens in the 1850s.

‘Lightest lines of rhyme, to speak’: How Poetry (Re)Defined Once a Week The birth of Once a Week out of and in response to Dickens’s weekly periodicals provides a concrete example of how influential Household Words and All the Year Round were in the development of the middle-class literary periodical (Law 2000: 27). As previously mentioned, Dickens’s weeklies established what would become the conventional format for the many middle-class literary magazines that followed: respectable serial fiction (selected and approved by a trusted literary or editorial figure) to lead each issue followed by a mix of non-fiction, short stories and poetry. The success of Dickens’s periodical begat many copycats and competitors, of which Once a Week is the most obvious. The public battle that Dickens and his former publisher waged in the press deeply affected the content of and potential audience for Once a Week. While Dickens simply transitioned his editorial persona and writing staff from one periodical to the other, Bradbury and Evans had a much greater challenge ahead of them as they attempted to salvage their share of the periodical market after the dissolution of Household Words. Popular authors took sides in the dispute between Dickens and his former publisher, with authors such as Harriett Martineau, Charles Knight and Thomas Hughes giving their allegiance to Bradbury and Evans, while Dickens maintained his working relationship with most of the writers who contributed to Household Words. Those who sided with Bradbury and Evans were conscious of the need to distance Once a Week from Dickens lest it appear they were copying the famous author’s new venture. In a letter addressed to the periodical’s editor Samuel Lucas, George Meredith (a frequent contributor to Once a Week) writes, ‘we must be careful not to seem to be copying the enemy’ (Meredith 1970: 65), and from content to material presentation, Once a Week did indeed stand apart from All the Year Round while still retaining several elements and artists that took advantage of Dickens’s celebrity and cultural recognition. The first issue of Once a Week appeared on 2 July 1859, and the differences between Bradbury and Evans’s new weekly and the

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model they left behind is immediately apparent: Once a Week lacks a famous author to conduct the periodical and define the brand, it has a completely different and more light-hearted tone focused on middle-class entertainment as opposed to social justice, and in perhaps the biggest change from Household Words, it includes illustrations from the first page of the inaugural issue. The periodical’s emphasis on illustration makes sense given the investments and interests of its publishers and first editor: Bradbury and Evans were, of course, known for publishing Dickens’s illustrated serials as well as the heavily illustrated comic miscellany Punch, and the periodical’s first editor, Samuel Lucas, had presented his theory of literary illustrations in an article for The Times a year prior to accepting his editorial role. With this team in place, high-quality illustrations by pre-eminent artists became one of the periodical’s primary selling features, establishing the periodical’s reputation and legacy just as Dickens’s name and fiction ensured the success and longevity of All the Year Round. George Soames Layard’s essay, written thirty years after the periodical’s initial success, emphasises the status that the periodical’s illustrations afforded Once a Week. He celebrates the periodical’s early years, noting that Lucas had ‘gathered round him probably as brilliant array of black and white artists as has ever been associated in one and the same undertaking’ (Layard 1893: 552). Similar articles celebrating the periodical’s literature do not exist. Now, while Lucas did commission illustrations for the periodical’s serials, it is his treatment of the weekly’s poetry that sets Once a Week apart from its competitors. Under Lucas’s editorial eye, Once a Week features poetry in a way that Household Words and All The Year Round never did: over the course of its first twelve months, Once a Week published eighty-two poems compared to the fifty-six published by All the Year Round. The numbers only tell half the story, however. Once a Week not only published poetry, it featured poetry. As Hughes (2010b) notes, the original illustrated poetry published in Once a Week became a value-added feature of the periodical, setting it apart from its contributors, and this investment in illustration and poetry is evident from the periodical’s opening pages and its illustrated eponymous inaugural poem. Written by Shirley Brooks and illustrated by John Leech, ‘Once a Week’ (Brooks 1859: 1–2) functions as the weekly’s only editorial statement, and, as befitting an inaugural poem, Brooks’s ‘Once a Week’ draws attention to the central elements of the periodical: its

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illustrations and its domestic, middle-class mentality. The speaker of the poem clearly stands in for the periodical’s editorial staff as Brooks’s use of the pronoun our in the poem’s opening lines indicates: ‘Our notion of the work we’ve undertaken’ (Brooks 1859: 1, emphasis mine). The speaker acts as the public voice of the periodical’s editor, speaking the ‘lightest lines of rhyme’ that come to define the brand of the periodical: it is a publication suitable for the middle-class homes into which the editors have invited themselves. The poem begins, however, by teaching the periodical’s readers how to read the illustrated magazine in front of them, implicitly emphasising the difference between Bradbury and Evans’s new project and that of their immediate competitor Dickens.19 In particular, the fourth stanza draws the reader’s attention to what Hughes calls the ‘mutual embeddedness’ of image and text in Once a Week (Hughes 2010b: 46). The speaker invites the reader to understand the text in light of the illustration located opposite the letterpress in the right-hand column as the following lines guide the reader’s eye to the illustration by openly referring to it: [ . . .] There’s sweet Clara Horner, Listening to Mario with her eyes and ears: Observe her please, up in the left-hand corner: Type of the dearest of our English dears. (Brooks 1859: 1)

This short, nondescript stanza provides a model for reading the poetry and layout of Once a Week, encouraging the periodical’s readers to understand the visual-verbal elements of the page as a singular, cohesive text.20 The layout (Figure 1.1) reiterates this sense of cohesiveness as it aligns the description of ‘sweet Clara Horner’ with the focal point of the illustration, Clara’s upper body and face. However, the layout of image and text does more than just instruct the reader about the periodical’s approach to illustration; it also furthers the magazine’s claims of legitimacy as a middle-class publication. As Hughes suggests, the appearance of illustration and text on the same page in Once a Week provides evidence of the periodical’s ‘classed status as an emphatically middle-class family magazine that takes reading, history, and art seriously’ (Hughes 2010b: 46). The number of illustrated poems published during the periodical’s first eighteen months on the market demonstrates the emphasis that Bradbury and Evans placed on illustration and poetry. Such poems became one of the defining features of Once a Week, signalling the

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Figure 1.1 ‘Once a Week’ by Shirley Brooks. Illustrated by John Leech. Once a Week. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.)

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periodical’s cultural value. The appearance two prominent illustrated poems in the periodical’s first issue reinforces the importance of illustrated poetry to the periodical’s brand. If the periodical’s inaugural poem taught readers to expect poetry accompanied by illustrations, then the second illustrated poem included in the weekly’s inaugural issue established the periodical as a venue for affordable art produced by some of the greatest artists of the period. Eight pages after Brooks’s ‘Once a Week’, readers encountered Tom Taylor’s ‘Magenta’ (Taylor 1859: 10), an occasional poem about the celebrations following the 4 June 1859 battle of Magenta. The accompanying illustration by John Everett Millais simultaneously draws attention to Taylor’s poem and ‘tacitly imports the symbolic capital accruing to the more expensive book to the cheap luxury of an illustrated magazine’ (Hughes 2010b: 51) through the pictorial allusion to the illustration Millais prepared for the 1857 Moxon Tennyson version of ‘Mariana’. From its very first issue, then, Bradbury and Evans positioned Once a Week as providing access to high-quality art. The dominance of the periodical’s illustrated poetry highlights the fact that its unillustrated poetry often functioned more like filler, reminding scholars of periodical poetry of the many and varied roles that poetry played in the periodical press. Of the 113 poems published between 2 July 1859 and 22 December 1860, all but twenty-four are accompanied by illustrations, and the first unillustrated poem appears over a month after the weekly’s debut issue, and that poem, Christina Rossetti’s ‘The Round Tower at Jhansi. – June 8, 1857’ (Rossetti 1859: 140), is clearly filler. The four stanzas of Rossetti’s poem are divided between the two columns at the very end of the page, and the poem’s central stanza is omitted, suggesting that the periodical’s editor shortened the poem to fit the space available.21 The relative infrequency of unillustrated poems between July 1859 and February 1860 (only seven out of the sixty-five poems published were unaccompanied by an illustration) convincingly implies that unillustrated poems routinely played the role of filler. Indeed, the treatment of Rossetti’s ‘The Round Tower at Jhansi. – June 8, 1857’ was not singular. The layout of Paul Richardson’s ‘Jeannie’ (1860: 68) seems to confirm that poems printed without illustrations acted as filler. Like Rossetti’s poem, Richardson’s short lyric appears at the bottom of the page, simply filling up the blank space. This treatment of unillustrated poems supports the inaugural poem’s implicit argument that the readers of Once a Week should expect illustrated poems and learn to read such texts as a visual-verbal medium.22

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Figure 1.2 ‘Once a Week’ by Shirley Brooks. Illustrated by John Leech. Once a Week. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.)

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If the first half of Brooks’s inaugural poem reminds readers about the centrality of illustrations to the experience of the periodical’s literature and confirms the status of the periodical as a middle-class literary product, then the second half of the poem offers advice for how and when to read Once a Week (namely, as a family on the weekend). For example, one of the directives contained in the poem includes implicit instructions for the professional, middle-class father. The lawyer is to ‘leave [his] dusty smother’ and ‘take holiday’ with his ‘bright-eyed wife’ (Brooks 1859: 1) and his copy of Once a Week, while the doctor must take his wife and daughter fishing and replace his copy of the Lancet with – what else? – Once a Week. Two vignettes printed on the recto further develop this message as the combination of Brooks’s poem and Leech’s illustrations provides the reader with a unified vision of the middle-class family on vacation, away from the city and its professional pressures (Figure 1.2). According to the poem, reading Once a Week at the weekend with your family represents the ultimate expression of the middle-class domestic ideal, and the speaker’s orders to the lawyers and doctors in the audience eventually leads to an explicit statement of the periodical’s didactic purpose.23 In the poem’s final stanza, the speaker of the poem suggests that readers will find within the periodical’s pages ‘teachings meek; – / [ . . . ] the morals of our ONCE A WEEK’ (Brooks 1859: 2). These morals are far removed from the professional world with its ‘importunities that never cease’ (2).24 Instead, the poem focuses on the importance of domesticity, specifically, the reconnection of the paterfamilias with his family. I keep returning to Once a Week’s inaugural poem because it does much more than simply introduce readers to the periodical and its editorial agenda; it also establishes the periodical’s visual aesthetic and introduces one of the major thematic threads that runs through its early poetry. The subject matter and style of Leech’s illustrations for ‘Once a Week’ repeat at least three times during the first eighteenth months of Once a Week: ‘Scarborough – 1859’ (H. 1859: 229–30), ‘First Love’ (Sketchley 1860: 322–3), and ‘A Score of Years Ago’ (W.L.W. 1860: 416).25 The noticeable visual continuity in these illustrations suggests that Bradbury and Evans, together with the periodical’s editor Samuel Lucas, had a particular aesthetic in mind when commissioning illustrations. For Lucas, the best literary illustrations remain faithful to the text; they complement the author’s text rather than subordinate the text to the visual.26 The illustrations for the poems mentioned above adhere to Lucas’s rules for effective illustrations. They accurately depict the scenario of each poem (a husband

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Figure 1.3 Illustration by John Leech for ‘Scarborough – 1859’ by H. Once a Week. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.)

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Figure 1.4 ‘First Love’ by R. F. Sketchley. Illustrated by F. Walker. Once a Week. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.)

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Figure 1.5 ‘A Score of Years Ago’ by W. L. W. Illustration by John Leech. Once a Week. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.)

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discussing marriage and family with his wife) while taking no liberty with the subject matter. However, the illustrations for ‘Scarborough – 1859’ (Figure 1.3), ‘First Love’ (Figure 1.4) and ‘A Score of Years Ago’ (Figure 1.5) suggest that Lucas’s mandate extended beyond the source text to include a consideration of the periodical’s aesthetic as a whole. The fact that the illustrations of these poems echo those that accompany Brooks’s ‘Once a Week’ reinforces the aesthetic continuity of the periodical and demonstrates how the poetry of Once a Week contributed to the textual, visual and thematic rhythms of the periodical. Indeed, while Household Words and All the Year Round depended on the running head ‘Conducted by Charles Dickens’ to create continuity across issues and publications, the publishers of Once a Week seemingly relied (at least in part) on the aesthetic stability of the periodical’s featured illustrations to define its identify across weekly issues. This attempt at creating a visually coherent publication is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that of the 113 poems published between 2 July 1859 and 22 December 1860, around 70 per cent were illustrated by the same group of prominent illustrators: Hablôt K. Browne, John Leech, and John Everett Millais. Together, Leech and Browne provided illustrations for 80 per cent of the illustrated poetry published in the periodical’s first volume. The presence of illustrations did more than contribute to the visual coherency of the weekly. The dominance of Halbôt K. Browne’s visual aesthetic in the early issues of Once a Week clearly defines the weekly as a product for the middle-class reader who enjoyed Household Words. Browne’s identifiable style connects him, and thus Once a Week, to the mid-Victorian domestic products of Dickens, perhaps explaining why Bradbury and Evans continued to commission work from Browne even as his reputation and allegorical style fell out of favour. The green wrappers associated with Dickens’s serial novels and decorated with Browne’s distinct allegorical illustrations act metonymically as cultural signifiers of the literary tastes and values of the Victorian middle class, and Browne’s contributions imported that meaning to Once a Week and its poetry, confirming the periodical’s status as a product designed for the middle-class reader.27 In fact, several of Browne’s designs for Once a Week echo the wrappers that he created for Dickens’s serial novels. Ralph Benson’s ‘Bought and Sold’ (1859b: 492–3) offers, perhaps, the best example of Browne’s Dickensesque designs. His illustrations for this poem run parallel to the text along the vertical margins of each page, creating a proleptic narrative that tells the story of the poem and provides a careful reading of Benson’s letterpress.

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The presence of Browne in Once a Week furthered the periodical’s agenda to take advantage of Bradbury and Evans’s previous association with Dickens by co-opting his cultural capital through the visual aesthetic associated with his serial fiction. However, while Once a Week did court an audience very similar to that of Dickens’s Household Words and All the Year Round, mediating, circulating and affirming the era’s dominant, middle-class domestic ideologies, unlike the outward-facing social justice concerns of Household Words and All the Year Round, the poetry of Once a Week tends to look inward, focusing on domesticity and the Victorian family, especially the figure of the father. For example, ‘Scarborough – 1859’, ‘First Love’ and ‘A Score of Years Ago’ are all concerned with the perpetuation of the middle-class family unit through the next generation, and, even when poems are not invested in fatherhood and domesticity, they often focus on the act of courtship, anticipating marriage. Examples of such poems include C. P. William’s ‘A Retrospective’ (1859: 129–30) and J. A. Langford’s ‘The Gloves’ (1860: 402).28 In a society increasingly concerned ‘about young middle-class men who possessed the means to marry but preferred to remain bachelors’ (Tosh 1991: 67), Once a Week acts as an antidote, promoting and presenting readers with a version of society that asserts the values of the status quo.29 In the case of ‘Scarborough – 1859’, ‘First Love’ and ‘A Score of Years Ago’, all three poems reinforce the heteronormative values of the middle-class family, narrating the speaker’s life experiences from youth to marriage to fatherhood and ending with the speaker’s acknowledgement that he hopes to see the domestic pattern of his life continued in the next generation. Framed by two engagements, one remembered (the speaker’s) and one observed (his daughter’s), ‘A Score of Years Ago’ fulfils the fatherly wish articulated in the last stanza of ‘Scarborough – 1859’: God Bless them, child and boy, and may He grant to them, my Kate, When manhood comes to those our sons, their father’s happy fate: Such a wife, my own true darling, as thou hast been to me, According to thy promise, in the grotto by the sea! (H. 1859: 229)

The repetition and development seen in these poems as they seemingly create a narrative of middle-class experience strongly suggests that the younger generations observed in ‘A Score of Years Ago’ and ‘Scarborough – 1859’ will experience the same happy fate as their parents. In the case of ‘A Score of Years Ago’, the pairing of letterpress and illustration underscores this perpetuation of domestic values and

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marital bliss by overlaying the proposals, which occur decades apart, onto the same physical space. The focus on a particular model of masculinity in these poems strongly suggests that poetry of Once a Week is at least partially responding to the concerns noted by John Tosh in his work on Victorian domesticity and manliness. Several poems provide a specific model for the development of the middleclass man, one that unfolds across periodical issues and promises that the perceived increase in Victorian bachelors (Tosh 1991: 67) is just that, a perception; it is not reality. The poems in Once a Week seem to respond to one another, providing the weekly’s readers with poetic narratives that unfold across periodical issues and promise that the youthful indiscretions and follies described in poems such as Ralph A. Benson’s ‘Young Nimrod’s First Love’ (1859a: 437–8) and A.F.’s ‘Black Monday’ (1859: 360) are but a passing phase.30 In ‘Black Monday’, for example, the speaker’s description of his flirting and flitting through a sea side town echoes the nostalgic musings of the speaker in ‘Scarborough – 1859’, who remembers visiting Scarborough from Oxford to flirt and play billiards instead of reading for honours as ‘in letters home ’twas said’ (H. 1859: 229). This echo suggests that although the speaker of ‘Black Monday’ leaves town in a carefree, frivolous state, this episode is part of the narrative of middle-class masculinity. He will be reformed and become the father figure present in the periodical’s other poems. ‘The “Poste Restante”. – A Reverie’ (Berni 1860) further confirms the periodical’s investment in narratives that tell of the young man being reformed by the love of a good woman.31 Here, a young man enjoying a trip to the continent writes to the girl he left behind at home about his hope for their future. Her letter ‘spoke a mood of pleasure, tears, surprise’ returning his affections.32 And at that moment, ‘A change came o’er me. There a man I breath’d,– / No more youthful trifler’ (1860: 622).33 Reading across periodical issues reveals how at least a portion of the periodical’s poetry reinforced the message of the weekly’s inaugural poem, supporting the periodical’s investment in middle-class domesticity. If, as Davidoff and Hall suggest, ‘the goal of all the bustle of the marketplace was to provide proper moral and religious life for the family’ (2002: 21), then Once a Week functions as a commercial product (priced for those who participate in the ‘bustle’) designed to help middle-class families achieve their goal. To quote the speaker of ‘The “Poste Restante”. – A Reverie’, it allows for the ‘shrinèd Love’ of middle-class domesticity to find ‘midst the din, / an inner temple’ (Berni 1860: 622). In addition, the presence of so many male

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speakers confirms the periodical’s interest in the role of the father in the mid-Victorian family. This focus complicates the critical narratives of periodical literature and gender found in the work of Jennifer Phegley (2004), Andrew Maunder (1999b) and even Claudia Nelson (1995: 3), demonstrating how studying periodical poetry can lead to important interventions in accepted narratives of periodical literature and cultural production. What I find most interesting about this series of poems, however, is how the implicit connections between the events and characters in the poems discussed, not to mention the visual and textual similarities noted in ‘Scarborough – 1859’, ‘First Love’ and ‘A Score of Years Ago’, suggest the existence of a particular pattern of experiences shared by the poems’ middle-class speakers and the periodical’s readers. Whether recounting past events, present experiences or future possibilities, these are undoubtedly modern, of-the-moment poems. The date included in the title of ‘Scarborough – 1859’ stresses this and positions the events of the poem as happening just prior to or perhaps even concurrently with the poem’s publication. The repeated representation of similar life events throughout Once a Week contributes to the textual and thematic rhythms of both the individual poems and the periodical. In addition, the publication dates of all the poems in either September or October each year create a sense of ritual: these moments make up the ‘continuing story’ (Hughes and Lund 1991: 1) of middle-class life. Turner argues that the pause introduced by serial publication ‘is where meaning resides’ and that this pause ‘is when the interaction and communication occurs’ since the ‘period of waiting and reading’ creates a ‘link between the past and the future’ (2002: 194).34 In the case of Once a Week’s domestic poems, the serial pause between them – ‘Once a Week’ (2 July 1859), ‘Scarborough – 1859’ (17 September 1859), ‘Black Monday’ (29 October 1859), ‘The “Poste Restante”. – A Reverie’ (23 June 1860 ),‘First Love’ (15 September 1860) and ‘A Score of Years Ago’ (6 October 1860) – links the past to the present moment and suggests a continuous model of middle-class domesticity sustained through successive generations and periodical issues. In this way, the serial structure of the periodical and its collection of poems focused on domesticity counter modern anxieties about the bachelor and the growing divide between the professional man and his family. As these poems on middle-class life and domesticity demonstrate, the poetry in Once a Week participates in contemporary debates about the Victorian home. Despite its apparent frivolity, the periodical’s poetry functioned to shape and define its readers in particular

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ways, responding to contemporary anxieties about the Victorian family and the moral condition of the middle class. Once a Week signals its investment in the middle-class family from the first page of its debut issue, and each poem that follows contributes to the periodical’s construction of a middle-class identity defined by domesticity. Even the ballads published in the periodical support its representation of middle-class culture, creating and reaffirming a national narrative based on the domestic ideology supported by the weekly’s middleclass audience. The periodical’s implicit participation in the literary culture and movements of the era, specifically those beyond the literary weekly, demonstrates the editors and publishers of Once a Week viewed it as a publication that took literature seriously. Consequently, we must take its poetry seriously, even though it can be easy to dismiss. After all, all this branding began with a poem, Brooks’s ‘Once a Week’, once again proving the crucial role that poetry plays in the development of a periodical’s editorial and literary identity. My argument about the role of inaugural poetry in Household Words, All the Year Round and Once a Week primarily focused on the poetry published during the first few months of each periodical’s run in order to emphasise the very specific role that poetry plays in establishing the literary and cultural identity of periodicals in the 1860s. As we shall see throughout my study of periodical poetry, the poems selected for a magazine’s inaugural issue repeatedly function to set the tone for the publication. Such poems work in concert with editorial statements, cover images and the surrounding literary texts to support the periodical’s mandate. In her essay on periodical poetry and editorial policy in W. E. Henley’s Scots and National Observer, Hughes expresses the need for ‘[a]dditional explorations of poetry throughout a periodical’s run, or an editor’s tenure’ (2016b: 219). She suggests that such studies ‘would substantially extend our understanding of periodical poetry and the unwritten but regnant principles of nineteenth-century editors in scheduling, selecting, and evaluating poetry’ (2016b: 219). Following Hughes’s model, I preform largescale analysis of individual periodicals during discrete periods generally organised around the tenure of the periodical’s first editor and the publication’s period of greatest commercial success. Beginning with Macmillan’s Magazine and the Cornhill, the following chapters build on the work begun here to consider the ways in which periodical poetry supports and, in some cases, subverts editorial policies and the form of the literary periodical, analysing the presentation of each periodical’s visual and verbal letterpress to uncover and articulate

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the unwritten principles that, to borrow from Hughes (2016b: 219), guided the selection, placement and publication of poetry in the periodical press. My analysis demonstrates that although these principles appear unwritten, they are actually contained in and composed by a periodical’s poetry from the inaugural poem to the seemingly insignificant lines of verse sandwiched between two articles.

Notes 1. The decades-long runs of Once a Week and All the Year Round make an analysis of every single poem published in these periodicals untenable. Thus, I have chosen to focus my analysis on the first series of each periodical, since it is during the inaugural issues of a periodical that the publication’s tone and audience is established. See my discussion of the Cornhill in Chapter 2 for a more in-depth discussion of the important role that the first few years of a periodical play in developing a publication’s reputation. 2. The inaugural poems of Good Words are discussed in more detail in Chapter 3. 3. My definition of a poem’s act of inauguration deliberately builds on and borrows the language of the Oxford English Dictionary definition of inauguration, which is ‘the formal introduction of something into public use’. 4. And Dickens definitely exerted his control over the periodical and its contents. Dickens’s editorial relationship with Gaskell is probably the most famous example. 5. The novella runs over the first three issues of Household Words. 6. Since Hunt’s poem appears later in the first issue and does not reference the periodical, it is an example of a context-dependent inaugural poem. 7. For further discussion of the prominence of religious forms in Victorian literature and culture, see Chapter 3. 8. The didactic power of the parable comes from this ‘gap between the expected and the unexpected’, which challenges readers to re-evaluate their beliefs and behaviours in light of ‘the new reality imagined in that turn’ (Colón 2012: 13). 9. Shortly after its debut, John Forster’s Examiner praised the journal as ‘one of the most agreeable and instructive collections of miscellaneous readings ever published’ (qtd in Lohrli 1973: 22). 10. Hiram Powers’s statue was exhibited at Graves’s Pall Mall in 1845 and, later, in the Crystal Palace during the Great Exhibition in 1851. 11. Interestingly, Barrett Browning’s Poems is often understood as the first place of publication for ‘Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave’ (Stone and Taylor 2009: 29).

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12. What follows is an abbreviated version of the scandal. William Buckler’s foundational article on Once a Week, ‘Once a Week under Samuel Lucas, 1859–65’, provides an excellent summary of the events leading to the dissolution of Dickens’s personal and professional relationship with Bradbury and Evans. For additional information, see Dixon 1991. 13. Dickens’s signed statement titled ‘Personal’ opened the 12 June 1858 issue of Household Words. 14. Ollier’s and Procter’s poems are separated by two articles: Dickens’s ‘The Poor Man and His Beer’ (Dickens 1859a) and Albert Smith’s ‘A Piece of China’ (Smith 1859). 15. Procter’s poem ‘The Schoolmaster’, for example, tells the story of the forgotten schoolmaster, who continues to live, forgotten and ignored, in poverty while the pupils he trains attain success: Grim Patience is his heritage, And poverty his lot; And so he is outstripped by all, And is by all forgot. (Procter 1859e: 101) 16. Of course, the fact that Procter was not of the working class himself raises questions about the authenticity of the stories captured in his poems and reinforces the importance of studying working-class poetry by working-class writers. 17. The description of the child suggests that the issue of racial otherness may also be at play in this poem. The child not only has black eyes and dark skin but it also ‘once a pack / Haply at a gipsy’s back’ (Procter 1859a: 20). 18. The content of Procter’s ‘The Sexton’ (1859d: 61) further develops the message of ‘The Workhouse Nurse’. The sexton’s song clearly positions the poor and the middle-/upper-classes as equals in death. Whether wealthy or poor, the sexton treats everyone the same. 19. The inclusion of this particular message was surely not an accident. 20. My reading of the page’s layout and the placement of the illustration applies the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds divides an image into nine equal parts with two vertical and two horizontal lines. Points of interest are then located along the intersections of these lines. If you divide Leech’s illustration according to the rule of thirds, Clara Horner’s body appears at a point of intersection. 21. In addition, the poem is attributed to Caroline G. Rossetti. Unfortunately, Crump’s variorum edition (1979–) does not give information about the poem’s periodical context, although she does note that no manuscript is extant (Crump 1979: 237). 22. The number of illustrated poems decreased over time. The periodical’s moderate success as the decade progressed meant that Bradbury and Evans could no longer justify the production of so many expensive

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23. 24.

25. 26.

Victorian Poetry and the Literary Periodical illustrations, supporting Hughes’s (2016b) argument that the production and placement of poetry can tell us a lot about the financial resources of a periodical. This appeal to the professional family solidifies the identification of Once a Week (and periodicals of its ilk) with the Victorian middle class. As Davidoff and Hall (2002) note, moral order and the doctrine of separate sphere ideology were central to nineteenth-century constructions of middle-class identity. Leech illustrated ‘Scarborough – 1859’ and ‘A Score of Years Ago’, while Frederick Walker illustrated ‘First Love’. Lucas thought and wrote a lot about illustration, commenting in an 1858 review of illustrated poetry books, If our designers would but interpret for our poets as carefully as the Brothers Dalziel and others interpret for them their art would be quite as effective, while their authors might be illustrated throughout, which is more than we can say of any of them up to this point. ([Lucas] 1858: 10)

27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

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The style of illustration preferred by Lucas is similar to what Kooistra defines as quotation, which occurs when ‘[t]he artist produces a picture which is a visual double for the word’ (1995: 16). For further information on Browne’s wrapper designs, see Patten 2002: 93–9 and Cohen 1980: 100–18. In the first poem, the speaker describes how he learned to flirt as a child. In the latter, the speaker comes across a young woman in repose and steals a kiss. While Tosh locates the origins of this concern in the late 1860s, the poetry of Once Week suggests that such anxieties appeared earlier in the decade. Calling the hero of the poem ‘young Nimrod’ highlights the young man’s follies. According to the OED, the word nimrod can be used to refer to a ‘great or skilful hunter; any person who likes to hunt’. Benson uses the term ironically. The comic tone of the poem, along with the exhausted cupid in the corner of the illustration, suggest that young Nimrod hunts the wrong thing. The reader knows she is a good woman because the speaker describes her letter with words fit for the angel-of-the-house paradigm: ‘Words calm and hopeful, womanly and wise, / Words that an angel might have penn’d or read’ (Berni 1860: 622). The illustrated ‘La Fille Bien Gardée (An Intercepted Letter)’ (S. B. 1859: 305–6) provides readers with a similar narrative of separated lovers. In this case, the engagement is already confirmed, and the poem comprises the male lover’s letter to his beloved, in which he discusses the difficulties of their separation and confirms his love and intentions for her.

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33. The male speaker of C. P. William’s ‘She and I’ (1860: 56) similarly reflects on his youthful behaviour and jealousies, which conclude with a happy marriage. 34. The publication of occasional poems such as the unillustrated ‘A Pouring Wet Day, June 17th 1860’ ([Unsigned] 1860c: 7) furthers this sense of interaction between the periodical’s poetry and the real-life experiences of the weekly’s readers.

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Chapter 2

The New Shilling Monthlies: Macmillan’s Magazine and The Cornhill

The rise of periodical literature for a distinct, and previously underserved, middle-class audience defined literary production in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The weekly periodical format discussed in the previous chapter represents one way publishers met the needs of middle-class readers; the shilling monthly represents another. The shilling monthly of the 1860s came to life under the auspices of two publishing houses: Macmillan & Co. and Smith, Elder. Following in the footsteps of the popular American periodical Harper’s Magazine (which was launched in the US in 1850 by the publisher Harper & Brothers), both Alexander Macmillan and George Smith (the heads of their respective publishing houses) planned to publish house journals featuring the authors of the day. Macmillan’s decision to publish his new monthly for a shilling inaugurated a new trend in publishing, leading to the birth of the shilling monthly as a genre. While the middle-class weeklies of Dickens and Bradbury and Evans built on and refined the model offered by the popular penny dreadfuls, transforming the weekly into a respectable genre for the middle-class family, the monthlies drew inspiration from the venerable quarterlies of the early nineteenth century. Macmillan’s Magazine (hereafter Macmillan’s), for example, retained the book reviews, literary essays and political prose that were mainstays in publications like the Edinburgh Review, and the Cornhill’s cover visually linked Smith’s new endeavour to the quarterlies of an earlier generation. The appropriation of the cultural capital associated with the quarterlies identified the monthlies as a higher class of publication, a status the material construction of the shilling monthlies affirmed. Unlike the cheaper weeklies, the monthlies ‘were of a higher quality, often including lavish illustrations and full-page text layouts rather than the newspaper-style columns and lack of illustrations that characterized Dickens’s magazines’ (Phegley 2004: 14). The upscale design of

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the shilling monthlies combined with their respectable contents positioned them as the perfect literary object for the middle-class family aspiring to demonstrate and hone their literary taste. Despite their centrality to the periodical culture of the 1860s, the shilling monthlies were not without their critics. In his 1884 history of the periodical press for the Atlantic Monthly, Charles E. Pascoe writes, With the birth of the Cornhill . . . the English magazine enters upon the last phase of its career. The wild oats of its youth have been sown, and it now takes the form of a sedate, authoritative, and high-culture literary journal

whose audience, Pascoe suggests, is the domesticated adult who has ‘grown older and wiser . . . and has done, at least for the present with adventure and extravagance’ (1884: 373–4). Indeed, the selection of William Thackeray as editor for the Cornhill implicitly identified the periodical with this older, wiser audience. His editorial persona did the rest, as he positioned himself as the Cornhill’s paterfamilias, a stately, domestic figure interested in neutral, family-friendly literature. Ultimately, the proprietors of Macmillan’s and the Cornhill were not interested in publishing experimental, unconventional literature. Rather, the poetry and fiction they published represented the height of the era’s middlebrow culture: poetry and prose written by some of the era’s most popular and established authors. While Pascoe sees the rise of the shilling monthly as the end of the literary tradition associated with the quarterlies and part-issue publication, this chapter suggests that Macmillan’s and the Cornhill represent a particular moment in literary history in which the shilling monthly explicitly functioned to reinforce and define middle-class cultural tastes and traditions by collapsing the distinctions between the high culture of the quarterlies and the modern lives and expectations of the middle-class reader. The covers of each shilling monthly make the cultural functions of the Cornhill and Macmillan’s clear. I have already briefly mentioned how the cover of the Cornhill links the periodical to the quarterlies; the title page of Macmillan’s is equally instructive. The title page of each issue features portraits of King Arthur, Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton (Hertz 1981: 119). The invocation of four of the nation’s cultural and literary icons firmly locates Macmillan’s as part of the cultural landscape defined by these figures. The title page implicitly promises that the literature published within the periodical represents

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the literature of the nation and continues the great British literary tradition inaugurated by the men depicted in the portraits. The decision to publish poems by authors newly added to the annals of British literary history, including Percy Bysshe Shelley (Macmillan’s) and Emily Brontë (the Cornhill), emphasises the embeddedness of Macmillan’s and the Cornhill in the literary and cultural traditions alluded to in each periodical’s cover. It is also no accident that the publication of these previously unpublished poems highlighted the literary connections of each periodical’s editorial team.1 Therefore, while most scholars tend to focus on the moral lessons offered by the shilling monthlies (see Phegley 2004), the contents of each periodical, and especially the poetry, suggests that these early and now-canonical shilling monthlies were equally, if not more, invested in defining the literary culture of the period. The reputation and calibre of the contributors to the shilling monthlies is only one half of the story, however. Published at the dawn of the 1860s, Macmillan’s and the Cornhill defined the roles of both the shilling monthly and mid-Victorian poetry as genres intended to instruct and entertain middle-class readers. The shilling monthlies offered such readers a distinct literary experience, one preoccupied with affirming and producing their class and gender identities.2 Specifically, the publications discussed in this chapter addressed and represented educated readers, professionals and their families through the literature they published: Macmillan called on acquaintances from Cambridge and Oxford to write for his publication while Thackeray promised readers articles written by professionals – the very demographic that defined the rising middle class throughout the nineteenth century. Pascoe’s dismissive reading of the shilling monthlies thus misses the point of the era’s literary periodicals. Such publications were not intended to challenge the status quo or promote radical literary forms. Macmillan and Smith used their respective shilling monthlies to circulate saleable literature grounded in the tastes of their middle-class readers and such literature was inevitably part of a much broader cultural project: ‘preserving the cultural health of the nation’ (Phegley 2004: 7). The shilling monthly was a key participant in the affirmation of the era’s dominant middle-class ideologies, which were bolstered and supported by the staid and boring readers Pascoe dismisses. Significantly, the poetry found in these periodicals both responds to and quietly challenges this project, demonstrating the complexity of and tensions within seemingly simple periodical verse. Focusing on the first five years of Macmillan’s and the first three years of the Cornhill, this chapter builds on previous scholarship of each periodical’s

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early years to demonstrates how Macmillan’s and the Cornhill shaped the poetic landscape of the 1860s through their editorial decisions. I am particularly interested in the way each periodical’s proprietor and editor used poetry to support the cultural and literary aims of their periodical.3 Macmillan’s and the Cornhill set a particular standard for middle-class literature in the 1860s, and, whether or not this standard reflected progressive or traditional cultural values, the fact remains that these two periodicals influenced the course of Victorian literature for at least a decade, and they determined the course of Victorian literary studies long after the 1860s ended.

First Off the Block: Alexander Macmillan and Macmillan’s Magazine While the inaugural issue of Macmillan’s did not appear until 1 November 1859, Alexander Macmillan, cofounder of the publishing house Macmillan & Co., had considered the possibility of a house journal as early as 1855 (Vanarsdel 2000: 374). Over the next few years, his friends, including J. M. Ludlow, kept reintroducing the idea, reminding Macmillan that ‘a publishing house with a journal, where novels could initially be published in serial and later in book form, would vastly increase the profits to both author and publisher’ (qtd in Vanarsdel 2000: 374). Once Macmillan committed to the development of a literary periodical, he took full advantage of the opportunities that a house journal afforded Victorian publishers. From its debut in 1859, Macmillan’s functioned to both promote the publishing house of Macmillan & Co. and its authors, and develop Macmillan’s relationship with writers whom he wished to represent.4 Perhaps the best example of how Macmillan used his periodical to court and develop poets is his professional relationship with Christina Rossetti. Although David Masson, Macmillan’s first editor, initially rejected Christina Rossetti’s poems, Macmillan saw something in her work and agreed to publish her poetry. Over the course of her career, Rossetti published more than twenty poems in Macmillan’s – thirteen of which appeared between November 1859 and May 1865 when Rossetti was still establishing herself as a saleable poet. In effect, Rossetti’s poetic contributions to Macmillan’s were, as Hughes suggests, ‘a bid for a book’ (2007: 93). The bid worked, and Rossetti published much of her poetry with Macmillan’s publishing firm (Worth 2003: 22), including Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1862 and The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems

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in 1866. As this example demonstrates, Macmillan’s magazine cultivated the talents and poetry of significant Victorian poets who would eventually find success outside of the periodical. Macmillan also took advantage of well-established authors to sell his periodical and potentially boost the sales of their forthcoming poetry volumes. For example, Macmillan published the serial version of Coventry Patmore’s Victories in Love between October and December 1861, offering readers a peek at what would become Book II in the poem’s 1862 volume edition. Here, Macmillan capitalised on the previous success of Patmore’s The Angel in the House, to which Victories in Love was a sequel of sorts, and promoted the firm’s forthcoming publication of the volume edition for Victories of Love the following year. The periodical also solicited work from some of the best-known poets of the period, including Tennyson (whose name publishers hoped would draw readers), Isa Craig, Caroline Norton and Dinah Mulock Craik. Overall, the majority of poets found in the first five years of Macmillan’s were names familiar to readers of the periodical press, including Arthur J. Munby, who also published his poetry in Once a Week; Dinah Mulock Craik, a frequent presence in Good Words; Sydney Dobell, who later published his poetry in the Argosy; and R. Monkton Milnes, who published some of his poetry in Macmillan’s direct competitor, the Cornhill.5 Macmillan’s also published early-career poets, and this decision to publish established periodical poets alongside the poet laureate and relative unknowns locates the periodical at the centre of the mid-Victorian poetry market. It is though such careful marketing and editorial decisions that publishing houses such as Macmillan & Co. established the cultural value of the shilling monthly, unwittingly influencing narratives about periodical culture well into the twentieth century. Over the course of its entire run (from 1 November 1859 to October 1907), Macmillan’s published approximately 536 poems (Worth 1990: 56), 149 of which appeared between November 1859 and November 1865 – the period under consideration in this chapter. Of the 149 poems initially published in Macmillan’s, around 10 per cent concerned politics and addressed an educated (presumably male) readership. While this does not seem like a large percentage, the periodical’s inaugural issue immediately identifies Macmillan’s as a publication willing to wade into the turbulent waters of contemporary politics. The issue opens with an essay titled ‘Politics of the Present Foreign and Domestic’ (1859: 1–10) by David Masson, and this interest in politics is later affirmed

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by the periodical’s inaugural poem, ‘Cobbett; Or, A Rural Ride’ (Venables and Lushington 1859: 40–6), which reimagines William Cobbett’s rural rides through England in the 1820s as a ballad, with Cobbett, an early-nineteenth-century political reformer, as the folk hero. The foregrounding of political content distinguishes Macmillan’s from its competitors and identifies the periodical as clearly catering to a very specific audience: the educated, professional middle-class man. The fact the Macmillan’s offices were initially in Cambridge (Hertz 1981: 119) further delineates the type of reader and contributor associated with Macmillan’s. He is someone who desires to revisit his university days or, if not a college man himself, who can participate, in a vicarious and perhaps aspirational manner, in college culture and debates. Ann Parry’s analysis of the journal under David Masson, the periodical’s first editor, confirms the link between Macmillan’s and the era’s collegeeducated men. She notes that ‘university men . . . comprised nearly 50 percent of contributors’ under the periodical’s first editor (Parry 1986: 50), and the contents of the periodical reflect this statistic. G. O. Trevelyan’s ‘The Cambridge University Boat of 1860’ (1860: 19–21), for example, reports on Oxbridge traditions, and poems about political figures appear alongside essays about Greek translations and hexameter (published shortly after Matthew Arnold’s On Translating Homer), identifying the periodical as one invested in contemporary scholarly debates.6 This professional, educated middle-class audience deeply affected the organisation and presentation of all poems in the periodical. For instance, Macmillan carefully plotted his rollout of Tennyson’s ‘Sea Dreams: An Idyll’ (1860a: 191–8), advertising the forthcoming poem and publishing reviews of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Maud in the two issues preceding Tennyson’s appearance. The publication of these reviews in anticipation of a new poem by Tennyson functioned ‘to promote the poet’s volume and [to] separate’ those readers able to afford both Idylls and Macmillan’s ‘from the classes beneath them by including them in a select, educated group who would indeed be interested in King Arthur and his court’ (Ledbetter 2007: 57).7 Macmillan thus constructed and appealed to a very select audience defined by its class status and educational (or cultural) background. Like most of the literary periodicals I examine, however, a greater portion of the periodical’s poetry seemly targets the wives and daughters of these middle-class men. Macmillan’s published a number of poems on relationships and familial love, such as Coventry Patmore’s Victories of Love, alongside devotional verses, including those by the

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well-known author Dinah Mulock Craik. Some poems, such as Mrs Norton’s ‘Gone’ (1862: 343–8), a poem written to commemorate the Prince Consort’s death, address both audiences and demonstrate the role that public poetry played in interpreting contemporary events and providing emotional outlets for readers, mirroring the practice of publishing poetry in the era’s newspapers (see Houston 2008). Craik’s ‘Our Father’s Business: Holman Hunt’s Picture of “Christ in the Temple”’ (1860a: 40–1) performs a similar function insofar as it interprets a cultural exhibition for the reader. The ekphrastic poem opens with apostrophe that doubles as a prayer as the speaker addresses the Christ child of the painting, uttering ‘O Christ, hear us!’ (Craik 1860a: 40). The remainder of the poem uses the painting to reflect on and celebrate some of the central tenets of Christianity, including the duality of Christ, who is ‘infinitely human, yet divine / [ . . . ] / The Son of God, and yet the woman’s seed’ (40), and the concept of atonement. The speaker abandons Our bitterness of loss, – aspirings vain, And anguishes of unfulfilled desire, Our joys imperfect, our sublimed despairs, Our hopes, our dreams, our wills, our loves, our all, And cast them into the great crucible In which the whole earth, slowly purified, Runs molten, and shall run – the Will of God. (Craik 1860a: 41)

In her desire to submit herself to God’s will, the speaker recognises that it is through the intercession of Christ that this can occur. The poem thus provides readers with an emotional and devotional response to the painting. It is distinctly feminine in its gushing and effusive, if theological, response to Holman Hunt’s work. The essay that precedes the poem serves to emphasise the gushing nature of Craik’s verse and further demonstrates how the periodical catered to and imagined the interests of its male and female readers. Frederic G. Stephens’s ‘Mr. Holman Hunt’s Picture’ (1860: 34–9) is analytical and detached. He describes the architectural detail of the painting as ‘not in anyway a flight of imagination, but the result of thoughtful study’ (35). The exact opposite of the emphatic apostrophe that opens Craik’s poem, the language of Stephens’s essay provides an academic evaluation of the painting that emphasises the labour and research completed by Holman Hunt. What makes Macmillan’s so interesting, and what differentiates it from the Cornhill and the shilling monthlies that followed, is the emphasis that Alexander Macmillan placed on poetry. Rather than

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emphasising serial fiction like the majority of shilling monthlies from this period, Macmillan’s defined itself through the attention it paid to the poets and poetry of the period. Macmillan’s continually published more poetry by a higher stature of poets than its direct competitors (Hughes 2007: 95). It also published long poems more frequently than the other periodicals I reference throughout this book, and editorial notes appended to several poems emphasise the originality of the periodical’s poetry. For example, a note attached to R. Monckton Milnes’s ‘Requiescat in Pace’ states: ‘We have reason to believe that this poem has been printed in some collection in the United States, but it has never been published in this country’ (Milnes 1860: 429). Similar information prefaces Shelley’s ‘Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici’ (Shelley 1862); the periodical’s inaugural poem, ‘Cobbett; Or, A Rural Ride’ (Venables and Lushington 1859: 40–6); and a set of poetic fragments by W. Sidney Walker titled ‘Two Unpublished Poems’ (Walker 1863; 7: 460). The editor of the periodical thus repeatedly positions Macmillan’s as a purveyor of original, first-run (or, as in the case of ‘Cobbett’, rare) poetry. The emphasis on the rarity and quality of poetry in Macmillan’s makes it the ideal publication from which to begin my discussion of the poetry published in the shilling monthlies of the 1860s. Significantly, though the structure, content and focus of Macmillan’s clearly identifies the periodical as an inheritor of established literary traditions and trends, Macmillan’s personal views on poetics were equally important to the development of the periodical. The next section will examine how Macmillan’s personal tastes and his decision to cater to a middle-class readership easily wooed by gestures to cultural traditions inevitably influenced the type of poetry published in his periodical. Macmillan’s role in producing the periodical demonstrates how publishers could and did influence the type of poetry consumed by readers in the 1860s.

No Rugged Verse Allowed: The Poetry of Macmillan’s Magazine That’s an old quarrel of mine with young authors – that about rhythm. I don’t think that it is a mere love of smoothness that induces me to cry out against imperfect rhythm. I can get at and even intensely admire Tennyson’s queerest metres, because after due pains taken I can get them to go, and can gallop on or canter or trot along them without breaking my poor nag’s knees. The reading of imperfect rhythm puts my teeth on edge like saw-sharpening. Our greatest poets never could help writing

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In December 1860, Macmillan wrote a letter to a Dr Stanley (presumably Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of Westminster and a contributor to Macmillan’s), outlining his view on what constitutes good poetry: it should follow a regular, or at least smooth, rhythm that will not ‘[break his] poor nag’s knees’ (Graves [1910] 2007: 167). As the guiding force behind the periodical, Macmillan ‘did more than anyone else to shape the policies and determine the contents of Macmillan’s Magazine’ (Worth 2003: 19), and he retained this control for most of his life. As Worth notes, Macmillan only began to relax his hold on the periodical in 1883, ‘finally let[ting] go altogether . . . [in] November 1885’ (2003: 19), ten years before his death in 1896. It follows, then, that, given his close supervision, Macmillan’s views of poetry informed both the poetics of the periodical as well as the poetry produced for middle-class readers. Many of the poems published in Macmillan’s seem to adopt conventional metres and forms, including iambic pentameter and ballad metre, and reflect conventional ethical, religious, sexual and political beliefs. Significantly, Macmillan’s identification of Britain’s greatest poets with the type of smooth rhythm he privileges implicitly places the poets he publishes among the pantheon of great British writers. They sit alongside Tennyson (and the literary idols depicted on the cover), giving them the cultural legitimacy that has been historically denied due to their participation in the periodical press. Tennyson’s ‘Sea Dreams: An Idyll’ is paradigmatic of the type of poetry published in Macmillan’s. Written in regular, iambic pentameter, ‘Sea Dreams’ recounts the dreams of a city clerk and his wife while they are on vacation: a thoroughly conventional middle-class subject (Davis 1986: 85). The middle-class father at the centre of the poem is riddled with guilt as he curses ‘his credulousness, / And that one unctuous mouth which lured him, rouge, / to buy wild shares in some Peruvian mine’ (Tennyson 1860a: 191). These thoughts combine with the loud crashing waves to produce his dream: a seascape journey representative of the psychological crisis he is experiencing because of his poor financial decisions. Despite the psychological turmoil experienced by the clerk, the poem’s metre remains relatively

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regular or, to use Macmillan’s turn of phrase, smooth, since rather than using metre to replicate sensations of psychological turmoil, Tennyson relies on enjambment to represent moments of distress or energy within the poem. Even this is rare, however, and reserved primarily for his description of the rough seas that prompt the speaker’s dream. The poem comments on its own smoothness as it nears its conclusion. The clerk states: ‘Our Boanerges with his threats of doom, / And loud-lung’d Antibabylonianisms / (Altho’ I grant but little music there)’ (Tennyson 1860a: 197). The metapoetical reference in the final line of this passage acknowledges the awkwardness of the preceding line, which Tennyson wrote in ‘barbarous hexameter’, a verse form that he later called harsher and coarser than the croaking of a frog (see Tennyson’s ‘On Translations of Homer: Hexameters and Pentameters’ published in the December 1863 Cornhill). The poem thus associates the poem’s anxiety (the speaker’s debts and financial downfall) with unmusical verse. In one of the only other scholarly readings of this poem, Patricia Elizabeth Davis offers a slightly different interpretation of the poem’s structure.8 She reads ‘Sea Dreams’ as possessing ‘a discordant structure and awkward prosody’ (1986: 85) throughout as befits a poem concerned with ‘the search for harmony’ in a discordant and chaotic world (1986: 94). Significantly, while Davis and I differ slightly in our interpretation of the poem’s prosody, her reading of ‘Sea Dreams’ further supports my contention that Tennyson’s poem aligns with Macmillan’s views of poetry and thus defines the poetics of Macmillan’s Magazine. To borrow from Macmillan himself, Tennyson’s ‘queerest meters’ do not disrupt the smooth reading experience Macmillan privileged and that, to be frank, defines much of Victorian periodical poetry. Consequently, I would revise Davis’s conclusions about the poem’s closing lullaby to suggest that the regularity of these final lines is not indicative of a lyrical flatness and rhythmic monotony that creates ‘a world of illusions inconsistent with the discord that characterises “Sea Dreams” in form and substance’ (1986: 94). Rather, these very illusions and the aggressively regularised verse form that delivers them serves to bring the poem into alignment with the poetics of Macmillan’s and periodical poetry. Tennyson’s metrical decisions throughout the poem cleverly participate in contemporary poetic debates and embody the tension and emotional turmoil of the clerk, who strives to find peace and harmony. The clerk finds this harmony in the gentle metre of his wife’s lullaby and the sleeping form of his child, which leads him to a place of forgiveness. The angel of the home, with her blind faith in the power of forgiveness

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and her gentle lullaby, creates solace within the domestic space of the couple’s rented home as the poem’s form allows both the reader and the clerk to gallop along and reach a place of closure and resolution without breaking their knees over rugged verse. While Tennyson was ‘granting requests’ to periodical editors, submitting poems that furthered his reputation as poet laureate and complemented his more literary, ‘high-brow’ poetry volumes (Ledbetter 2007: 52, 55), other poets used the periodical to publish their less experimental, aesthetically challenging, and professionally fulfilling poetry. As previously mentioned, Christina Rossetti published in Macmillan’s to supplement her income. Like Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Rossetti wrote with ‘one hand for the booksellers, / While working with the other for [her]self / And art’ (Barrett Browning 1996: 309–11). For Marianne Van Remoortel, acknowledging Rossetti’s work with Macmillan’s ‘abruptly shift[s] our attention away from the slow progress of The Prince[‘s Progress] . . . and the challenges of writing good poetry to much more mundane concerns of household responsibilities and livelihood’ (2013: 712). Writing poetry becomes a form of labour, and the periodical contributions of female poets lay bare the work and economics of poetry. Quite simply, Rossetti’s contributions to the periodical press allowed her to earn a living and to write her poetry. Evidence from Rossetti’s letters supports this division of her poetic identity between the work-a-day poet and the artist. In a letter to her brother dated October 1864, Rossetti calls the poems she sends to Macmillan’s ‘pot boilers’ (Harrison 2006: letter no. 233), ‘creative work[s] produced solely to make the originator a living by catering to popular taste, without regard to merit or quality’ (Oxford English Dictionary) or, in the case of Rossetti’s periodical poems, the work’s potential afterlife. Unlike Tennyson, Rossetti sold the copyright of her pot-boilers to Macmillan’s. She hoped that this would allow her to ‘keep the pot boiling as she was working on more ambitious projects’ (Van Remoortel 2013: 715). Rossetti thus viewed her periodical contributions through an economic lens; however, as I argue throughout this book, while the poems Rossetti submitted to the periodical press represent her less ambitious work that does not mean that such poems did not engage with and help develop Victorian poetics. The fact that such poems appeared in the more accessible literary press means that for many Victorian readers the periodical version of Rossetti was the only Rossetti they knew. Rossetti first appearance in Macmillan’s occurred in February 1861 with the poem ‘Up-Hill’. This short devotional poem explores

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the struggle to find and know God, and is representative of Rossetti’s devotional poetry – at least the shorter lyrics. Each stanza contains a set of questions and answers, depicting humanity’s search for certainty, security and rest after the struggles of the day and, more broadly, life. The poem eventually confirms that there will be ‘beds for all who come’ (Rossetti 1861: 325), but only after establishing that the path to rest requires struggle and labour: ‘Does the road wind up-hill all the way? / Yes, to the very end’ (325). The journey along this path functions as the poem’s central metaphor as Rossetti uses the daily journey and struggle of life to represent the journey towards God’s love and a place with Him in the afterlife. The poem follows a simple abab rhyme scheme and uses a strict metrical structure of four-line stanzas written in iambic pentameter/trimeter. The ‘metrical strictness’ of the poem – Rossetti deviates little from the metre established in the poem’s first stanza – ‘is in conflict with the performed looseness of the poem which has the feel of a ballad’s rhythm’ (Fabb and Halle 2006: 111) as Rossetti’s chosen metre extends the a-line of the conventional ballad, which often follows a pattern of alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter. In their work on the metrical complexity of Rossetti’s poetry, Nigel Fabb and Morris Halle suggest that ‘perhaps this conflict expresses the conflicts represented [in] the poem itself’ (2006: 111). Indeed, Rossetti deviates from the pattern of alternating pentameter and trimeter twice in the poem, writing in pentameter rather than the expected trimeter in both the second and third stanzas of the poem: But is there for the night a resting-place? A bed for when the slow dark hours begin. May not the darkness hide it from my face? You cannot miss that inn. Shall I meet other wayfarers at night? Those who have gone before. Then must I knock, or call, when just in sight? They will not keep you standing at that door. (Rossetti 1861: 325)

Such subtle shifts in metre gently disrupt the smooth, galloping metre of the poem, reinforcing the poem’s exploration of faith and doubt. However, despite Rossetti’s deviation from traditional ballad metre, the poem still looks and feels like a ballad – a fact supported by the poem’s popularity with nineteenth-century composers.9 This tension between the conventional and experimental, which results in what Armstrong calls the double poem, appears in many of Rossetti’s

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pot-boilers as the periodical poetry she submits to Macmillan’s, and, later, the Argosy, both tests and attends to the rules of form that governed poems published in the shilling monthlies and their weekly brethren. The next section reads Rossetti’s contributions to Macmillan’s alongside those of Dinah Mulock Craik, a frequent periodical contributor, in order to demonstrate how the metrical complexity noted in poems such as ‘Up-Hill’ ultimately belies the underlying complexity of conventional, non-canonical periodical poetry, encouraging a reassessment of the periodical poetry written by Rossetti’s less-celebrated peers. Rossetti’s ability to adhere to convention while subtly challenging it through metre or the subversion of traditional poetic tropes and images perhaps explains the longevity of her poetry. The ‘pot boilers’ she submitted to Macmillan’s are often anthologised and analysed in a way the poems of her fellow periodical poets are not. However, as my discussion of Rossetti’s ‘Up-Hill’ suggests, writing periodical poetry meant adhering (at least superficially) to the poetics of the periodical press. Reading poets as responding to the forms demanded by the periodical press encourages a revaluation of poems that might otherwise be dismissed. For example, a quick comparison of contributions by Rossetti and Craik highlights a seemingly significant gap in sophistication. Published two months after Rossetti’s ‘A Birthday’ (1861b: 498) – a lush, image-rich poem that anticipates the style of Goblin Market – Craik’s ‘Year after Year. A Love Song’ (Craik 1861b: 138) lacks the vigour of Rossetti’s verse. While they are both love songs, Rossetti’s poem indulges in images of fecundity (‘My heart is like an apple-tree / Whose boughs are bent with thickest fruit’) and exoticism (from pomegranates to a peacock’s plumage), creating a visceral aesthetic experience as metaphor builds upon metaphor and image builds upon image until the poem’s completion which suggests a moment of rebirth as the speaker enters a new state of being: ‘Because the birthday of my life / Is come, my love is come to me’ (Rossetti 1861b: 498). Moreover, Rossetti’s periodical poem once again demonstrates features of the double poem: underneath the veneer of a conventional love song, the poem also functions as an exploration of faith, especially the fulfilment of one’s relationship with Christ.10 Craik’s metaphors, on the other hand, are more mundane and rooted in the cycles of daily life. The poem begins, Year after year the cowslips fill the meadow, Year after year the skylarks thrill the air,

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Year after year, in sunshine or in shadow, Rolls the world round, love, and finds us as we were. (Craik 1861b: 138)

Unlike the exotic pomegranates and peacock feathers of ‘A Birthday’, Craik’s ‘Year after Year’ is decidedly British with its references to cowslips and skylarks. Furthermore, the love it represents is not one of overwhelming passion or youth: it is a staid and companionate love. Craik provides only brief and fragmented glimpses of the speaker and their beloved, all of which suggest age: ‘though blanched those curling tresses, / Though loose clings the wedding-ring to that thin hand of thine’ (Craik 1861b: 138). As these brief excerpts demonstrate, the images contained in Craik’s poem lack the vibrancy, urgency, and symbolic potential of those used by Rossetti in ‘A Birthday’. However, Craik is not interested in exploring the almost indescribable passion of either love or faith. The poem’s concluding stanza explicitly rejects passionate expressions of love in a series of lines that replace passion with the staid love of old age: So let the world go round with all its sighs and sinning, Its mad shout o’er fancied bliss, its howl o’er pleasures past: That which it [the world] calls love’s end to us was love’s beginning:– I clasp arms about thy neck and love thee to the last. (Craik 1861b: 138)

The poem’s representation of marital love as only beginning at ‘that which [the world] calls love’s end’ transforms the traditional periodical love song, which tends to focus on love’s origins rarely venturing beyond the love of the middle aged. Indeed, it is rare to find a periodical poem that celebrates marriage throughout life as it moves from ‘boyish passion’ to the ‘Strong hope of manhood’ (138). Craik’s poem thus extends the vision of middle-class love and marriage (just as the metre of ‘Year after Year’ extends the conventional 4:4/4:3 metre of most periodical love songs into iambic pentameter, itself extended by an extra syllable in many lines), and in doing so, she provides a new narrative form for periodical love poetry, one that looks beyond the blush of youth to the final years (and moments) of life. Craik’s other contributions to Macmillan’s are similar in tone and scope to the two poems I have already discussed: ‘Our Father’s Business: Holman Hunt’s Picture of “Christ in the Temple”’ (Craik 1860a) and ‘Year after Year: A Love Song’ (Craik 1861b). The ten poems she published between May 1860 and December 1864 reflect

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in some way on life, love and faith, responding to identifiably British locations, landmarks and artefacts. For example, ‘At the Sea-Side’ apostrophises the ‘solitary shining sea’ (Craik 1860b: 393), addressing it as the speaker’s muse. Facing the ‘many-voiced and angry sea’, the speaker reflects on the ‘many a hope’ that ‘went sailing once, / Full set, with canvas free’ (393). Ultimately, the speaker of Craik’s poem finds a sense of ease in the ‘Unchanging, everlasting sea!’ as, similar to the speaker of ‘Year after Year’, ‘Thy restless moan of other years / Becomes an endless psalm’ (394). Craik’s choice of the word psalm to end the poem transforms and revises the preceding stanzas, which Craik wrote using ballad metre. The sing-song rhythm of the poem becomes inflected with the devotional meaning attached to the psalms, and read back from this perspective, the poem clearly explores the fluctuations and growth of faith over the course of the speaker’s lifetime. However, unlike the withdrawing seas of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ (published 1867), the ‘everlasting sea’ of Craik’s poem promises an everlasting faith, ‘humble as sublime’ (Craik 1860b: 394). Craik’s periodical poetry thus deals in the same metaphors as those adopted by canonical poets, and, I would argue, the doubleness of Craik’s ‘At the Sea-Side’ demonstrates an undervalued and shrewd understanding of poetic forms, periodical forms and audience expectations. In many ways, it is unfair to compare anthologised work with poems that first (and perhaps only ever) appeared in the periodical press. Yet, the history of mid-Victorian poetry is more complex and diverse than suggested by the anthologies currently used to teach Victorian literature. Though scholars rarely discuss the poetry of Craik, Craig or Norton, these women were some of the most prolific and well-known literary figures of their time.11 The frequent appearance of their signatures in the shilling monthlies makes it seem as though they are Victorian poetry – according to the era’s periodicals, at least. Significantly, poets, like Craik, who published a significant amount of their poetry in the periodical press, responded to a different set of forms and expectations than poets who only sent pot-boilers and the occasional commissioned poem to the era’s literary magazines.12 The presence of such poems in the same volume or even issue of a periodical suggests that readers could and did appreciate poetry written by a wide variety of poets, including those now largely dismissed. Moreover, it illustrates the important role that periodicals such as Macmillan’s played in the cultivation and development of the era’s poetic landscape: shilling monthlies published the poetry and poets of the age. Macmillan’s, and other periodicals like it, became the

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outlet for much of the era’s poetry, and the presence of canonical poets like Rossetti in the shilling monthlies further supports the notion that such publications are central to any discussion of Victorian poetry. While poetry occupies a less central position in the Cornhill, Thackeray and Smith similarly publish poetry by popular and well-known authors, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tennyson and Adelaide Anne Procter, ‘the best-selling poet of the nineteenth century bar Tennyson . . . [and] Queen Victoria’s favorite poet” (Mason 2006: 81). The quality and content of the poems published in the Cornhill further demonstrates the centrality of the shilling monthlies – and their poetry – to the literary culture of the 1860s.

‘The original programme’: Defining the Cornhill In November 1859, Thackeray wrote a letter addressed to potential friends and contributors of his new periodical venture with the publishing firm Smith, Elder: the Cornhill. In the letter’s closing lines, Thackeray hopes for ‘a fair custom from the public for our stores at “The Cornhill Magazine”’ (Ray 1946, vol. 4: 161). His wish for the public’s fair custom came true. The first issue of the Cornhill reportedly sold 110,000 copies, exceeding Thackeray’s expectations; it quickly established itself as the family literary magazine of the 1860s. The Cornhill was, to borrow from Thackeray’s 6 January 1860 letter to Sir John Fox Burgoyne, ‘an immense success’ (Harden 1994, vol. 2: 935). The Cornhill’s monthly publication schedule, literary focus and book-like format competed with Macmillan’s to fill a specific niche in the periodical market of the era. Like its main competitor, the periodical’s combination of serial fiction, educational essays and short stories gave middle-class readers more literature for their shilling than the similarly priced part-issue novel.13 The Cornhill, however, had a not-so-secret weapon at its disposal: the reputation of Thackeray. Under Thackeray, the periodical appealed to the middle-class professional and his family, providing edifying texts imbued with the weight and authority of both the contributor’s and Thackeray’s reputation. For critics (and competitors) like George Meredith, who was a champion of Once a Week, the tone, rigour and relative aesthetic sedateness of the Cornhill under Thackeray ‘reeks with old Fogydom’ (Meredith 1970: 49). Yet, the periodical’s first issues outsold its modern, ‘hipper’ competitors, including Bradbury and Evans’s

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weekly. It did so by appealing to the high-culture tastes and pretensions of its middle-class audience. The appeal to literary tradition through texts imbued with cultural capital is perhaps best exemplified through a comparison of Tennyson’s early contributions to Once a Week and the Cornhill. Tennyson’s first (and only) contribution to Once a Week is the poem ‘The Grandmother’s Apology’ (1859: 41–3), a sentimental poem that recounts a grandmother’s domestic tragedies, including the deaths of her children: ‘But all my children have gone before me, I am so old’ (41). Kathryn Ledbetter describes ‘The Grandmother’s Apology’ as ‘sweetly sentimental’ and particularly ‘well suited . . . for a traditional Victorian family periodical such as Once a Week’ (2007: 55). It represents, she continues, the ‘type of poetry that endeared Tennyson to his middle-class readers’ (55). In stark contrast, Tennyson’s first contribution to the Cornhill is his now-canonical dramatic monologue ‘Tithonus’ (1860b: 175–6). While the ‘classical eloquence’ of Tennyson’s poem ‘clashes with the “flashy modern novel” that precedes it in the periodical’ (Ledbetter 2007: 61), the poem nonetheless signals the periodical’s literary and cultural status. Classical allusions frequently appear in the poetry published in the periodical, signalling the publication’s cultural capital and positioning it as a publication of men (and families) of letters. Thus, while Meredith mocked the Cornhill, stating in a letter to Samuel Lucas on 28 December 1859 that ‘the first Number fairly entitles it to be call[ed] the “Old Fogies”’ (Meredith 1970: 49), that very ‘old Fogydom’ is what enshrined the Cornhill as a cultural object, countering its inherent ephemerality as a periodical publication and making it a part of the literary canon. The success of the Cornhill was due to two men: George Smith and William Makepeace Thackeray.14 In the late 1850s, Smith noticed a distinct gap in the literary market, observing that ‘[t]he existing magazines were few, and when not high-priced were narrow in literary range’ (Smith 1901: 4). Smith recognised the need for a family literary magazine to serve an eager middle-class readership ignored by the mid-Victorian periodical market. ‘It seemed to me’, he reflects in his 1901 essay on the monthly, ‘that a shilling magazine which contained, in addition to other first-class literary matter, a serial novel by Thackeray must command a large sale’ (1901: 4). At first, Smith was only interested in Thackeray as a potential contributor, offering the author £4,200 for one or two novels ‘to appear in twelve monthly instalments through 1860 and 1861’ (Eddy 1970: 8). Once Thackeray agreed to Smith’s terms, the publisher began to look for an editor. After several authors, including Thomas Hughes, declined the

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editorial position, Smith turned his attention to Thackeray, offering him a salary of £1,000 per year to expand his role and edit the periodical (Eddy 1970: 11). Thackeray was to handle the literary side of the publication while Smith would take care of the business matters he knew Thackeray despised; both men would use their respective positions in the literary world to attract contributors. Thackeray did much more than handle the literary side of the publication, however. Like Dickens and Macmillan before him, Thackeray’s literary reputation and personal taste determined the periodical’s tone and familial ideology. His editorial voice defined the Cornhill from its very first issue to its last.15 Thackeray’s presence frames the inaugural issue of the Cornhill: his letter to contributors acts as a preface of sorts, establishing the publication’s editorial plan for its first readers while his first instalment of the ‘Roundabout Papers’ provides a conclusion (Thackeray 1860b).16 The reproduction of his letter for the readers of the Cornhill’s first issue is particularly relevant to any discussion of the periodical’s branding and poetry. Originally written and circulated in November 1859, Thackeray’s letter closes with an extended metaphor that uses the language of agriculture to define the Cornhill’s mode of publication and the project of the periodical as a whole. Thackeray writes: The kindly fruits of the earth, which grow for all – may we not enjoy them with friendly hearts? The field is immensely wide; the harvest perennial, and rising everywhere; we can promise competent fellow-labourers a welcome and a good wage; and hope a fair custom from the public for our stores at ‘The Cornhill Magazine’. (qtd in Ray 1946, vol. 4: 161)

This single statement defines the periodical’s brand, audience, and content. His reference to the ‘kindly fruits, which grow for all’ (Ray 1946, vol. 4: 161) gestures towards the accessibility and relative affordability of the new shilling monthly; it belongs to all middle-class readers who can afford to purchase it. The metaphor of innocuous wholesome fruit alludes to Thackeray’s desire to avoid controversial subjects while his description of the periodical’s scope as an ‘immensely wide’ field with ‘harvest perennial, and rising everywhere’ (161) points to the miscellaneous nature of the periodical as well as its continuous serial publication. Lastly, Thackeray’s identification of his contributors as ‘competent fellow labourers’ (161) speaks to his interest in publishing articles written by specialists in a variety of professional fields and anticipates the theme of literary

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production as labour seen throughout the periodical. It is through this depiction of the Cornhill as an agricultural product that Thackeray establishes the periodical’s prescriptive metaphor, one that the contents of the periodical’s first issue continually reinforce. Thackeray’s use of agricultural metaphors to explain the work of the Cornhill links his understanding of the periodical to the iconic visuals of the periodical’s famous golden-orange cover, the design of which Thackeray commissioned from illustrator Godfrey Sykes in November 1859 (the same month that he wrote his letter to potential contributors).17 The cover itself contains four interconnected vignettes that depict rustic figures ploughing, sowing, reaping and threshing. Read alongside Thackeray’s initial letter, which acts as the periodical’s editorial manifesto, these agricultural images render the georgic idealism of Thackeray’s letter visual, contributing to the overall branding of the periodical. The seasonal cycle depicted on the cover acknowledges the periodical’s serial structure; it appears reliably month after month just as the seasons recur year after year. The quarterly, agricultural structure implied by Sykes’s design also references ‘previous modes of living and previous modes of publishing’ (Turner 2002: 192). As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, the temporal pattern depicted by the four quadrants of the cover creates a visual link between the periodical’s new shilling-monthly format and the era’s more prestigious quarterly publications, transferring the cultural capital of the literary reviews to Thackeray’s shilling monthly. In addition, these seasonal images allude to the georgic poetry of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, introducing an implicit narrative of labour politics and British national identity to the periodical.18 Such themes reappear throughout the history of the periodical; however, I am going to focus on the four key elements of the periodical that establish and reaffirm the periodical’s branding, especially its interest in literary labour: Thackeray’s introductory letter (Ray 1946); the poem ‘Father Prout’s Inaugurative Ode to the Author of Vanity Fair’ ([Mahony] 1860); Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s essay celebrating the birth of the Cornhill (Ritchie 1896); and, of course, the periodical’s golden-orange cover, which bound every issue. Published near the middle of the first issue, the inaugural poem written by Francis Sylvester Mahony (under the pseudonym Father Prout) repeats the agricultural language of the cover and Thackeray’s letter. Mahony was a frequent contributor to periodicals such as Fraser’s Magazine and Bentley’s Miscellany, and he was known to a number of Victorian writers, including Charles Dickens, the

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Brownings and Thackeray. ‘Father Prout’s Inaugurative Ode to the Author of Vanity Fair’ demonstrates his familiarity with both the literary world of mid-Victorian England and Thackeray’s place in it. The poem also acknowledges the mix of the modern world and the idealised past depicted on the Cornhill’s cover. Its opening lines refer to the modernity of the period, ‘Ours is a faster, quicker age’ ([Mahony] 1860: 74), acknowledging the technological and social changes of the period as well as the shift between quarterly publication and the monthly format adopted by the Cornhill. However, while the poem begins with this reference to modernity, it ends by associating Thackeray with the rustic thresher on the cover. To use Mark Turner’s phrase, ‘the time line becomes tangled and folds back in on itself’ (2002: 192). The poem’s use of metaphor to represent Thackeray as a labourer allows it to layer the past and the present, an effect supported by a series of allusions in the poem that reference authors from Britain’s past. According to this ode, the Cornhill under Thackeray builds on the literary traditions associated with the figures the speaker names, including Shakespeare and the young Thackeray, while rejecting the literary style of Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield. As the poem progresses, Mahony picks up on the agricultural metaphors of the periodical, suggesting that Thackeray ‘proffer good material – / A genuine Cereal, / Value for twelvepence, and not dear at twenty’ ([Mahony] 1860: 75). This description of literary material as a natural product or cereal picks up on the harvest imagery used by Thackeray at the end of his letter to contributors. The poem’s emphasis on quality and affordable literature confirms Thackeray’s stated editorial agenda and the periodical’s identity as a respectable and accessible publication, an identity reinforced by the cover, which advertises the affordable price and greets readers with old-fashioned georgic visuals. Mahony’s pun on cereal reinforces the implicit link between the products and processes of agriculture, which Sykes depicts on the cover and Thackeray alludes to in his letter, and the serial structure of periodical publications. Mahony incorporates such agricultural language throughout the poem, continually strengthening the poem’s connection to Thackeray’s letter. For example, he describes the periodical’s contents as grain harvested by Thackeray and held ‘Ready for use, within thy Cornhill granary’ (76), and his revision of the periodical’s title to isolate the word corn – ‘Thron’d on the HILL of CORN’ (76) – implicitly echoes Thackeray’s description of the periodical as composed of ‘kindly fruits’ (Ray 1946, vol. 4: 161): corn being defined as ‘[t]he fruit of the cereals’ in the

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nineteenth century (Oxford English Dictionary). Such wordplay supports the existence of a textual and pictorial network of agricultural metaphors in the periodical’s inaugural issue. Building on this idea of a literary granary manned by the publishing house of Smith, Elder, the final stanzas of the ode identify Thackeray with the labouring figures of the cover. The speaker advises the new editor to choose his ground and ‘Put forth thy shining sickle’ to ‘reap North, South, East, Far West, / The world-wide Harvest!’ ([Mahony] 1860: 76). Here, the language of the poem mirrors the quadrants of the cover design, associating the four labourers with Thackeray and the work of a periodical’s editor. Mahony links literary labour to a concrete image of work, and, once again, the visual language of the cover reinforces this idea. The agricultural language, along with the speaker’s reference to Shakespeare, ground the periodical in the established literary tradition, positioning it as a high-quality publication designed to both entertain and educate. As the speaker observes, the Cornhill will not ‘deign to win our laugh / With empty chaff’ (75). After the Cornhill’s first issue, the verbal text of Thackeray’s letter and the ‘Inaugurative Ode’ fade into the periodical’s index, though they are never entirely forgotten as long as the visual text of the cover remains, reappearing issue after issue, sustaining the memory of Thackeray’s Cornhill. Anne Thackeray Ritchie explicitly refers to Sykes’s visual images in her 1896 explanation of the Cornhill’s continuing presence in the Victorian literary market. She observes, ‘for over a quarter of a century the four sturdy labourers have kept at their work’ (1896: 2). Through Ritchie’s essay, the cover image becomes a symbol of the Cornhill’s continuity, and, with the launch of the periodical’s new series, the nostalgia associated with the image creates a link between the new series and the Cornhill of the 1860s. As Mark Turner notes in his in-depth reading of the cover’s visual qualities, Sykes’s depiction of agricultural labourers is an example of ‘time in crisis and cultural memory at work’ (2002: 192). The periodical’s cover depicts a consistent and continuous tension between the past and the present, modernity and nostalgia, a series of tensions that reflect the periodical’s cultural position at crucial moments in its history. Regardless, the agricultural labourers, whom Mahony strongly associated with Thackeray in the publication’s inaugural issue, remain a symbol of the periodical’s continuous literary identity, even as the connection between the labourers and Thackeray fades into the past. Ritchie’s isolation of the four labourers teases out the metaphor of the cover illustration, reinforcing the periodical’s connection to her father and emphasising the power of the visual in

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defining the literary identity of a particular text, in this case the Cornhill as a whole. The inaugural issue of the Cornhill establishes this strong relationship between image and text through the intertextual network of Sykes’s design, Thackeray’s letter, and the periodical’s inaugural poem. As Ritchie’s essay suggests, over time, Sykes’s design becomes the dominant text; its visual metaphors come to define the periodical’s literary identity, both past and present. However, the agricultural associations of the cover also suggest a second possible reading of the visual text. As Turner points out, one of the most interesting aspects of the cover is its ‘seasonal, natural reading of time’ (2002: 192). He writes: ‘here what is paid homage to is not just a type of periodicity (the quarterly) but also a way of life – a pre-industrial, pre-urban vision which appears natural, in tune with nature, a slower way of life – but a way of life that really was no longer part of the here or now, the present. Except as nostalgia or memory’ (2002: 192). The periodical ‘stretches back in time while simultaneously projecting the future’ (Turner 2002: 192). It conforms to modern modes of publication even as Thackeray appears as an antiquated thresher, harvesting the literary products of his contributors and transforming their work into the Cornhill. Turner locates this tension between past, present and future in the serial fiction of the novel, referring to the nostalgia of Trollope’s Barchester novels (Framley Parsonage was the periodical’s first serial novel) and Gaskell’s exploration of the threat of railway time (and technology) in Cousin Phillis (serialised from 1863 to 1864). A number of poems published in the Cornhill under Thackeray’s editorship, including Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’ (1860b: 175–6), S.R.H.’s ‘Mabel’ (1860: 282), Owen Meredith’s ‘Last Words’ (1860: 513–17) and R.K.A.E.’s ‘Hæc olim meminisse juviabit’ (1861: 190–1), similarly refer to this sense of nostalgia, suggesting a tension between the promise (or lack thereof) of the present moment and the speaker’s memories of the past; however, the agricultural imagery prominent in the first issue (and continuing into the 1890s via Ritchie’s essay) suggests that a portion of the periodical’s constructed nostalgia refers back to the earlynineteenth-century georgic. And this is what I find most compelling about the periodical’s cover and its inaugural texts. If, as Mahony’s poem implies, Thackeray can be seen as a georgic thresher, then literary pursuits can be understood in terms of georgic labour. The visual and textual network constructed by periodical’s inaugural issue establishes this connection, foreshadowing and allegorising the periodical’s interest in the idea of literary labour and way it defines the purpose of middle-class literature and the role of the author.

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‘Reap North, South, East, Far West’: Literary Labour in the Cornhill Magazine The Cornhill’s self-definition as a carefully cultivated periodical supported by literary labour and overseen by its paterfamilias defined the foundational years of the monthly. As the most popular and respectable literary periodical of the period, the Cornhill under Thackeray became ‘a symbol of cultural knowledge and authority’ (Phegley 2004: 80) in the middle-class home.19 Specifically, it contributed to the development and education of its middle-class readers, especially those associated with the professions. However, unlike Once a Week, which also appealed to professionals but focused on the middle-class family and domesticity, the Cornhill’s contents, especially its poetry, focused more on developing and supporting a professional identity. Appearing on the market at the tail end of the mid-century rise of the professional, Thackeray and Smith self-consciously positioned their monthly as a professional publication that contributed to the health of the nation through its support of the middle-class professional and his family.20 As previously mentioned, Thackeray’s initial letter to contributors called on professional and ‘well-educated gentleman and women’ to write on what they know (Ray 1946, vol. 4: 161), and the occupations included as part of Thackeray’s list – a geologist, engineer and lawyer – conform to the attributes of the era’s ideal gentlemanly professions as defined by Gilmour (1981) and Reader (1966). While none of the poems published during Thackeray’s tenure as editor address the professions of engineering or geology (though ‘Manoli’ might come close), a number do seem to address the nature of literary/artistic life, presenting it as a distinct profession bound up in broader ethical concerns, including the moral role of the author figure. During the twenty-nine months of Thackeray’s editorship, poems about literary/artistic labour appear in five separate issues with three poems on literature appearing in the July 1860 issue alone: Matthew Arnold’s ‘Men of Genius’ (1860: 33), Thackeray’s ‘Vanitas Vanitatum’ (1860a: 59–60), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘A Musical Instrument’ (1860: 84–5).21 This number is more significant than it may seem at first. Out of the twenty-nine issues published during this period, twenty-five contain poetry, meaning that 20 per cent of the issues that included poetry published a poem about literary or artistic labour.22 The periodical’s focus on literary labour is not surprising. Critics such as Robin Gilmour (1981) and Jennifer Phegley (2004) have demonstrated the Cornhill’s preoccupation with the rise of a new

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definition for the gentleman in the 1860s. For mid-century Victorians, the gentleman was a figure defined by his participation in the professions. This shift in the definition of gentlemanliness, from the model of the aristocrat to the model of the professional man, defined the mid-Victorian middle class. The Cornhill’s promotion of ‘all things middling: middle-brow culture, middle-class power, and a middle-of-the-road political stance’ (Phegley 2004: 73) thus cultivated more than an image of the ideal woman reader in relation to the rise of the middle-class professional; it defined the role of the professional writer through its poetry, establishing a model for middleclass literature and authorship. The centrality of the periodical to the development of Victorian professional identities is not a new idea. Scholars of the Victorian periodical generally agree that periodicals were important organs for the development of the literary professional. Linda Peterson, for example, discusses how the concept of authorship developed through the periodical press: ‘that is where the debates about authorship were aired, where the discourse evolved, and where writers established their literary reputations’ (2009: 5). As mentioned in the previous section, the invocation of the georgic tradition through both the Cornhill’s cover and the contents of its debut issue furthers the publication’s role in narratives of Victorian professionalisation. In his work on the georgic, Clifford Siskin notes that ‘writing in the form of the georgic . . . proved to be a crucial tool in the making of modern professionalism’ (1999: 120). The georgic allowed poets to explain and establish the rules of a profession in a simplified manner, making such ‘rules appear to be simply an account of what’s out there’ (120). Poetry in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could thus function as a sort of professional handbook, and I argue that the poetry of the Cornhill echoes this earlier use of the georgic – and poetry more broadly – transforming Thackeray’s periodical into resource and training ground for literary professionals. Like the specialist periodicals referenced in Marysa Demoor and Andrew King’s (2009) work on trade publications of the nineteenth century, I contend that the Cornhill acted as a regulatory body, functioning in part as an organ for the delineation of the professional author’s role in society. The remainder of this section will consider representations of literary labour in the poems of Matthew Arnold, Adelaide Anne Procter, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Owen Meredith and W. M. W. Call, demonstrating how the poetry of the Cornhill under Thackeray consistently aligned the purpose of authorship and literature with traditional, georgic models of literary labour – even when the letterpress resisted such interpretations.

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Matthew Arnold published one of his earliest poetic contributions to the shilling monthlies in the Cornhill for July 1860.23 ‘Men of Genius’ opens with the figure of God and his ‘far-shining train’ (1860: 33) looking down from heaven on the madness of the world below. The diction of the poem’s first stanza isolates humanity from the world of God, deliberately juxtaposing the silence of heaven with the violent mêlée on earth: Silent, the Lord of the world Eyes from the heavenly height, Girt by his far-shining train, Us, who with banners unfurl’d Fight life’s many-chanc’d fight Madly below, in the plain. (Arnold 1860: 33)

The poem builds on the sensation of a disjointed and confused world by depicting God as an army general who prepares his ‘far-shining train’ to enter ‘the battle below’ and carry his peace to earth (33).24 The speaker of the poem never defines the nature of this peace, but the connotations of ‘genius’ suggest that the peace referred to is one of cultured, intellectual reason that will act as a balm for the uncertainty and tumult of modern life. The construction of the third stanza emphasises the militaristic tone of the poem initially introduced through prior allusions to battle and banners. The speaker observes how ‘Gladly they rise at his call; / Gladly they take his command; / Gladly descend to the plain’ (33). The dactyls of these lines, together with the anaphora created through the repetition of the word gladly, recalls the structure of Tennyson’s famous war poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (Tennyson 1854), which was also a periodical poem, published in the 9 December 1854 issue of The Examiner. The martial allusions lend a sense of legitimacy to the work of the man of genius both thematically and structurally. Like joining the army, one of the acceptable and, more importantly, established professions of the era, intellectual work becomes a valuable and necessary vocation for peace in the world of the poem. Arnold thus makes a claim for the importance of the intellectual man in society, even if he may go astray or die before he can complete his ‘bold-follow’d way’ (Arnold 1860: 33). The representation of literary work as a vocation in Arnold’s poems supports William McKelvy’s argument that the long nineteenth century saw the ‘religious vocation of literature’ become ‘a politically significant theme in British intellectual life’ (2007: 3). Indeed,

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Arnold’s poem speaks to the role of the intellectual man in cultivating a rational society, further aligning the Cornhill with a middleclass readership of professionals. The poem describes a specific sort of labour that requires the intellectual’s engagement with society and suggests that his work will help build a stable nation, mediating conflict. The message of the poem complements that of the Cornhill as whole. Under Thackeray, the periodical aimed to build a stable, wellread community of middle-class readers: the foundation of the modern British nation. This association of literature and literary work with the improvement of the British nation predates the Cornhill and Arnold’s poem, however. Like the cover, then, Arnold’s poem layers past and present, reaffirming traditional values in a modern context. The language and imagery used by Arnold echoes that of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who, in 1831, argued for an understanding of literary work as a profession, noting ‘that writers were “crusaders for their nation,” since through their contributions to the press they forged a national identity for readers’ (King 2009).25 As Andrew King points out, Bulwer-Lytton’s tactical use of the term relied on the idea that the professions heroically carried forward, even embodied, the idea of the nation, a notion much grander than earlier applications of the term to writers at periods when it was used more in the sense given in Johnson’s Dictionary as an employment. (King 2009)26

The Cornhill re-establishes this sensibility in the 1860s through contributors such as Thackeray, who began his career as a writer under Bulwer-Lytton’s model of the literary professional. It invites this comparison with its georgic cover design and the agricultural language that permeates the monthly’s first issue. This repetition of georgic imagery in the periodical cultivates a specific definition of the professional as a one who responds to and helps build a moral and educated middle class. Each representation of literary labour in the Cornhill contributes to this notion of literature’s responsibility to the social and moral health of society. The monthly’s representation of Thackeray as a paterfamilias figure, presiding over a middleclass dinner table, positions the author as responsible for the moral reading habits of the family just as Arnold’s metaphors of heavenly battle transform the status of the intellectual into a professional figure responsible to society and the nation. Though Adelaide Anne Procter’s poem ‘The Carver’s Lesson’ (1860: 560) does not contain the georgic or militaristic language

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found in the texts by Thackeray and Arnold, her poem nonetheless contributes to the periodical’s definition of the author, outlining the moral and social role of the author/artist from the perspective of the reader/viewer. In this way, Procter’s poem builds on the themes embodied by the georgic. As Siskin observes, the georgic ‘was the means by which the work of writing itself came to be seen as a potentially heroic activity, its practitioners possessed with considerable redemptive power’ (1999: 120). Enfolded in the georgic discourse of the periodical’s cover, Procter’s poem explores the redemptive power of art and the occupation or work of the artist, demonstrating how the contents of the Cornhill continuously (and implicitly) built on the model(s) of authorship suggested by the periodical’s network of georgic allusions. A didactic text, ‘The Carver’s Lesson’ teaches the reader about the nature of art and the role of the artist, embodying the pedagogical function associated with the georgic tradition and speaking to the professional himself, reassuring the carver about the importance and significance of his work. The speaker argues that art is ‘no mere skill of subtle tracery’ (Procter 1860: 560). Rather, art contains a ‘hidden spirit, / That we may, or may not, understand’ (560). This hidden spirit serves a social function because, in Procter’s poem at least, art comforts people who view it in times of need. The particular artist figure addressed by Procter is an empathetic figure who encodes some ‘loving message to’ the viewer (560). Unlike Arnold, who focuses exclusively on the explicit heroism and selfsacrifice of the man of genius, Procter examines the role of art, and by extension, the artist in a person’s everyday life. The poem ends with an anonymous viewer, who, ‘With perplexed struggle in his brain’, views the long-dead carver’s work and receives ‘the loving token’ that the carver ‘hid there many years ago’ (560). The artistic labour of the carver produces a balm against ‘life’s turmoil’ and ‘perpetual pain’ (560). In effect, Procter’s poem serves to define the important social function of art: to connect to the viewer and perhaps even offer comfort. Published two months after Procter’s ‘The Carver’s Lesson’, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘A Musical Instrument’ (1860: 84–5) reframes Procter’s optimistic view of artistic production as both the poet and the creative act become products and perpetrators of violence. Barrett Browning’s retelling of the myth of Syrinx and Pan raises questions about the morality of authorship and the cultural positioning of the man of letters as hero. The image of Pan hollowing the reed as he sits on the bank of the river anticipates and sullies Pan’s creative act. Through an act of simultaneous

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violence and reanimation, Pan becomes the creator of both the piercing sweet music of the reed and the poet who grows out of Pan’s music. Significantly, by describing the reviving force of Pan’s music as ‘Piercing sweet’ (85), Barrett Browning combines the saccharine sweetness traditionally ascribed to feminine poetics with the piercingly violent, artistic and intellectual vigour commonly associated with masculine poetics (and creativity – see Arnold’s and Call’s poems for evidence of this). As Margret Morlier contends, Pan’s treatment of the reed, his notching of ‘the poor dry empty thing’ (Barrett Browning 1860: 84), suggests the presences of ‘something sinister, especially for women, in the Romantic privileging of imagination over nature’ (Morlier 1990: 133). Ultimately, Syrinx’s transformation into a reed does not allow her to escape Pan’s rapacious violence or his creative, imaginative act. She remains subject to the violence of Pan, manipulated and destroyed as part of his creative process – the very process described and codified in earlier Romantic and georgic poems preoccupied with defining the occupation of the author. The poem’s critique of Pan’s creative act hinges on this association of the great god’s sweet song with his violent behaviour. He hacks and hews ‘as a great god can, / With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed’ (Barrett Browning 1860: 84), using an instrument similar to the poet’s pen to destroy the reed and create a conduit for his art. This connection between the tool Pan uses on the reed and the Victorian poet’s pen – as well as the steel type used in nineteenth-century printing practices (Chapman 2003: 279) – further implicates the poet in Pan’s violent act of creation. Thus, while Barrett Browning’s meaning in the final stanza retains some ambiguity, the symbolism embedded in her depiction of Pan suggests that the lament of the ‘true gods’ (Barrett Browning 1860: 85) can be convincingly read as referring to the broader costs of poetic life. Read through this interpretive lens, the poem allegorises and critiques the processes through which the poet figure – as symbolised by the reed – comes under the potentially damaging influence of culture’s definition of professional authorship and creativity. It also offers a potential solution. In response to the sinister behaviour of Pan, and by extension, the Romantic and professional poet, the poem proposes an alternative model of creativity, namely that ‘the role of any poet should be like the reed mediating morality rather than, like Pan, presuming to create it’ (Morlier 1990: 144). The poem’s appearance in the Cornhill simultaneously complicates and highlights this message.

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Figure 2.1 ‘A Musical Instrument’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Illustrated by Frederic Leighton. Cornhill. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.)

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As it originally appeared in the July 1860 issue of the Cornhill, ‘A Musical Instrument’, with its critique of the very systems of authorship that inform Thackeray’s shilling monthly, was accompanied by an illustration, compounding the poem’s ironic relationship to the periodical and its editor. Frederic Leighton’s Pan reframes Barrett Browning’s critique of artistic power by focusing the reader’s attention on the ‘great god Pan’ rather than the musical instrument of the title (Figure 2.1). Seated in the foreground of Leighton’s pastoral scene, Pan’s physical body fills the frame, determining the way your eye moves through the vertical plane of the illustration. Leighton associates Pan’s human upper body with the pan pipes and his final sweet song while Pan’s bestial legs guide the eye down towards the river as one of Pan’s hooves hovers over the remains of a reed. The frame of Leighton’s illustration creates an implicit interpictorial link between Pan’s hyper-masculine act of artistic creation and the cover’s representations of masculine labour as a metaphor for creative literary production. The lightly sketched fields over Pan’s left shoulder further reinforce this association between Pan and the rustic labourer of the periodical’s cover. In the background of the image, Leighton depicts a scene of commerce, cultivation and labour through a train of wagons driven by indistinct figures. Visually inserted into this discourse of cultivation, the poem does not depict Pan as simply crushing the landscape; rather, he cultivates it, turning the natural reeds into a conduit for his creative power. Mediated by this visual interpretation, Pan’s treatment of the reed is no longer a commentary on the difference between masculine and feminine poetics and the need for the poet to mediate morality. The act of cultivation suggests the creation of morality, realigning the creative power of Pan with the Romantic poet, who privileges the act of creation over nature. Leighton’s illustration highlights Pan’s particular form of cultivation as the crisp lines of the pan pipes stand out against the shaded curves of Pan’s body. The meaning of the poem’s final few lines shifts placed as they are within the visual/metaphorical network of meaning created between Leighton’s illustration and the georgic allusions of the periodical’s cover, Thackeray’s letter, and the inaugural ode. The inaction of the ‘true gods’ (Barrett Browning 1860: 85) – all they can do is lament – suggests that this progress (or cultivation of the land) is inescapable: the sharp lines of the pan pipes suggest a sort of modernity linked to technological production while the pan pipes are a tool of creative production similar to Pan’s ‘hard bleak steel’ (84) and the poet’s pen. This resonates with the cover illustration designed by Sykes for the magazine, which also points to tools

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and modes of production through the scythe and plough. Such tools are necessary for the cultivation of land, and, by extension, the cultivation of literature. This does not leave room for Barrett Browning’s new model of poetics, which examines and rejects the violence and control implicit in poetic and cultural power through the figure of the reed. The focus on Pan and the finished product of the pan pipes, whose sleek design completely removes them from the natural landscape, contrasts with Barrett Browning’s interest in the reed. Leighton’s illustration leaves the reader with the image of Pan’s machismo while Barrett Browning’s poem ends with the melancholy absence of the reed: the central figure in her discussion of Victorian poetics, power and influence. The paratext surrounding ‘A Musical Instrument’ thus reinserts the poem into the periodical’s narrative of professional authorship and literary labour, even as the poem resists the model offered. I explore how the ideological power of the periodical press, as represented here by the various networks informing the meaning of Barrett Browning’s poem in the Cornhill, can silence alternative poetic models further in Chapter 4. There I suggest that the influence of periodical forms is particularly important in the context of popular poetry since the cultural power of critics rendered the periodical poetry of the popular, and often female, Victorian poet invisible. Owen Meredith’s early contributions to the Cornhill, ‘Last Words’ (1860: 513–17) and ‘Elisabetta Sirani’ (1861: 500–3), similarly explore cultural narratives of authorship and the cost of creative acts. In ‘Last Words’, Meredith examines the role of the professional author and displays an anxiety about the artist figure’s moral role and the relevance of his or her art. The poem thus seemingly addresses the need of professional writers to imagine their ‘works as contributing inestimable benefits to society’ (Poovey 1988: 102). During his monologue, the speaker of the poem, himself a poet, outlines his early beliefs about the role of a poet in society: ‘Therefore I mingled among them, deeming the poet should hold / All natures saved in his own, as the world in the ark was of old; / All natures saved in his own to be types of a nobler race’ (Meredith 1860: 515). Meredith’s poet figure describes how he initially understood his profession as a vocation that positioned the poet as a man separate from humanity. He believed that he is supposed to belong to a nobler race, one duty bound like Noah with his ark or, when read intertextually, Arnold’s man of genius to save humankind from its folly.27 However, similar to the lost men in Arnold’s poem, who ‘Baffled, bewilder’d [ . . . ] stray’ (Arnold 1860: 33), the poet-speaker in ‘Last Words’ laments his solipsistic focus on fame and notoriety:

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Still I call’d Fame to lead onward, forgetting she follows behind Those who know whither they walk thro’ the praise or dispraise of mankind. All my life (looking back on it) shows like the broken stair That winds round a ruin’d tower, and never will lead anywhere. (Meredith 1860: 515)

Thus, despite his intentions and the promise of being a professional writer, his life remains wanting; his literary labour is a futile, embarrassing endeavour. The poet spends the remainder of the monologue commenting on the futility and folly of his life and his work as a poet. He ends his speech by dismissing labour and work: ‘We are but day labourers all’ (517). The speaker thus rejects the very ideals of professional authorship articulated throughout the periodical, dooming the poet-speaker to failure. This line, however, contains more than one allusion. The poet-speaker’s observation also rewards the educated reader, the literate figure privileged by the Cornhill, with its explicit reference to Milton’s ‘Sonnet XVI’, which Milton wrote one year after he went blind. In Milton’s sonnet, the line in question, ‘Doth God Exact daylabour, light denied / I fondly ask’ (Milton 2008: lines 7–8), captures the speaker’s sense of loss just as the volta moves the poem away from this despair. No longer able to write, the speaker fears that he has lost his purpose in life and can no longer meet the expectations of God, who gave him his talent. The second half of the sonnet sees the speaker realising that he can still serve God: ‘who best / Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best’ (lines 10–11).28 Milton’s poem, like Meredith’s, thus explores the idea of labour. However, while the concerns of Meredith’s poet focus primarily on his reputation and impact on the world, Milton’s speaker understands literary labour as the application of ‘that one Talent’ lodged in his soul to the service of God (Milton 2008: line 3). The intertexts of Meredith’s poem (the Cornhill and Milton’s sonnet) complicate the poem’s representation of poetic labour and reputation, undermining the pathos associated with Meredith’s poet speaker. His focus on the potential legacy of literary labour and the idealised genius of Shakespeare, Milton and Burns, misses the point of Milton’s poem. Even when the speaker realises the error of his fame-seeking ways, he still focuses on preserving his reputation, asking his friend to burn his books and ‘Blot out my name, that the spirits of Shakespeare and Milton and Burns / Look not down on the praises of fools with a pity my soul yet spurns’ (Meredith 1860: 516). In effect, the poet speaker erases the second half of Milton’s sonnet, ignoring Milton’s recognition that all of

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humanity serves God if they live within His grace. In the secular context of the Cornhill, Milton’s message about serving God can be extended to serving the community and not doing harm to those around you. The speaker poet’s solipsistic focus on his words prevents him from achieving the acceptance and peace found in Milton’s sonnet. It also prevents him from occupying the role of the poet as described in the poems by Arnold and Procter. Significantly, his failure lies in his inability to understand poetry and art as both a vocation and work, returning us to the periodical’s original prescriptive metaphor of physical, ephemeral and cyclical labour. Meredith returns to the notion of genius and artistic legacy in his second contribution to the Cornhill, ‘Elisabetta Sirani’. Another dramatic monologue spoken from the artist’s point of view, ‘Elisabetta Sirani’ imagines the deathbed speech of a young female Baroque painter. Known for her prolific talent, modesty and beauty, Sirani (1638–65) was an Italian painter who started painting at the age of seventeen, with most of her work created for private patrons.29 The poem progresses from the speaker’s emphatic declaration about her impending death, ‘Just to begin, – and end! so much, – no more!’ (Meredith 1861: 500) to her final wishes, ‘There by his tomb (our master’s) let me lie, / Somewhere, not too far off’ (503). The enjambed lines enact the speaker’s scattered almost frantic state of mind, leading to her final acceptance of death, which Meredith signals through the dizzying of her brain and darkening of her eye. Meredith’s poem represents one of the few portrayals of a female artist in the poetry published under Thackeray. The female speaker provides a foil for Meredith’s previous deathbed poem, written from the perspective of a frustrated male poet. While the male poet of ‘Last Words’ muses on his professional homosocial relationships and the legacy of his literary output, Meredith domesticates Sirani’s final thoughts about her relationship to art. He presents her as a virginal figure: a pure and virtuous artist who dies, sacrificing her life for her vocation and family. She informs her imagined auditor(s): [ . . . ] never loved but you, Dear family of friends, except my art: Nor any form save those my pencil drew E’er quiver’d in the quiet of my heart. I die a maiden to Madonna true, And would have so continued. (Meredith 1861: 502–3)

The domestic register of Sirani’s sacrifice is distinctly different from the martial sacrifice of Arnold’s men of genius and the noble (if

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short-sighted) goals of Meredith’s unnamed poet in ‘Last Words’. Meredith’s ‘Elisabetta Sirani’ thus bridges the gap between the two main thematic trends in the Cornhill’s poetry: literary or artistic work and domesticity or motherhood. By grounding Sirani’s monologue in her domesticity, the poem confirms Phegley’s reading of the periodical’s representation of educated women. For Phegley, the Cornhill’s contents present women’s education as supportive of the domestic roles associated with women rather than those of the public sphere. Therefore, even though female authors figured prominently in debates about professional authorship, contemporary representations of women writers portrayed them as ‘amateur counterparts against which male authors defined their professional careers [ . . .] co-labourers in an emerging field of artistic and cultural endeavour’ (Peterson 2009: 5). By calling women amateurs, contemporary discourse about professional authorship tempered the role of female writers. Within the context of the Cornhill, Sirani’s domestic turn serves to define female artistry as something different from the militaristic action of Arnold’s men, the sympathetic influence of Procter’s carver, and the professional goals of Meredith’s poet. The domestic turn in Meredith’s poem supports the monthly’s overall ideology in another way: it implicitly echoes the importance of the familial community constructed by Thackeray in his initial letter to contributors, emphasising the central role that domesticity should play in the middle-class life of the professional author/artist. Poems published in the Cornhill continued to promote this message even after Thackeray’s resignation.30 W. M. W. Call’s ‘Manoli’ (1862: 346–50), which was published after Thackeray left the periodical, warns the male artist about the domestic costs of professional preoccupation. The poem complicates the presentation of the professional as a noble (if unrealistic) intervener depicted by Arnold and Procter while explicitly representing the cost and violence of creation introduced months earlier by Barrett Browning. It describes an artisan’s decision to sacrifice his wife in order to complete the great walls and towers of his community. As Manoli’s wife wanders to her fate, the speaker critiques the professional desires of the poem’s masons: Meanwhile the master-masons saw her come, – The lords of art that, throned above all life, Make thought and fancy blossom out of stone, And live for them – them only. (Call 1862: 348)

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Figure 2.2 ‘Manoli’ by W. M. W. Call. Illustrated by Frederick Sandys. Cornhill. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.)

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The masons described by the speaker only care for the production and preservation of their art. This infatuation with artistic labour and production becomes their moral code as they lust after a ‘beauty that demands / All sacrifice of child, or wife, or self’ (348). In the poem, the consequence of such beliefs is the entombment of Manoli’s wife. Frederick Sandys immortalises this crucial moment in his illustration (Figure 2.2), which depicts the final plea of Manoli’s wife as she reaches out of the tomb-like structure. Her face twists in anguish as she begs her husband, whom Sandys imagines as a racial other, to cease his deadly task. Through the illustration, the sacrifice becomes the focal point of the poem, echoing the text’s emphasis on Manoli’s wife. She becomes part of the tower’s narrative. The masters will tell ‘Of the true, noble life that passed away, / To round their labour to full-sphered success’ (350). The poem ends with the speaker’s explicit criticism of this blind labouring for progress, suggesting that in modern times ‘The same old doom will reign, and men will die, / To crown their age with beauty, and to bring / Imperial days while they go building on’ (350). Call’s poem argues that imperial expansion occurs at the cost of men and women’s lives. The poem’s speaker has a double vision, looking outwards to imperialism and looking inwards at the costs of such activities and beliefs at the domestic level. Though published after Thackeray left the Cornhill, Call’s poem nonetheless joins those by Arnold, Procter, Barrett Browning, and Meredith in their exploration of the cost, legacy and responsibility of literary labour. The concept of literary labour seems to preoccupy the poets and editor of the Cornhill. The different ways in which Arnold, Procter, Barrett Browning, Meredith and Call approach the issue of authorship and literature in society emphasise how popular periodical poems contributed not only to the structure of the periodical in which they were published but also to contemporary cultural debates. The tension between a nostalgic conception of labour and the costs of artistic life in all of these poems parallels the periodical’s negotiation of the era’s anxiety about the changing nature of time. To return to Turner’s reading of the Cornhill’s cover, the quarterly pattern designed by Sykes represents ‘the new rhythms of modernity’ (2002: 192). It references older forms of publication, such as the quarterlies, even as it announces the development of the new literary monthly. The periodical’s nostalgia for a simpler, slower-paced past becomes entwined with the persistent progress of modernity and new modes of publication. As I suggested earlier, a similar layering of past and present is evident in the editorial presence of Thackeray. The speaker in Father Prout’s

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poem, for example, introduces the famous editor through an allusion to one of Thackeray’s earliest works: the travelogue Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846). He states, ‘There’s corn in Egypt still / (Pilgrim from Cairo to Cornhill!) / Give each his fill’ ([Mahony] 1860: 76). This specific reference to Thackeray’s work establishes a connection between the editor and the idea of the Cornhill. It plays on Thackeray’s literary fame, assumes an informed audience and promises this audience that Thackeray still has stories to tell. These contexts established the literary and cultural identity of the Cornhill for the majority of the nineteenth century, persisting long after Thackeray had left his post and the Cornhill of the 1860s was but a memory.

The End of an Era: Thackeray’s Resignation The poetry not published in the Cornhill near the end of Thackeray’s reign as editor gives a unique perspective on the apparent discord between publisher and editor even as it confirms Hughes’s (2007) argument that a study of periodical poetry can tell us a lot about periodical culture. Barbara Schmidt (1995) suggests that there were a number of factors behind Thackeray’s resignation, including his displeasure with some of the novels acquired by Smith and the exorbitant fee that Smith offered to pay Eliot for Romola.31 Thackeray’s letters and the contents of the periodical following his departure support these theories. For instance, in a letter to Smith from March 1860, Thackeray defends his decision to reject the previously discussed ‘Manoli,’ claiming that ‘in its present state it would not be agreeable to very many of our readers’ (Harden 1994, vol. 2: 955). He continues: ‘The name of Allah used lightly I will always object to. I doubt whether the public will bear being told god is the author of evil’ (955–6). Thackeray’s rejection of ‘Manoli’ stems from the text’s representation of the Christian God as ineffective and complicit in the act of human sacrifice. The topic, he suggests, is not appropriate for a family publication.32 However, despite Thackeray’s initial rejection, three months after his final issue as editor, Smith and his group of co-editors published ‘Manoli’, signalling a distinct shift in the periodical’s tone and editorial policies. The move towards more sensational and popular literature – the monthly published Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, a sensational novel about murder, family and villainous maids, from November 1864 to June 1866 – could be seen as an attempt to bolster decreasing sales in a saturated market.

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Regardless, the direct challenge to Thackeray’s editorial voice through poetry emphasises the subtle break between Thackeray’s vision of the Cornhill and that of Smith’s new editorial team comprised of George Smith, George Henry Lewis, Frederick Greenwell, J. F. W. Herschel and Edward Dutton Cook. These changes provide a valuable contextual frame through which we can read the poetry and poetic politics of Thackeray’s editorship. The final poem published in the Cornhill under Thackeray’s editorial guidance was a selection from the Iliad translated by John (J.F.W.) Herschel (1862). The presence of Herschel, an eminent figure in the world of Victorian science and astronomy, supports the periodical’s cultural claims. Herschel’s name carries cultural weight and identifies the translation as the product of a highly decorated and respected member of the scientific community. His contribution affirms the editorial vision that Thackeray established in his November 1859 letter to contributors, specifically his wish ‘to invite pleasant and instructed gentleman and ladies to contribute their share to the conversation’ (Ray 1946, vol. 4: 161). The essay and excerpt from Herschel’s translation in the Cornhill presents him as an educated professional man, entering the broader conversation about hexameter verse and its potential as a viable verse form for English poetry. The preliminary remarks preceding Herschel’s translation firmly locate the translation and, by extension, the Cornhill in contemporary debates about English prosody. Similar debates appeared in Macmillan’s, which published ‘English Hexameters: Mr. Dart’s Translation of the Iliad’ by the Rev. Dr Whewell in April 1862 and ‘New Hexameter Translations of the Iliad’ in August 1862 (Whewell 1862a, 1862b). The presence of these essays in the periodical press suggests that not only were periodicals a space in which debates about poetry could occur among literary professionals (and, indeed, had occurred throughout the nineteenth century, especially in the quarterlies), but with the rise of the shilling monthly they were also a space through which the cultural debates could be circulated among non-specialist, middleclass readers. In the Cornhill, Herschel defends his use of hexameter in translation, claiming that hexameter brings power and variety to English verse forms (Herschel 1862: 591). He points out, ‘it is not in favour of bad verse of this or any other kind that we contend’ (590). Well-written hexameter, he argues, represents ‘the least monotonous [metre] in which a long poem can be translated or written’ (592). For Herschel, poets who write bad hexameter believe ‘that the English hexameter must gallop’ and thus sacrifice the metre’s structural

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variety, exchanging it ‘for a monotony the heaviest and most wearisome of which human composition is capable – the monotony of forced, unceasing, laborious activity’ (592). Herschel’s prefatory comments and subsequent translation are part of what Yopie Prins calls the ‘hexameter mania’ of the nineteenth century (2000: 100). In her work on Victorian metre, Prins describes how ‘[t]he viability of writing verse in classical metres was an ongoing debate, if not an obsession, among poets and prosodists throughout the Victorian period’ (2000: 100). Central to this debate was the figure of Matthew Arnold, who, in the early 1860s, called for the use of hexameter verse in his series of lectures titled On Translating Homer. According to Prins, Arnold ‘prescribed hexameter not only for future translators of Homer but also for the future of English poetry’ (2005: 231). For Arnold, the kinetic qualities associated with dactylic hexameter came to echo the rapid progress and movement of the Victorian era, ‘not as nostalgia for the time of the ancients but as a way of comprehending the temporality of modernity and the modern’ (Prins 2005: 232). In response to Arnold’s lectures, writers such as Herschel, who published his translation of Homer’s Iliad in 1866, C. B. Cayley, J. Henry Dart and James Inglis Cochran attempted to produce hexameter translations of Homer’s poetry. All of them included prefatory material with their translations that justified their adoption of the quantitative metre. This move to quantitative verse, which critics claimed was incompatible with the accentual patterns of the English language, occurred just after print became the hegemonic medium of the nineteenth century (Rowlinson 2007: 59). Poetry’s transition into the era’s print culture invited experiments in and manipulation of metre.33 Prins locates these experiments as part of the era’s exploration of voice and audience through poetic form.34 She writes: If the circulation of poems in nineteenth-century print culture already trouble[d] the relation of person to voice, then in Victorian metrics we see a further transformation of voice into a spectral form, simultaneously present and absent, and strangely detached from spoken utterance. (2000: 91)

This effect of a transformed poetic voice is part of the hexameter debates. Hexameter seems removed from the natural English accent. Its quantitative structure seems at odds with the traditional poetic lines used by English-speaking poets. However, the verse form works in print because it is a material form. Defending his decision

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to translate in hexameter, Herschel writes that hexameter lines ‘shall render the full sense of the original in every material particular [ . . . ] producing unforced, fluent, and readable verse’ (Herschel 1862: 593, emphasis in the original). In other words, the English translation will have the same number of syllables per line as the Greek original. Herschel admits, however, that on occasion ‘the hexameter mantle will be found to sit too loosely’ on the English language and ‘require a little expansion on the part of the wearer to fill it out properly’ (594). He distinguishes these added words from the translated Greek through italics, emphasising the difference and self-consciously exposing the act of translation. For Herschel, translators should signal any deviation from the source text with some kind of typographical difference (594). Herschel’s conscious exploration of the work of translation and the critical thought behind prosody supports the periodical’s presentation of the literary professional. It provides something of a vocational guideline to future writers/ translators. Herschel’s translation also informs our understanding of poetry in the Cornhill under Thackeray’s editorship. Read as part of both the larger debates on prosody and the periodical’s interest in the role of the artist/writer, Herschel’s translation implicitly (and probably unconsciously, as no correspondence from Thackeray about this particular poem survives) acts as Thackeray’s final statement on the role of poetry in the Cornhill. In her article on the Cornhill’s poetry, Rosemary Scott notes that the quality of any given poem, along with Thackeray’s own tastes, often determined which poems were published. He would reject poems for their ‘imperfections in rhyme’ and ‘any hint of impiety or lack of religious sensitivity’ (1999: 272). As established in the periodical’s inaugural issue, Thackeray only wanted to publish ‘kind fruits’ and ‘genuine cereal’: wholesome texts that would feed the minds of his readers. Thackeray’s active participation in the selection and rejection of texts suggests that Thackeray supported Herschel’s project, aligning Thackeray with Arnold and his argument for hexameter as the future of Victorian poetry. It is interesting, then, that eighteen months after Thackeray’s resignation, the periodical’s new editors published Tennyson’s ‘Attempts at Classic Meters in Quantity’ (1863a), in which the poet laureate blasts the contemporary mania for hexameter verse. Published in the December 1863 issue of the Cornhill, Tennyson’s poem ‘On Translations of Homer: Hexameters and Pentameters’ undermines the literary project of hexameter translation as supported by Herschel and others. The poem is worth reproducing in full:

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Victorian Poetry and the Literary Periodical These lame hexameters the strong-wing’d music of Homer! No – but a most burlesque barbarous experiment. When was a harsher sound ever heard, ye Muses, in England? When did a frog coarser croak upon our Helicon? Hexameters no worse than daring Germany gave us, Barbarous experiment, barbarous hexameters. (Tennyson 1863b: 707)

Prins offers a useful way of reading the poem. She examines how Tennyson’s application of metrical elements undermines contemporary arguments for hexameter verse forms. Her work describes how Tennyson’s poetic lines are deliberately awkward, emphasising the incompatibility of the English language and hexameter verse forms (2005: 247–8). Tennyson ends the poem by dismissing the work of poets and prosodists such as Herschel. He calls their work a ‘Barbarous experiment’ of ‘barbarous hexameters’ (Tennyson 1863b: 707). The repetition in the line, emphasised by the pause of the caesura, draws attention to the word barbarous and its potential connotations. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word barbarous has two main meanings. The first meaning identifies something barbarous as being not Greek or Latin (i.e. not classical or pure). According to the second meaning, the word barbarous can also refer to something or someone unpolished, illiterate and/or without literary culture (e.g. illiterate people). Tennyson’s poem capitalises on both definitions of the word. If, as Prins’s work on Victorian metre suggests, the turn to hexameter for translations of Homer represents a desire to capture the essence of the classical verse, then Tennyson’s choice of the word barbarous completely undermines these goals, implying that such experiments in this verse form are neither classical nor Greek; they merely mimic or degrade Greek verse forms by forcing the English language to conform to the rules of hexameter. They are the product of sub-literary authors: the popular poets and poetry of the periodical press. Prins picks up on such connotations, noting that ‘the scansion of the last phrase is so ridiculous that it sounds almost like “barbarous hexameters” are written by “barbarous amateurs’’ ’ (2005: 247). The form of Tennyson’s poem matches the content; he deliberately constructs awkward lines in hexameter to make his point about the barbarous verse. A. A. Markley points to a number of instances where Tennyson uses poetic form to present his own understanding of poetry. For example, in the poem ‘Hendecasyllabics’, also published in the December 1863 Cornhill, Tennyson ‘addresses his “chorus of indolent reviewers” [Tennyson 1863c]

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using the metre which Catullus frequently used for satirical jabs at those who had earned his scorn for one reason or another’ (Markley 1998: 464). These examples show how Tennyson used poetic form as a tool for criticism, and he continues to do so in the December 1863 issue of the Cornhill, offering readers a blank-verse translation of the Iliad to contrast with previous hexameter versions. The direct challenge to hexameter translations such as those prepared by Herschel represents a challenge to the poetics and literary content of Thackeray’s Cornhill. Indeed, after Thackeray’s resignation, the tone of the journal’s poetry shifted. There was a move away from poems concerned with the professionalisation of authorship. The periodical’s new editors replace such poems with those concerned with legends or heroes. Thackeray’s resignation from the periodical was due, in part, to his displeasure with the content of the periodical. One must wonder, then, if this shift in poetic style contributed to his sense of the periodical’s declining literary and moral standards. Certainly, the appearance of the once-rejected ‘Manoli’ suggests that Smith, in conversation with the group of co-editors succeeding Thackeray, did revise the standards that Thackeray applied to the periodical’s contents. Nonetheless, as Leonard Huxley observes, ‘Thackeray left a deeper mark upon the CORNHILL than the shortness of his editorship might suggest’ (1922: 377). Huxley goes on to explain that Thackeray’s novels and essays ‘gave form to a great part of the original programme’ (377). However, as I have argued throughout this chapter, Thackeray’s editorial decisions regarding poetry also played a significant role in the development of the periodical’s ‘original programme’. The visual and poetic network of the periodical’s early issues demonstrates how Thackeray cultivated a specific vision of the literary professional through the content of the Cornhill, contributing to contemporary social and literary debates, such as the nature of the professional and prosody, while also building the reputation of an important literary publication that influenced the periodical market of the 1860s. If, as Caroline Levine states, the politics of form are ‘a matter of distributions and arrangements’ that involve ‘organizing time’, ‘enforcing hierarchies’, and ‘activities of ordering, patterning, and shaping’ (2015: 3), then the form of the shilling monthly – as initiated by Macmillan’s and the Cornhill – functioned to enforce social and cultural hierarchies through the way each editor (Alexander Macmillan and William Thackeray, respectively) shaped, ordered, organised and determined

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the literary contents of their magazines. Alexander Macmillan’s editorial policies determined the type of poetry to which Victorian readers had access in both the periodical and gift book market. As the example of Christina Rossetti’s career indicates, success in Macmillan’s could lead to a book contract. Equally important, however, is the question of who had access to Macmillan. For example, one of the most prolific contributors to the periodical, Dinah Mulock Craik, was a friend of Alexander Macmillan and married his business partner George Craik in 1865. The close ties between the editors and contributors of many shilling monthlies means that these periodicals often function as closed systems, circulating and promoting work by those of a particular class and social circle. The shilling monthlies relied on networks of authorship to compile their list of contributors. The benefit of hiring a Thackeray or Trollope to edit your shilling monthly was not only their literary reputation but their literary connections. Moreover, by privileging established authors and their literary networks, the form of the shilling monthlies served to reinforce middle-class tastes and cultural values, circulating literature that enforced middle-class hierarchies and ideologies, and comforting readers challenged by the rise and success of penny dreadfuls and working-class publications. As the first shilling monthlies on the market, Macmillan’s and the Cornhill regulated models of middle-class periodical production, authorship and poetics, creating and affirming a hierarchy of the periodical press that lasted well into the twentieth century. While recent critics have questioned the centrality of Macmillan’s and the Cornhill to the history of Victorian periodicals, this chapter suggests that these publications used periodical and poetic forms to cultivate their own hierarchy and reinforce their literary and cultural authority within a fluid literary marketplace.

Notes 1. Macmillan’s published Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici’ in July 1862, while the Cornhill published Emily Brontë’s ‘The Outcast Mother’ in May 1860. 2. See Phegley (2004) for further information about how the shilling monthly (re)asserted and circulated middle-class concepts of gender and gender roles within the Victorian middle-class family. 3. Recent scholarship on the Cornhill, for instance, tends to focus on the periodical’s early years, especially Thackeray’s role as editor and the way in which his personal beliefs on issues such as spiritualism and the role of the gentleman inform the identity of the periodical (Colby 1999; Fisher

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

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2000; Dawson 2002). Phegley (2004) similarly focuses on the periodical during Thackeray’s reign as editor in Educating the Proper Woman Reader. Indeed, much of the scholarship available on Macmillan’s Magazine focuses on the figure of Alexander Macmillan and how his investment in building the reputation and profits of both Macmillan’s Magazine and Macmillan & Co. affected the contents of the magazine (Parry 1986; Worth 1990, 2003; Vanarsdel 2000). The frequent and consistent presence of these now largely forgotten poets across periodical titles confirms that anthologies of canonical poetry only tell half the story. Arnold’s On Translating Homer (1861) was based on a series of public lectures that he delivered in the late 1860s in his role as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Macmillan’s published its contribution to the era’s discussion about translation, ‘English Hexameters: Mr. Dart’s Translation of the Iliad’ in April 1862 (Whewell 1862). The lead-up to Tennyson’s appearance in Macmillan’s also had a more prosaic function: Macmillan timed the debut of Tennyson’s new poem to counter the publication of the Cornhill’s first issue (Ledbetter 2007: 57). Ledbetter offers a brief reading of the poem in her work on Tennyson and the periodical press (2007: 58–9). As Fabb and Halle put it, the ‘metrical form and perceived rhythm are different’ (2006: 112). See Van Remoortel (2013) for further information on the afterlife of ‘Up-Hill’ (Rossetti 1861a) and ‘A Birthday’ (Rossetti 1861b). Simon Avery’s reading of the poem confirms this interpretation. As he argues, the poem’s conclusion is ‘clearly on one level meant to represent the final achievement of that long-desired union with Christ’ (Avery 2014). Craik, for instance, published 141 poems in the periodicals indexed by the Database of Periodical Poetry alone. This number does not include her contributions to Macmillan’s. However, the very fact that Rossetti viewed her contributions as potboilers raises questions about the development of the canon – after all, Rossetti’s so-called pot-boilers appear in several academic anthologies. Published in America, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine was one model for the British literary periodical. The profitability of Harper’s in the 1850s ‘as an advertisement for its publications and an outlet for [the publishing house’s] authors’ led to the explosion of the genre in London, ‘where nearly every major publishing house began its own magazine’ (Phegley 2004: 13). For further information on the transatlantic influence of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, see Phegley (2004). In his retrospective on the periodical, Leonard Huxley suggests that the Cornhill survived into the twentieth century through a consistent

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15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

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Victorian Poetry and the Literary Periodical devotion to the literary ideals established by Smith, which included ‘treating each subject [ . . . ] telling each story with the manifold responsiveness of thought to feeling and word to thought which differentiates literature from which is not literature’ (1922: 370). For more information on George Smith and the publishing house of Smith, Elder and Company, see Schmidt (n.d., 1983), Sutherland (1986) and Scott (1999). The ‘Roundabout Papers’ appeared in every issue edited by Thackeray, constantly reminding readers of the presence of the editor, his reputation as a social critic and satirist, and the values informing the periodical’s contents. The volume editions of the periodical available in the University of Victoria’s archives (where I completed most of my archival research) do not contain the letter or the original golden-orange cover. The loss of such material contexts is one of the challenges encountered when undertaking research on the periodical press. My work is defined by the condition and content of what survives. The letter was originally sent to G. H. Lewes in early November, after Lewes’s contributions were already secured. Smith then circulated the letter among other potential contributors before it appeared as part of the periodical’s first issue. Dwight Durling (1935) discusses the seasonal mode of georgic poetry in his seminal work Georgic Tradition in English Poetry. The majority of critics (Crawford 2002; Van Hagen 2007; Baker 2008) writing on the georgic discuss the genre in terms of labour politics and nation building in light of late-eighteenth-century changes to agricultural production and the continuing growth of empire. In her discussion of the periodical’s serial fiction, Phegley notes that ‘[w] hile the Cornhill’s featured novels did not always increase the magazine’s readership as dramatically as Smith hoped, they allowed the magazine to advertise itself as a signifier of middle-class taste’ (2004: 75). For further information on the Cornhill’s cultural influence and domestic ideology, see Eddy’s book on the periodical (1970: 45) and Maunder’s essay (1999a). Between 1851 and 1861, there was a 219 per cent increase in the number of authors who identified themselves as professionals (Reader 1966: 208), and the number of self-identified professional authors continued to increase into the twentieth century (211). In addition to the poems published in July 1860, the following poems address art/literature in some capacity: ‘Father Prout’s Inaugurative Ode’ ([Mahony] 1860: 75–6); the unsigned ‘Dante’ ([Unsigned] 1860d: 483); Adelaide Anne Procter’s ‘The Carver’s Lesson’ (1860: 560); Owen Meredith’s ‘Last Words’ (1860: 513–17), and his ‘Elisabetta Sirani’ (1861: 500–3). This number increases when we broaden the definition of labour to include the act of birth and subsequent maternity, another key thematic

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25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

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strain found during Thackeray’s reign as editor. With this definition in mind, one-third of the issues edited by Thackeray include poems about labour and production through labour. The presence of maternity in the Cornhill is worth further study; however, it is beyond the scope of this project. See Timney (2009) for a discussion of the metaphorical connotations of the word labour in working-class poetry by women. Arnold would later submit poems to Macmillan’s and the Atlantic Monthly in 1866 (Ledbetter 2007: 57). The connection of the intellectual man to God suggests that such labour is also a vocation. For an examination of literary work as vocation, see Hadjiafxendi (2009). Bulwer-Lytton is best known for the florid prose of his popular ‘silver fork’ novels from the early decades of the nineteenth century. Educated at Cambridge, Bulwer-Lytton made his living as an author, writing bestsellers in the 1830s and participating in periodical culture throughout his career. He was a prolific author, and ‘for thirty years after his death he remained a pillar of the literary establishment; besides innumerable cheap reprints, no fewer than twenty-five multi-volume collections of his complete novels were issued in Britain and America between 1875 and 1900’ (Brown 2004). The only contemporary author to outsell him was Dickens. Interestingly, Bulwer-Lytton’s son would write two poems on the professional artist for the Cornhill under the pseudonym Owen Meredith. While the Ark saves only Noah’s family, letting the rest of humankind drown for its sins, God nonetheless charges Noah and his family to continue the human race after the water recedes. Of course, Milton would go on to compose the biblical epic Paradise Lost (1667) with the help of amanuensis. Her paintings were considered part of the seventeenth-century Emilian Baroque School. Her work was dismissed in the nineteenth century. This is consistent with Phegley’s observation that G. H. Lewes (who sporadically served as editor of the Cornhill after Thackeray’s resignation) carried on Thackeray’s message about the value of educational reading for women, but rather than focusing on the health of the readers themselves, he shifted his attention to the cultural health of the nation. (2004: 77)

31. Smith ended up paying Eliot £7,000 for the serial novel. This was £3,000 less than his original offer, which he reduced because ‘Eliot refused to write her novel in the specified number of monthly parts’ (Phegley 2004: 75). 32. Thackeray rejected Barrett Browning’s ‘Lord Walter’s Wife’ for similar moral reasons, stating that readers ‘would make an outcry’ if exposed to Barrett Browning’s ‘account of an unlawful passion felt by a man for a woman’ (Ray 1946, vol. 4: 226–7).

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33. The move from oral tradition to print culture also signalled a shift in the politics of nineteenth-century verse. Anne Janowitz describes how ‘[a]t the micro-level of poetic form, an assertion of the four-beat stress metre against the five-beat stress-syllable metres of print culture encodes arguments about social and personal functions articulated at the macro-level of poetic thematics’ (1998: 14). Janowitz links this shift to the communitarian lyric and nineteenth-century politics of labour. 34. The dramatic monologue provides another example.

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Chapter 3

Devotional Reading and Popular Poetry in Good Words

Good words are worth much but cost little. George Herbert, epigraph for Good Words1

Secular literary periodicals such as Household Words, Macmillan’s Magazine and the Cornhill undoubtedly defined a significant portion of the literary market for middle-class readers interested in reading the era’s latest novels and consuming poetry, illustrations and non-fiction essays in a curated and family-friendly setting. However, alongside the popular literary weeklies and the shilling monthlies helmed by famous authors, a secondary periodical market flourished, far exceeding that of secular publications: the religious press. Mark Knight suggests that ‘it is difficult to imagine the nineteenth century without the religious debates and influences that played such a crucial and extensive role. Periodicals’, he argues, ‘were crucial to this vitality’ (2016: 363). The numbers support Knight’s assertion. In 1864, a table of circulation numbers for London publications suggests that the sale and circulation of monthly religious periodicals greatly exceeded the circulation numbers of ‘magazines and serials of a higher class’ (Altick 1998: 358). Several decades later, a latenineteenth-century source identifies religious periodicals as the largest category of periodical publications, representing 43 per cent of the total periodical market (Knight 2016: 355).2 The index appended to Josef Altholz’s The Religious Press in Britain, 1760–1900 (1989) alone lists 571 titles published during the nineteenth century. Given the number of religious periodicals circulating in the 1860s – around 228, according to Altholz’s index – it is, to adapt Knight’s phrasing, difficult to imagine nineteenth-century periodical poetry and poetics without considering the periodicals produced out of the religious discourse of the period.

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Religious periodicals took a variety of forms during the nineteenth century: some were linked to a specific religious domination with the literature therein explicitly promoting a particular theology, some exclusively focused on doctrinal and philosophical issues, some were associated with religious publishers, some ‘included material that might be deemed “secular” . . . [but] continued to signal a theological orientation through various means’ (Knight 2016: 356), and some, like Good Words, published a mix of non-denominational secular and devotional literature aimed at a broadly Christian audience. For the purposes of this book, I have chosen to focus on Goods Words as a representative example of the religious literary periodical.3 Good Words is by no means the only mid-Victorian religious literary periodical of note. The Religious Tract Society’s weekly penny periodical The Leisure Hour (1852–1905) aimed for the same domestic readership as Good Words and published serial fiction, poetry and essays interested in moralising and self-improvement; Sunday at Home (1854–1940) was designed to advance religious thought in the home (Altholz 1989: 48); The Month (1864–1939), a Roman Catholic publication, published some of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s early poetry; and John Cassell’s series of family magazines – Cassell’s Family Magazine (1874–97), Cassell’s Illustrated Family Magazine (1853–67), and Cassell’s Magazine (1867–74, 1897–1930) – are often classified as religious periodicals due, in part, to the strong faith of their publisher. However, while all the aforementioned periodicals are important to consider when discussing the religious and devotional periodical market of mid-Victorian England, focusing solely on Good Words allows for a consideration of how this devotional periodical used and modified the publication formulae established by Once a Week and the Cornhill in order to create and cater to a community of readers invested in Sunday reading. Ultimately, Good Words participated in the shared culture of the shilling monthlies and middle-class weeklies, constructing and affirming the same mid-Victorian middle-class readership as All the Year Round, Once a Week, Macmillan’s Magazine and the Cornhill. It also capitalised on the era’s burgeoning religious print culture, which included the development of popular mass-produced periodicals such as those aforementioned, the Quiver (1861–1926) and the Sunday Magazine (1864–1906), Alexander Strahan’s second foray into religious periodicals. As seen in the other periodicals referenced in this study, the poetry published in Good Words forms an integral part of the periodical’s literary identity, contributing to and confirming its message that a literary work made of good words could and should act as a prompt for devotional thought and practice.

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The Sabbath Reading Question: Good Words in the (Religious) Literary Market Published weekly in 1860 and then monthly from 1861 to 1906, Good Words appealed to Christian readers of literary periodicals who were interested in consuming devotional texts alongside the content found in most middle-class weeklies and shilling monthlies. As the sales of devotional publications such as John Keble’s The Christian Year (1828) suggest, there was a definite appetite for devotional literature, especially poetry, among the British reading public. Under the guidance of publisher Alexander Strahan and editor Norman Macleod, Good Words capitalised on the popularity of the literary periodical as defined by Dickens’s Household Words and, later, Thackeray’s Cornhill, using the periodical press to promote Christian thought and practices through poetry, prose and biblical readings. The periodical effectively merged devotional and domestic reading practices, presenting its contents as prompts for spiritual thought and integrating devotional reading practices into the leisure reading habits of the middle-class family. By positioning itself as a non-denominational religious periodical with a focus on literature, Good Words strategically courted a broad, middle-class Christian readership, setting itself apart from the era’s plethora of denomination-specific periodicals: Good Words was a literary periodical with Christian content, as opposed to a religious periodical interested in denomination-specific questions of theology. A reviewer in the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent Supplement for 14 January 1862 confirms this important difference between Good Words and other contemporary religious periodicals, noting that Good Words ‘is remarkably free from the exclusiveness of some denominational periodicals, and may be read by Christians generally without coming into collision with nice theological points’ ([Unsigned] 1862: 7). The periodical’s interest in promoting Christian modes of reading and life provides evidence of its hybridity as a periodical invested in both conventional, secular literature and religious thought. The debut of Good Words thus marks the rise of a different kind of religious periodical based on the literary models provided by the new shilling monthlies. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, Strahan and Macleod modelled Good Words on its competitors. When the periodical began, it looked like one of Dickens’s weeklies, following the same text-heavy, two-column format. Then, a few months into its run, Good Words began illustrating its fiction and poetry, aligning it with publications such as Once a Week. By the periodical’s second year, Strahan and Macleod transformed their weekly venture into

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an illustrated shilling monthly, clearly responding to the success and prominence of the genre. The success of Good Words, as it adopted the model of the secular shilling monthly, influenced subsequent religious publications. First published a year after the debut of Good Words, John Cassell’s the Quiver provides a quick case study of this trend. Though the Quiver maintained its strict religious focus for several years under the subtitle Designed for the Defence of Biblical Truth and the Advancement of Religion in the Homes of the People, in 1866, Cassell rebranded the Quiver as An Illustrated Magazine for Sunday and General Reading, suggesting a shift in the market of religious periodicals. In order to engage a mass readership and compete with the glut of middle-class periodicals on the literary market, publications like the Quiver had to become non-denominational products designed for leisure reading on the Sabbath. For publishers in the 1860s, then, the new model for successful religious periodicals required publishing secular literary material within a sacred framework that emphasised Sunday reading and incorporated ‘theological forms, such as sermons [ . . . ] devotional pieces’ or biblical exegesis (Knight 2016: 356), while avoiding clear references to any specific religious orientation. Instead, publications subtly signalled their theological orientation by employing well-known religious editors and contributors. From the beginning, Alexander Strahan intended Good Words to publish content appropriate for family reading on the Sabbath. In an 1872 essay discussing the periodical’s origins, Strahan describes how, at the age of 24, he ‘formed a project of starting a magazine to contain [ . . . ] not so much articles of a religious character, as articles of a general character written in a religious spirit’ (1872: 292).4 Strahan’s desire to enter the religious publishing market began in his childhood and grew out of the religious environment of his home and his family’s connections to the Free Church movement. Raised in the Calvinist theology of the Free Church, Strahan began his publishing career in 1853, working at a religious publishing house that served the Free Church cause in Scotland (Srebrnik 1986: 3).5 Despite his ties to the Free Church, Strahan became a congregant of the Church of Scotland in his early adulthood, though ‘the Free Church emphasis on social reform and on the political claims of “the people” remained a part of Strahan’s philosophy even after his religious beliefs became more moderate’ (Srebrnik 1986: 3). This base in Scotland provided fodder for early criticisms of the periodical, which Strahan’s relationship with Macleod furthered (Macleod

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was Strahan’s minister and a prominent member of the Church of Scotland). As Srebrnik points out, ‘even though Strahan went out of his way to make Good Words [ . . . ] acceptable to English readers by including contributions from as many Anglican writers as possible, Anglican ministers fretted that Good Words was conducted, after all, by Presbyterians’ (1986: 4). There is some validity to this criticism. Several of the poems published in the first few issues of Good Words implicitly adopted some of the tenets associated with the Church of Scotland’s post-disruption theology, ‘which assumed that Christ had died for the salvation of all who believed in him, and not merely for the elect’ (Srebrnik 1986: 29).6 Literary reviewers were less concerned, however, noting that although Good Words was a Scottish publication, it was not obviously ‘marked by any national peculiarities’ ([Unsigned] 1862: 7). Other groups responded negatively to the periodical’s combination of religious texts with popular literature. Novels written by Trollope appeared alongside texts written by authors ‘from various schools of religious thought’ (Srebrnik 1986: 35). Sally Mitchell describes how tract societies attempted to blacklist the periodical ‘because young people might be tempted to read the secular articles on Sunday’ (1983: 146).7 The most radical response to the periodical occurred in 1863 when the Free Church Presbytery of Strathbogie in the Scottish Highlands ‘gathered together all copies of Good Words to be found in the neighbourhood and then solemnly burned them in the marketplace’ (Srebrnik 1986: 62).8 Prior to the dramatic journal burning, which inadvertently served to advertise the periodical in the area, the Presbytery of Strathbogie requested that the Scottish General Assembly ban Good Words among its followers because they believed that the ‘periodical was calculated to do much injury’ ([Unsigned] 1863c). The Scottish General Assembly acted as the highest court of the Church of Scotland and debated issues affecting the Church and society, such as the Sabbath question. In his speech supporting the motion, Reverend Archibald McGilvray of Keith argued that Good Words was ‘injurious to the mind’ and omitted ‘full and clear doctrinal and practical teaching on the great truths contained in the Bible and embodied in our Catechisms and the Confessions of faith’ ([Unsigned] 1863c). He also worried that there are ‘many who will not limit their reading on that day simply to what are called religious articles, but will read other portions of this publication’ ([Unsigned] 1863c). Macleod, who was vilified by McGilvray, responded to his critics by outlining the editorial policies governing Good Words:

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Our purpose was to combine as far as possible in ‘Good Words’ all those elements which have made what are called ‘secular’ periodicals attractive, whether in good fiction, wholesome general literature, or genuine science, – to have these subjects treated in a right and therefore religious spirit, and to add what are called ‘religious articles,’ containing a full and uncompromising declaration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, in every number.9 (qtd in Strahan 1872: 295)

For Macleod, the literature published in Good Words does not detract from a person’s spiritual growth; it supports it no matter the subject or day of the week. If, as Phegley suggests, the illustrated family magazine of the 1860s was a ‘collaborative and corporate’ form (2004: 11), then the corporate mandate of Good Words, at least, according to Macleod, was to promote Christian thought through literature. Indeed, the periodical’s very title alludes to the Christian belief that the Bible is the Word of God (see Gen. 1.1), accentuating the importance of reading to contemporary Christian practices and beliefs.10 The format of Good Words confirms this mandate as Macleod emphasises careful Christian reading and thought in each issue he edits. The first issue, for instance, explicitly outlines the periodical’s project, opening with an editorial by Macleod that encourages the reader to spend ‘a short portion of time [ . . . ] each day this year in private prayer, in reading God’s Word, and, if possible, some devotional book’ (1: 4). Seemingly in response, each issue published in 1860 closes with the weekly feature ‘Good Words for Every Day of the Year’. This feature pairs biblical passages with a brief exegesis designed for domestic reading, suggesting that the periodical itself performs the role of the ‘devotional book’ that Macleod sees as a daily necessity for readers; after all, ‘God’s Word’ is homonymically and conceptually close to the title Good Words. In 1861, Macleod alters the title of this serial feature, calling it ‘Our Sunday Evenings’. The new title explicitly identifies Sunday as a time for reading and reflection, while the possessive adjective our refers to the assumed community associated with the periodical: its contributors and readers alike. Such features demonstrate how the periodical aimed to become a part of its readers’ domestic and spiritual lives, and it is through the development of this consistent, devotional framework during the periodical’s early years that Macleod, much like Thackeray at the Cornhill, established the brand and legacy of Good Words. The periodical’s devotional content integrated it into the rhythm of family reading practices on the Sabbath while still maintaining the literary periodical’s role as an entertaining product designed for leisure reading

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during the week. The structure of Good Words presents literary content, including serial fiction and secular poems, as compatible with Christian thought and devotional reading practices, treating it, to quote Macleod, ‘in a right and therefore religious spirit’. Whether its readers accepted and enacted these practices or not, Good Words transforms the act of leisure reading on a Sunday into an intellectual, meditative and moral practice. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, Macleod emphasises the devotional potential of Sunday reading practices through his editorials and the publication of serial features such as ‘Good Words for Every Day of the Year’, providing readers with constant reminders about how to read and engage with their leisure reading in a Christian manner. Just like its secular competitors the Cornhill and Once a Week, Good Words locates the Victorian family at the centre of its periodical project. Similar to the inaugural poem of Once a Week, which encouraged leisure reading to restore familial relationships and tranquillity, Macleod’s editorial ‘Sunday’ (1862b: 193–7) defines ‘The day of rest’ (and leisure reading) as ‘an unspeakable blessing, as re-uniting the scattered members of the household’ (194). For Macleod, Sundays become a moment when the Victorian family can gather and ‘cultivate the religion of domestic love’ (194). Macleod’s statement seems to privilege the secular love associated with the Victorian family over conventional religious belief; however, it also supports community worship and devotion, melding the older traditions of religious observation with the new traditions of leisure reading inaugurated by the literary periodicals (Turner 2002: 191).11 Macleod pursues this vision of a domesticated faith in his editorial, stating that on the Sabbath people should ‘together confess their common faith, express their common joy in knowing God by the singing of psalms and hymns of praise, and pour out their prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings for themselves and for all men’ (195). The periodical’s poetry facilitates this singing or, more aptly, reading of hymns, providing the foundation for Macleod’s vision of Sunday reading and Strahan’s ambition to publish a popular Christian periodical. The possibility for reflection exists in every article while the periodical’s poetry implicitly teaches readers how to read and understand the importance of literature both secular and devotional. For example, Dora Greenwell’s ‘Pencil Marks in a Book of Devotion’ (1860a: 143), which I will discuss later in detail, explicitly highlights the devotional potential and function of literature. In addition to the meaning contained in the letterpress, the physical layout of poetry on the pages of Victorian periodicals compounded

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spiritual potential of poetry (see Hughes 2007). In her discussion of Dinah Mulock Craik’s ‘Until her Death’, published in Good Words for May 1862, Kooistra explains how ‘the pictured poem provokes multiple meanings and encourages continued contemplation and interpretation’ (2014: 119). While Kooistra links this message to the Victorian reader’s awareness of artists as mediators and interpreters, her reading of the pictured poem demonstrates how the poetry of Good Words in both content and appearance encouraged an engagement with questions of reflection, interpretation and reading. This chapter is particularly interested in how the devotional poetry published in Good Words promoted devotional reading practices, setting the periodical apart from its direct competitors All the Year Round and the Cornhill. It is a conventional literary periodical with a devotional twist. Good Words did publish secular material, including poems on domestic life and the political situation in America and Italy as well as retellings of middle-eastern legends; however, unlike its competitors, which all published poems on similar topics, Good Words placed a particular emphasis on publishing works clearly aligned with its religious mandate. The poetry it published provides an excellent overview of this practice. Good Words tended to publish either overtly devotional poems or poems written by well-known devotional poets such as Francis Ridley Harvergal, a popular evangelical hymnist, and Dora Greenwell, who, while less popular than someone like Adelaide Anne Procter, was equally well respected and wrote widely about theological issues. The structure and content of the periodical make its focus obvious through the frequent appearance of Macleod’s editorial voice, the didactic nature of much of its poetry, and its frequent publication of hymns (or hymn-like poems), which function as a symbol of mainstream Christianity in the Victorian era. These features create a specific reading experience modelled on the middle-class illustrated shilling monthly and designed to encourage Christian morality in non-denominational context.

‘The essentials of the Christian Faith’: Reading Good Words As suggested in the introduction to this chapter, the religious and literary cultures of the Victorian period cannot be separated. Both Joshua King (2016) and William McKelvy (2007) emphasise the centrality of the era’s religious debates to the rise of periodical culture and the mass readership of the nineteenth century. King, for

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example, argues that the religious debates between Tractarians and Evangelicals contributed to the rise of the religious periodical press in the 1830s: the very same decade in which Keble published The Christian Year as an ‘intervention in nineteenth-century print culture’ (King 2016: 67, 130). As McKelvy notes, ‘The Christian Year was a powerful alternative to the fashionable literary annuals that rose in prominence along with Keble’s volume in the late 1820s and throughout the 1830s’ (2007: 152–3). The early decades of the nineteenth century, then, mark the moment when debates about religious and devotional practices entered the literary market through the era’s increasingly popular and accessible periodical formats. The religious publications produced during this period created a reading nation that, McKelvy argues, ‘was widely perceived to be a religious event, or an event with consequences that were mostly religious’ (2007: 255). By the 1860s, ‘the time when’, McKelvy writes, ‘our notion of culture was formulated and popularized . . . writers addressed readers fluent in comparing versions of literary and religious authority’ (2007: 1). Periodicals like Good Words provide evidence of this fluency as the periodical publishes essays, novels and poetry that invite readers to engage with religious and literary forms modified and adapted for a popular readership ‘theologically uninstructed by the state’ (McKelvy 2007: 255). The consequence of this turn to the periodical press transformed the way Victorian readers constructed and understood their religious communities. I thus join King in his revision of Benedict Anderson’s theorisation that ‘imagining national communities is an essentially secular activity’ (King 2016: 4). The religious press of the Victorian period clearly counters this narrative. King, for instance, traces ‘the many efforts during that century to turn the circulating printed page into a medium for imagining and participating in competing versions of a British Christian community’ (2016: 2). McKelvy similarly emphasises the inescapable connection between religion and the imagined reading communities of the nineteenth century, noting that ‘literature assume[d] a religious vocation in modern Britain in concert with the creation of a reading nation’ (2007: 12). Indeed, many of the periodicals included in Altholz’s index suggest an investment in developing and supporting a religious community, whether that community is tied to a specific denomination, a religious society (such as those associated with the temperance movement), or a broad Christian readership (such as Good Words). While the religious periodicals of the nineteenth century clearly indicate that the periodical press played a role in developing imagined

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religious communities, most scholarship on this issue begins with and focuses on Keble’s The Christian Year, which King describes as ‘provid[ing] a means for imagining private and domestic acts of reading as ways of participating in a print mediated, national religious community’ (2016: 130).12 For King, the success of The Christian Year can potentially be explained by the link it created ‘between a national community secularly timed by clocks and periodicals, and a cross-denominational community of anonymous, faithful readers, united by basic piety and a generally Christian typological code for interpreting national and daily life’ (2016: 158). The book’s very title ‘reminded readers that The Christian Year – unlike the fickle production of restless poets – did not simply pass away but returned again and again by virtue of its own divine derivation’ (McKelvy 2007: 153). Its controlled and conservative poetic form provided readers with a sense of religious security fuelled by Keble’s ‘absolute conviction’ (expressed in each poem’s form and content) ‘that God’s will is present and paramount’ (Blair 2003: 130). The steady and regular forms used by Keble to compose his series of poems leave no room for doubt or insecurity – such poems are ‘correspondingly more likely to deploy irregular, unsteady, unbalanced rhythms’ than those secure in their faith (Blair 2012: 1). In a world altered by new conceptions of time, The Christian Year provided stability, countering the constantly changing world of the periodical press as well as the unease caused by the era’s religious debates and the rise in religious doubt. The work of the periodical press in developing religious reading communities is inherently different from that of The Christian Year. While Keble’s poetry volume promoted a private, stable reading practice, Good Words (and other periodicals like it) overtly cultivated a public reading experience that spoke to the reader’s modern lived experience.13 The serial publication schedule of Good Words (at first weekly and then monthly after 1861) aligned with that of the era’s other literary periodicals, inserting the periodical into the public and communal experience of magazine day and serial reading. This is especially clear in Macleod’s editorials, which imagine a community of readers and draw attention to the fact that the individual reader is but one member of the Good Words audience. Moreover, while The Christian Year is the work of a single author, the periodical is inherently a social or communal text. Illustrations by a variety of artists provide interpretations of poems and affect the experience of fictional narratives. Essays on natural history appear alongside devotional poems. Ultimately, the periodical’s serial features, including its fiction, Macleod’s editorials, and its series of biblical exegesis, create

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a secular liturgy based on communal authorship and the seriality of periodical time. This community of authors and readers affects and complicates the meaning and reception of devotional periodical poetry, providing one explanation for the relative absence of scholarship of the poetics of popular mid-Victorian devotional periodical poetry.14 Much of the conversation around nineteenth-century devotional poetry focuses on the rise and influence of the Tractarian movement and its poetics as defined and practised by Keble in both his Lectures on Poetry (1832–41) and The Christian Year.15 In his important work on Tractarian poetry, G. B. Tennyson contends that ‘the work of the Tractarian poets and their followers constitutes a new creation of a sub-genre of poetry itself’ (2006: 114). With an estimated ‘one copy of The Christian Year for every sixty Britons’ by mid-century (Hughes 2010a: 141) no work on Victorian devotional poetry can entirely ignore the influence of Tractarian poetics on the production and reception of devotional poetry. As G. B. Tennyson points out in his essay on the sacramental imagination, the poetic model offered by Keble in both The Christian Year and his Lectures on Poetry set ‘a rationale for much of the treatment of Nature by religious minds for the rest of the century’ whether they were Tractarian or not (1977: 372). F. Elizabeth Gray similarly argues for Keble’s influence, noting that his poetics are ‘central to an understanding of female poetics’ (2006: 62) in the nineteenth century. She states that ‘Victorian women’s religious poetry displays a complex attitude toward inspiration and originality, which may be illuminated by viewing it through the lens of Tractarian preoccupations’ with ‘originality and imitation’ (2006: 63, 62).16 Gray’s argument anticipates Kirstie Blair’s study of form, faith and Victorian poetry, where she emphasises the need for scholars of Victorian poetry to recognise that canonical poets ‘produced their religious poetry as part of a context of popular religious poetics’ (2012: 5). Blair’s argument can easily be extended to include the non-canonical (and non-Tractarian) female poets who dominated the pages of religious periodicals such as the Christian Lady’s Magazine (see Gray 2006) and Good Words. What ultimately matters in such discussions of religious poetry is the return to thinking about form as opposed to aesthetics which allows readers of Victorian devotional poetry to engage with the era’s poems on their own terms as a product of the period’s devotional and literary cultures.17 Modern critics of Victorian poetry and religion agree that to truly understand religious poetry, we must pay greater attention to

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theological language and forms (Knight 2016: 363). Victorian readers ‘were steeped in biblical language’ (Rimmer 2006: 20). Consequently, ‘writers of the period drew readily on the Bible, confident that any reasonably alert reader would [be able to] decode their allusions’ (Rimmer 2006: 20). Many scholars of Victorian religion and readership have commented on this capacity of Victorian readers to understand and identify biblical and liturgical allusions: King points to the Bible (as well as the Prayer Book and hymns) as part of a ‘wide range of public allusions and shared forms’ that allowed poets like Tennyson to communicate their ideas about faith (2016: 15); Knight and Mason identify the ‘endless repetition and recollection of phrases from Scripture and liturgy’ as a defining element of Christian poetry (2006: 103), further noting that most nineteenth-century homes had both a Bible and the Book of Common Prayer (2006: 7); and Stephen Prickett observes that the advancement of biblical studies in the eighteenth century influenced literary culture, ‘[making] the biblical tradition, rather than the new classical one, the central poetic tradition of the Romantics’ (1986: 105).18 In addition to the ‘wide range of public allusions’ available to devotional poets, ‘Victorian poets and their readers shared a vocabulary relating to contemporary religious debates that we have largely lost’ (Blair 2012: 5). One of those shared, and often debated, vocabularies was form (2012: 5).19 The Evangelical and dissenting traditions, for instance, opposed form, suggesting that ‘too much interest in forms threatened to over-value the external at the experience of the internal, spiritual faith’ (2012: 23). Proponents of the Oxford movement, on the other hand, emphasised the importance of form. As Blair argues, the Oxford movement, which contributed to the development of Tractarian poetics, ‘can be read as an attempt to incorporate the new Evangelical emphasis on religious feeling into the formal frameworks of the Church of England’ (2012: 29). In many ways, the periodical format of Good Words represents the natural conclusion of such debates over religion and the devotional potential of poetic form. The periodical ‘expressed the common Presbyterianism and indeed the common evangelisms of Scotland’ (Altholz 1989: 89) through poetry that focused on the internal experience of faith, while simultaneously imposing a nondenominational devotional framework onto the ‘secular’ literature it published. In effect, Good Words transformed the experience of leisure reading into much more than a ‘frivolous “trifle”’ (Kooistra 2014: 112), seamlessly merging the devotional and the secular. For instance, while a poem such as the more secular and domestic

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‘Making Poetry’ by Frances Ridley Havergal (1867: 248–9) implicitly functions to teach readers that ‘poetic expression is integral to what it means to be human in the modern world’ (Kooistra 2014: 112), the devotional poetry of Good Words further refines this message by linking the practice and reading of devotional poetry to the expression of faith in the mid-Victorian world. For the reader of Good Words, poetry was not just filler or value-added literature conveying cultural value; rather, it contributed to the reader’s understanding of faith and the experience of modern life.

Lines of Devotion: Poetry in Good Words The lessons offered by poetry (devotional and otherwise) fill the pages of Good Words. Between 1860 and 1862, Good Words published 219 poems; many of which express some religious feeling. By 1881, the number of poems published reached 1,158.20 The sheer number of poems that appeared in Good Words over the course of twenty years identifies the periodical as a significant repository of periodical poetry, especially that written by women writers.21 The list of female contributors to Good Words includes some of the most prolific and popular female poets of the mid-Victorian era, including Dora Greenwell (53 poems 1860–80), Dinah Mulock Craik (27 poems 1860–80), Sarah Doudney (nine poems 1875–80), Menella Bute Smedley (28 poems 1866–79), Isa Craig (eleven poems 1862–78), Jean Ingelow (sixteen poems 1863–70) and Francis Ridley Havergal (fourteen poems 1860–77). Significantly, many of these women poets were also known for their devotional verse.22 The publication of poems by some of the era’s most popular and influential poets of religious and devotional verse positions Good Words as crucial to any study of the poetics of periodical poetry. This chapter pays particular attention to the poetry of Dora Greenwell, whose poems stand out for their variety and their engagement with the practices of devotional reading.23 Emma Mason describes Greenwell’s poetry as ‘ach[ing] for direction, begging its reader to decide on the tone but equally allowing a freedom of interpretation that grants religious quality within a meaning for the readers of all faiths or none’ (2006: 11). The freedom of Greenwell’s poetry makes her the ideal poet for Good Words: her broadly Christian poetry appealed to all readers regardless of religious affiliation. Furthermore, her ability to write poetry that demands an active devotional reading practice aligned her with the periodical’s interest in producing devotional readers and

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developing an imagined spiritual community that gathered monthly around the pages of Good Words. Before I turn to Greenwell, however, I want to start at the beginning with the periodical’s first issue and the publication of its inaugural poem, the unsigned ‘Little Things’ ([Unsigned] 1860a: 15). Unlike the easily identifiable inaugural poems of Once a Week and the Cornhill, the inaugural poem published in the first issue of Good Words does not announce itself. Printed on the penultimate page of the first weekly issue, ‘Little Things’ quietly and unobtrusively confirms the publication’s defined agenda, reminding the reader that good words have the potential to effect change in the world. The poem echoes and reiterates the message contained in Macleod’s inaugural editorial address: ‘We Wish You a Good New Year!’ ([Macleod] 1860: 1–4).24 In this essay, Macleod clearly constructs an imagined community of devotional readers by asking them to ‘unite with us in expressing the honest prayer before God, that “good words,” and good words only, may be published from week to week in these pages’ (1). Macleod’s belief in the periodical’s ability to provide its readers with ‘words of truth and soberness, of wisdom and love, such as will help to make this year a good one to us all’ (1), fits with the periodical’s motto, ‘good words are worth much and cost little’. And Good Words fulfils the edict of its motto by providing moral literature at an affordable price, making it accessible to a broader spectrum of the Victorian middle class than more expensive shilling monthlies such as the Cornhill. As we shall see, the poetry published throughout volume one confirms the periodical’s defined agenda. Appearing fourteen pages after Macleod’s welcoming editorial, ‘Little Things’ builds on the main themes discussed by Macleod, tackling the publication’s investment in the idea of good words. Ironically, the fact that is appears unsigned imbues the poem with more power and not less. It is not simply an anonymous, throw-away poem. The lack of signature allows the poem to carry the ideology of the journal; there is no authorial reputation to intervene.25 Each stanza in ‘Little Things’ reminds the reader that even the smallest words and deeds – such as a short anonymous lyric – have the potential to effect change in the world: Scorn not the slightest word or deed, Nor deem it void of power; There’s fruit in each wind-wafted seed, Waiting its natal hour.

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A whisper’d word may touch the heart, And call it back to life; A look of love bid sin depart, And still unholy strife. No act falls fruitless: none can tell How vast its power may be, Nor what results unfolded dwell Within it silently. Work, and despair not: give thy mite, Nor care how small it be; God is with all who serve the right, The holy, true, and free. ([Unsigned] 1860a: 15)

The poem suggests that the key to devotional reading practices is to understand words and thoughts in a Christian manner. This understanding will allow the reader to affect the world in a positive way. The poem never speaks of the potential for negative influence, but in its very absence, that alternative is dismissed as outside the Christian beliefs and behaviours informing the periodical. Interestingly, the poem gives power to its readers – a theme that runs through the periodical’s poetry, both secular and devotional, and is a product of the periodical’s editorial practices. As Kooistra notes, ‘by granting public space to a wide variety of poetic expression . . . Good Words simultaneously claimed poetry as part of everyday life and affirmed modern readers as “poets of their own acts” of making’ (2014: 135). The allusion to the parable of the widow and her mites (Luke 21: 1–4 and Mark 12: 41–4)26 – ‘work, and despair not: give thy mite, / Nor care how small it be’ – encourages the poem’s readers to see themselves as participants and potential actors in the world: no matter their material circumstances. For the speaker of the poem, any act of devotion, no matter how little, will strengthen and help the reader express their relationship with God, who ‘is with all who serve the right’ ([Unsigned] 1860a: 15). Written in hymn common metre, ‘Little Things’ explores how the good words of Christian poetry harness the power of language and devotional literary forms to inspire Christian thought.27 Indeed, the poem both demonstrates and selfreferentially calls attention to the good words of Christian poetry, implicitly demonstrating how such poems harness the power of language and devotional literary forms (such as hymn common metre) to inspire Christian thought and actions. The poem’s placement in the inaugural issue of Good Words transforms the poem into something

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more than just the poetic and more affective affirmation of Macleod’s editorial. The poem’s opening line prepares the reader for the devotional practice modelled in the serial feature introduced immediately after ‘Little Things’: ‘Good Words for Every Day of the Year’. This weekly feature presented readers with a brief biblical exegesis for every day of the week. The structure provided by the weekly feature explicitly encourages readers to integrate devotional readings into their daily lives. Furthermore, ‘Good Words for Every Day of the Year’ models the close reading of God’s ‘good words’, and in doing so, the series emphasises the importance of careful, Christian reading practices. The periodical’s first issue thus includes multiple documents explaining and demonstrating both the practice of devotional thought and the importance of devotional texts. Poems that explicitly reflect on the function of inspirational verse and the power of ‘good words’ make up approximately 10 per cent of the first volume’s devotional poetry, and such poems reappear throughout the periodical’s forty-year run.28 For example, a poetic meditation on the power of language and good words opens the second volume of the journal. The poem ‘Good Words’ by L.C.C. (1861a: 1–2) welcomes the New Year with a prayer: That He who knows each spirit’s wants, (Beyond my love to read,) May mould your wishes to His will, And crown them thus indeed. (2)

The poem’s interest in language and the power of words, specifically prayer and wishes, supports the project of the periodical, which is to publish good words that prompt Christian thought and action. The poem deliberately draws on the language and branding of Good Words as the January issue it opens with marks the periodical’s first as a monthly publication. The consistent messaging suggests that Macleod and his publisher Strahan were invested in creating a cohesive package regardless of format, and this consistency extends to the periodical’s decorations. The illustrated twigs and vines that make up the woodland font of the poem’s title appear throughout the first three volumes of Good Words (from 1860 to 1862), and this visual/ verbal continuity in the periodical establishes the commercial identity of Good Words. Macleod’s editorials, which appear throughout the periodical, are also important to this endeavour. They transform him into a paterfamilias figure similar to Thackeray in the Cornhill. Macleod guides the reader’s experience of the periodical text just as

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a father would guide religious observations in the home. Through his editorial voice, Macleod frames the poetry of Good Words as a devotional space for readers designed to prompt a meditative reading experience. In Good Words, all the parts of the periodical work together to strengthen and reinforce its particular brand. The frequent appearance of poems on reading and devotion confirms that Good Words intended readers to recognise the devotional potential of poetry. Greenwell’s ‘Pencil Marks in a Book of Devotion’ (1860a: 143) is the paradigmatic example of such poetry. In this early poem, Greenwell explores the effects of good words on the reader. The poem begins with the speaker coming across several underlined passages in a book of devotion and reflecting on the comfort that the anonymous original reader took in those words. The first few stanzas of the poem appear in the periodical as follows. ‘It happened one day, about noon, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen on the sand.’ STRONG words are these – ‘O Lord! I seek but Thee, Not Thine! I ask not comfort, ask not rest; Give what, and how, and when thou wilt to me, I bless Thee – take all back – and be Thou blest.’ Sweet words are these – ‘O Lord! it is Thy love, And not Thy gifts I seek; yet am as one That loveth so I prize the least above All other worth or sweetness under sun.’ And all these words are underscored, and here And there a tear hath been, and left a stain, The only record, haply, of a tear Long wiped from eyes no more to weep again. And as I gaze, a solemn joy comes o’er me – By these deep footprints I can surely guess Some pilgrim, by the road that lies before me, Hath cross’d, long time ago, the wilderness. (Greenwell 1860a: 143)

The speaker of the poem uses the quoted texts as the impetus for spiritual reflection, demonstrating the power of good words. But the presence of the epigraph from Robinson Crusoe does more than just signal the importance of devotional readings. The epigraph speaks of one ‘surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore’

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(143). The appearance of the print suggests the presence of a previously unknown community. The invocation of the footsteps in the fourth stanza further recontextualises the epigraph; they become an imprint, a trace, that helps the speaker find a place – a community – where one does not ask for the Lord’s blessing and love but realises that such love and faith exists within the self, needing no external reward or gift. The speaker states, ‘By these deep footprints I can surely guess / Some pilgrim, by the road that lies before me, / Hath cross’d, long time ago, the wilderness’ (143). The speaker’s allusion draws on the shared vocabulary – both biblical and secular – of Victorian readers. The diction used creates an implicit allusion to the biblical narrative of the Temptation of Christ (Matthew 4: 1–11, Mark 1: 12–13, and Luke 4: 1–13); the lines simultaneously trace the struggles of faith and provide hope for its affirmation. However, the readers of Good Words would have undoubtedly also understood the line as an allusion to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s ‘Psalm of Life’ (1830), one of the most widely known and circulated poems in the Victorian era.29 The appeal to this shared, communal vocabulary reinforces the arguments made by Blair (2012), King (2016) and others about the shared vocabularies of Victorian readers, and suggests that poets and editors used this communal and commonplace devotional language to create readerly communities united in time and space through their shared understanding of the poem and the affective, devotional experience it encourages. The poem suggests the presence of a spiritual community as the speaker responds to and reflects on the emotional, tearful and transformative experience of a previous reader, ultimately sharing the experience: ‘And meeting words of promise, meekly, gladly, / Went on his way rejoicing – so will I’ (143). In some sense, then, the poem becomes a response to the ‘little things’ referenced by the anonymous poet discussed at the beginning of this section. The actions of the reader who underlined the passages found by Greenwell’s speaker come to influence the speaker’s spiritual growth in the same way that Macleod intends the periodical’s good words and Christian message to contribute to the devotional practices of its community of readers. Poems throughout Good Words draw on this shared knowledge of the Bible and Christian tradition, including parables and exempla, and the language of contemporary devotional poetry and literature. For example, the didactic nature of L.C.C.’s translation of Victor Hugo’s ‘The Toad’ (L.C.C. 1861b: 33–4) links the poem to the parables of Christ.30 The poem implores its readers to see ‘the life below’ and to exhibit compassion for those below them in society (33). The

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Figure 3.1 ‘The Toad’ by L. C. C. Illustrated by J. D. Watson. Good Words. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.)

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speaker reminds readers that ‘Perhaps this thing we curse felt himself blest, / Linked with the Infinite, like all the rest’ (33). The lesson of the poem asks readers to see the divine in all things, and the proleptic narrative illustration that accompanies the poem reinforces this message (Figure 3.1). The illustrator, J. D. Watson, places the toad in a vulnerable position near the hooves of an ‘Old, meagre, lame, worn-out’ donkey guided by a threatening, masculine figure (34). Meanwhile, a group of young boys look down at the amphibian with expressions of mischievous interest, anticipating their cruel actions. They stop their friend from throwing a stone only to tell him, ‘Just wait a moment, leave the toad alone, / The wheel will crush it, ’t will be better fun’ (34). In the background, a gentlewoman and a priest walk away from the scene in blissful ignorance, unaware of the violence behind them. The illustration’s composition captures the message of the poem by forcing viewers to confront societal obliviousness and violence as poem and illustration work together to relay a specific Christian lesson. Like Christ’s parables, this illustrated poem teaches the reader about human nature and the tenets of the Christian faith, paying particular attention to society’s tendency to ignore the downtrodden. Its verbal and visual forms draw on the reader’s ability to read and recognise parable-like structures.31 Parables are not the only devotional form appropriated and alluded to by the poets of Good Words, however. Greenwell’s ‘Go and Come’ (1862a: 31–2), a poem that examines the responsibilities of Christianity, including missionary work, charity and war, turns to the proverbs, providing yet another example of the way the devotional poetry of Good Words draws on the shared biblical language and allusions of the era’s poets and readers. The title contains an allusion to a particular proverb that focuses on the nature of faith and the adherence to moral law. The proverb implores the listener to ‘Trust in the Lord with all thy heart’ (Prov. 3: 5), a message repeated by Greenwell in her poem. The proverb goes on to admonish the listener to do one’s Christian duty: Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, When it is in the power of thine hand to do it. Say not unto thy neighbour, ‘Go, And come again tomorrow and I will give.’ (Prov. 3: 27–8)

Greenwell’s poem opens with an awareness of this edict and revises the imperative ‘Go’ (Greenwell 1862a: 31). Rather than signifying the dismissal of one in need (as the Proverb warns against), Greenwell’s ‘Go’ signifies God’s order for the speaker to go and work for

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the Lord, gleaning for him ‘’mid wasted frames outworn / ’Mid souls uncheered, uncared for; hearts forlorn’ (31). The poem builds on the lesson and the form of the proverb (both have an assumed listener and are delivered as a monologue), speaking of a Christian’s duty to live according to the word of God even as the speaker questions the consequences of faith. For the speaker, the acts required to live a life of Christian duty seem to reinforce God’s absence in the world. Again, the title provides some insight into the speaker’s resistance to the biblical imperative. The phrase go and come is a reversal of the common phrase come and go, which means ‘[t]o be first present and then absent; to approach and recede; to appear and disappear alternately’ (OED Online). This definition circulated in the nineteenth century, appearing in Tennyson’s Enoch Arden (1864), and it is particularly apt for Greenwell’s poem as the speaker dwells on the perceived absence and then presence of God. When God appears in the poem, the meaning of the verb go shifts. It no longer signifies a distancing from God, as it did before the speaker began his journey; rather, the imperative brings the speaker closer to God: ‘We follow Thee, yet still, in peace or war, / Thou leadest us’ (Greenwell 1862a: 32). In going, the speaker comes to the Lord, resolving his feelings of God’s absence. The poem closes with the verb come, marking the end of the speaker’s spiritual journey through which he discovers the true nature of faith: a willingness to believe in and follow the path of God. The poem thus reinforces the Proverb’s description of Christian behaviour as constantly following and trusting in the will of God. Greenwell’s poem also emphasises the importance of reading ‘sideways’ in periodicals (see Hughes 2014). Similar to ‘Little Things’ in the periodical’s inaugural issue, Greenwell’s poem provides a poetic explication of Macleod’s opening editorial for January 1862, ‘A Word in Season’ ([Macleod] 1862a: 1–3). Macleod’s essay calls for readers to act and live each day in accordance with the Christian faith unlike most people who ‘Instead of being faithful in their use of the day which God gives them, and for which they alone are responsible, they plan and contrive how they will be faithful over the morrow’ (1). The people who Macleod criticises tell their neighbours ‘Go’ and fail to heed to God’s call to action. The editorial and poem both echo the message of Proverbs 3, reaffirming the need for readers to keep God’s commands in their heart and allow Him to direct their path through life. Published in the same issue, these very different texts demonstrate how the poetry and prose of Good Words combined to produce a cohesive religious message based on the reader’s

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knowledge and understanding of devotional reading practices. As with Macleod’s other editorials, this one also implicates the reader as part of a spiritual community, positioning them (and their fellow readers of Good Words) as part of a community of faithful Christians, whose habits, including reading Good Words, will strengthen their relationship with God and thus decrease the burden of mortal life. The final example I wish to discuss in this section on biblical allusions and shared language is Isa Craig’s ‘The Christmas Child’ (1862: 55–6) illustrated by Thomas Morten, which, like the other poems mentioned, alludes to a biblical text: the nativity (Luke 2: 1–20).32 Craig’s poem relocates the nativity story, placing it in a contemporary environment that simultaneously complements and critiques the social ideals supported by Christian thought. The poem comments on the isolated and overlooked figure of the fallen woman/mother, a pitiable creature that nonetheless exists in the shadows outside domesticated consciousness. The illustration emphasises this point: the forsaken mother is barely visible in the upper-right-hand corner. Morten dedicates the white space of the illustration to the foundling and its new parents (Figure 3.2). Perhaps ironically, the outcast mother performs an act of Christian charity, giving her infant to a couple still grieving for their long-dead child. The poem ends with an ambiguous whisper: ‘“A Christmas gift,” we’ll keep it, dear, / It was to-night the Saviour came’ (Craig 1862: 56). The identity of the speaker is unclear at this point, and the poem’s reference to the Saviour has two potential meanings: it references Christ’s birth and it implies that the child acts as the family’s personal saviour, saving them from grief and giving them the family they desire. In this way, the poem reworks the traditional nativity story, demonstrating once again how devotional poetry complements the religious impulse of the periodical. Such poetry reimagines existing religious narratives for a popular readership, providing new ways for the periodical’s Christian community to engage with the principles behind biblical narratives. Thus far I have focused on how the poetry of Good Words relied, in part, on the shared biblical and devotional language of the era’s middle-class readers to establish, promote and perpetuate a religious reading community organised around the serial rhythms of the periodical press. However, unlike Keble’s The Christian Year, which represents ‘one of the century’s most powerful and popular means for imagining private devotional reading as participation in a national and imperial religious community of nameless individuals’

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Figure 3.2 ‘The Christmas Child’ by Isa Craig. Illustration by Thomas Morten. Good Words. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.)

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(King 2012: 408–9),33 periodicals like Good Words promoted communal reading practices as established in Macleod’s opening editorial, which emphasises the coming together of communities to worship and explore their faith. The presence of hymn-like poems in Good Words furthers the sense of community developed by the periodical. Indeed, the act of reading a hymn in Good Words is at once personal and communal.34 The recognisable metre of the hymn form evokes the participatory practice of the traditional liturgical hymn, and its communal nature suggests an imagined community of worshippers, singing and worshipping in one choral voice. Ian Bradley discusses how this was particularly important in the nineteenth century, which came to view the hymn as ‘a cohesive and unifying force in a society which was in some danger of fragmentation and factionalism’ (1997: xi). The presence of hymn-like poems, written by poets associated with the genre, grounds Good Words in the devotional practices and traditions of the period even as the very publication of Good Words – and its combination of secular and spiritual material – signalled the rise of new Sabbath traditions, including the leisure reading of shilling monthlies. Certainly, the number of poems published in the first volume of Good Words that came from well-known hymnists suggests that Strahan and Macleod were taking advantage of the contemporary rise in and prominence of hymn culture.35 Between 1860 and 1880, well-known devotional poets and hymnists such as Frances Ridley Havergal, Jean Ingelow and Dora Greenwell published a total of eighty-three poems in Good Words.36 A poem from Havergal, Ingelow or Greenwell appears in almost every volume edition of Good Words during this period with the exception of 1868, 1871 and 1875. The relatively frequent presence of poems by these writers supports the notion that the devotional poetry of Good Words drew on all forms of Victorian devotional and poetic culture. The use of hymn form simply functions as another example of the shared devotional language circulating during the period.37 For the purposes of this chapter, I understand the hymn-like poems in Good Words to be a hybrid genre, combining the form of the literary hymn with the cultural resonance of the liturgical hymn (those sung during church services). According to The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics, the literary hymn ‘[t]ypically begins with an invocation and apostrophe. The main body will narrate an important story or describe some moral, philosophic, or scientific attribute. A prayer and farewell provide the conclusion’ (Rollinson 2012: 646). While such criteria can be applied to many of the devotional poems in

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the periodical, I want to suggest that the hymns of Good Words represent a specific sub-genre of devotional periodical poetry that imports the cultural meaning of the liturgical and communal hymn into the silent letterpress of the periodical. The hymns of Good Words thus participate in a process similar to that of the literary lyric in the early nineteenth century insofar as the literary hymn, like the lyric, seems to ‘understands itself variously preserving, succeeding, incorporating or remaking earlier lyric’, or in this case, hymnal, ‘forms with other modes of circulation and reception’ (Rowlinson 2007: 59).38 What I want to suggest is that, perhaps, we can understand the devotional poetry of Good Words as adopting and remaking the familiar metre of hymns (and ballads), transforming such poems into a product of the periodical press perfect for reading with the family on a Sunday. The structure of the hymn is instantly recognisable and contributes to the genre’s familiarity, recognisability and communal nature. J. R. Watson notes that the metrical requirements of the hymn create ‘a recurring stability upon which the developing hymn can be built; the verse design determines the invariant features of the work, and sets limits to the variations’ (1997: 27). Within this structure, the words initially follow a linear pattern, but their association with melody, which is circular, transforms the nature of the hymn (26). It is through this combination of the cyclical and the linear that the ‘direction of the hymn becomes clear, the structure unfolds, and then the last verse brings it to a conclusion’ (26). Dora Greenwell’s ‘When Night and Morning Meet’ (1860b: 188) demonstrates how the structural continuity noted by Watson exists within the hymn even when there is no musical accompaniment. The poem is deftly structured, with the first and last stanzas providing a clear description of the beginning and end of a life: In the dark and narrow street, Into a world of woe, Where the tread of many feet Went trampling to and fro, A child was born, (speak low,) When the night and morning meet. ............................ From the dark and narrow street, Into a world of love, A child was born – speak low, Speak reverent; for we know Not how they speak above, When the night and morning meet. (Greenwell 1860b: 188)39

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In her description of death, Greenwell subtly alters the language of the opening and closing stanzas. The switch from in to from in the first line of each stanza captures the moment of death, and the replacement of woe with love similarly factors into this shift towards not only death but also heavenly love. The removal of parentheses around the phrase ‘speak low’ (188) further indicates a change in circumstance from the first stanza. Through a comma, Greenwell links the request to speak low with the idea of speaking reverently, which connotes a sense of veneration or respectful thought more realistic at the moment of death then the celebration that accompanies birth. Finally, the last sentence of each stanza remains the same, and the liminal nature of the moment described in the line ‘When the night and morning meet’ (188) cleverly refers to the structure of the poem as a whole: it hovers between the space of life and death. Greenwell connects these two moments through repetition. These first and last stanzas of the poem emphasise its deliberate structure, which moves from birth in the first stanza, ‘full seventy summers back’ (188), to death in the last. The poem is at once timeless and time bound. It lacks a specific historical context, and yet, it is grounded in the biblical lifespan of a human: seventy years (Psalms 90: 10).40 These elements, combined with the poem’s interest in faith and heaven, locate the poem as part of literary hymnody. It adapts the traditional hymn form for periodical publication by retelling one of the conventional narratives associated with hymns (that of life and death), ending with a call for reverential silence/reflection, and embedding the hymn’s musicality in its text. The link between the poetry published in Good Words and the hymn is an important part of Alexander Strahan’s vision and Norman Macleod’s editorial practice: the production of a popular nondenominational periodical that contributes to the devotional culture of mid-Victorian Britain. The poetics of Good Words ultimately function to establish a space for devotional thought within the modern form of the periodical press. Good Words, like Greenwell’s ‘The Railway Station’ (1860d: 438), reminds readers that ‘Not all the turmoil of the Age of Iron / Can scare that Spirit hence’ (438). Unlike several other poems in the periodical, which retreat to nature for spiritual rejuvenation, Greenwell’s poem brings faith into the city ‘far remote from Nature’s fair creations’ (438). The speaker of Greenwell’s poem claims that despite the era’s rapid pursuit of modernity and technology, the melodies of faith hover ‘But soft, above the noontide heat and burden / Of the stern present’ (438). To borrow from Krista Lysack’s analysis of the relationship between devotional and industrial time, the melodies of faith referenced by the poem’s

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speaker are able to ‘keep time with the world in which’ periodicals such as Good Words were ‘being produced’ (2013: 458). The poem concludes with the speaker’s assertion that those who remember the traditions of faith displaced or compromised by modernity will be blessed in the afterlife. Greenwell presents a similar argument in her poem ‘The Blind School’ (1861b: 505), which she published under the initials K.K.T. In this later poem, Greenwell reiterates the presence of God in modern society: Surely He dwells among us as of yore, His Spirit works with ours, when science turns From binding fast the elements, and o’er Neglected childhood yearns. (505)

The poem speaks of the dual presence of science and God. Secular modernity has not chased away faith; rather, the speaker still has faith in the constant presence of God on earth and the reader’s role in ensuring that God’s will be done under the ‘earthly sun’ (505). As a product of modernity, the periodical participates in the broader cultural shift noticed in these poems from faith and tradition to science and technology, including the rise of the railway. The poetry and the spiritual content of Good Words disrupt this trend, reintroducing society’s ‘traditions of youth’ (Greenwell 1860d: 438) through the modern product of the periodical. While Greenwell’s poems focus on faith in urban centres, the poetry included in the periodical frequently turns to rural and natural settings in its celebration of Christianity. Nature poems such as ‘Autumn’ (H.M.T. 1860: 593) and ‘The Coming of Spring’ (Craik 1861a: 224) encourage readers to see and reflect on their faith and God’s work in nature. The importance of nature to devotional thought also appears in the periodical’s hymns. For example, John S. Blackie’s hymn ‘How Wondrous Are Thy Works, O God!’ (1862: 521–2) describes an active God who treads through his natural creations. The poem’s opening stanzas present God as an active presence in the natural world depicted in W. P. Burton’s accompanying illustration (Figure 3.3). His breath is what shakes the treetops and releases the fragrance of the trees. The speaker describes the movement of the wind as follows: Where the rich-tressèd birchen-bower Shakes fragrance round in sunny hour, Where the rock-rooted pine-trees nod, Thy breath is there, thou mighty God! (Blackie 1862: 521)

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Figure 3.3 ‘How Wondrous are Thy Works, O God!’ by John S. Blackie. Illustrated by W. P. Burton. Good Words. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.)

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Surrounding the natural landscape of the illustration with exclamatory stanzas that end with the exuberant exclamation ‘thou mighty God!’ (521), Blackie transforms the passive landscape of the image. The landscape becomes enlivened with the poet’s active God, a God whose influence is seen in nature. In many ways, the poem comments on the purpose of nature poetry in Good Words: to declare the wondrous presence of the divine. The repeated return to non-urban landscapes throughout the forty-year run of Good Words produces an implicit critique of the modern devotional practices associated with urban life. Illustrated nature poems, such as ‘Autumn’ (H.M.T. 1860), ‘The Coming of Spring’ (Craik 1861a) and ‘How Wondrous Are Thy Works, O God!’ (Blackie 1862), encourage readers to see and reflect on their faith and God’s work in nature. Though the periodical’s poetry consistently reinforces this appeal to nature as a spiritual prompt, the most striking instance of the natural world acting as a sacred or meditative space is the publication of ‘August: An Autumn Picture’ (Montbard 1882) (Figure 3.4). There is no context provided for the image in the periodical, not even a page number. It exists only as a visual text imbued with the meaning of all the poems that came before it as the lessons about reading and devotion contained in over several decades Good Words determine the meaning of ‘August: An Autumn Picture’.

The Visual Composition of Poetry in Good Words Of the 117 poems published in Good Words between 1860 and 1862, over half were illustrated; the percentage of illustrated poems per volume steadily increased from 27 per cent in 1861 to 81 per cent in 1862. This growth in the number of illustrated poems is not seen in the other periodicals mentioned in this study, and it represents Strahan’s attempts to grow his publishing business through illustration.41 Illustrations by Millais and other well-known illustrators increased the cultural value of his periodical, and illustrating poetry specifically allowed him to consolidate the growing middle-class audience for poetry gift books with that of the emerging audience for illustrated literary periodicals (Kooistra 2014: 116). Strahan’s decision to publish twelve engravings from Millais’s Parables of the Lord in 1864 emphasises the connection he strove to develop between his periodical and the market for illustrated gift books as these particular illustrations both advertised Millais’s new book and drew an audience interested in previewing Millais’s forthcoming work for cheap in the periodical press.

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Figure 3.4 ‘August: An Autumn Picture’ by G. Montbard. Good Words. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.)

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Figure 3.5 ‘Love’ by M. Illustrator unknown. Good Words. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.)

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Like the majority of illustrated Victorian periodicals, Good Words used a layout that framed its poems with thick white margins, allowing the reader to quickly identify poetry among the densely printed prose. This layout appears time and again in the periodical press, linking the poetry of the annuals from the 1820s and 1830s to the literary periodicals of mid-Victorian Britain. However, while the layout of Good Words was not distinct from the standard layout seen in its illustrated competitors, the devotional content of the periodical’s poetry reinforced and heightened the perceived symbolic spiritual weight of poetry in the periodical press (and vice versa).42 The illustrated poetry of Good Words thus exists in a complex cultural nexus where questions of cultural production, visual literacy, layout and devotional reading practices intersect. For example, the periodical’s layout links poetry to biblical verse through the visual cues of its layout: the white margins that conventionally frame periodical poetry also appear around the lines of biblical verse published as part of each issue’s biblical exegesis. The placement and composition of the periodical’s illustrations similarly function to create connections between the devotional content of the periodical and its poetry. One key example of this is the first illustrated poem published in Good Words, ‘Love’ by M. (1860a: 168), which is prefaced by a spherical medallion stamped with the bust of Dante (Figure 3.5). The image makes it clear that the speaker is a Dantean figure who wants to ‘weave a wreath [ . . . ] / Of all things rich and fair’ for his beloved (168). The poem ends with the speaker promising that his love is eternal, ‘ever fresh, and pure, and bright, / As on its natal day’ (168), and will last until the lovers meet again in heaven. The poem muses on the promise of love and the limits of human memorials and representations of love engaging with the secular traditions of love poetry. Yet, it also represents love as a sacramental experience that must be preserved.43 Read as part of Good Words, the poem comments on the importance of human relationships, creating a link between the experience of mortal love and one’s relationship with God. The layout of the periodical helps to facilitate the spiritual connotations of this particular poem. In effect, it combines established traditions of love poetry signified by Dante with the devotional as suggested by the poetry and layout of Good Words. The placement of the image, the page’s wide margins and the poem’s content all work together to prompt spiritual reflection, building on the poetic sensibilities established in the periodical’s earlier poems. In her reading of the periodical’s poetry, Kooistra observes that ‘Macleod used double-page openings and pictured poetry strategically

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as an effective landing place where readers could pause, contemplate, and return’ (2014: 123). Dora Greenwell’s ‘Love in Death’ (1862b: 184–5) provides evidence of this effect, demonstrating how the illustrated poetry of Good Words transformed everyday events into spaces for contemplation and encouraged readers to have an affective response. An epigraph prefaces the poem, presenting the facts of the event described by the poem in a stark manner: ‘A woman perished in a snow-storm while passing over the Green Mountains in Vermont; she had an infant with her, who was found alive and well in the morning, carefully wrapped in the mother’s clothing’ (184). The epigraph delays its identification of the woman as a mother until its penultimate word. The poem, on the other hand, rewrites and replaces the plain language of the newspaper report, adding an emotional component to the bleak facts by imagining the mother’s final thoughts as she lay dying in the snow, her body protecting that of her young child. It transforms the woman from a nameless figure into a mother who would sacrifice everything and die for her child. Greenwell’s repetition of the word mother early in the poem reinforces the woman’s maternity: ‘A mother’s spirit in its parting clung / Unto her child – a mother’s soul was stirred / Through all its depths – a mother’s fondness hung’ (184, emphasis mine). The focus on the mother figure aligns the poem with contemporary discourses of motherhood, which argued that mothers were responsible for the mental, moral and physical well-being of their children and, by extension, the nation.44 The poem’s focus on maternal emotion offers readers an alternative perspective of the event described in the news clip of the epigraph. The visual length of the poetic lines mimics the layout of the periodical’s prose, taking up nearly all the space in the columns and collapsing the distinction between the genres. Nonetheless, the poem’s adherence to iambic pentameter limits the number of words that can appear in each line. This creates white space within each column that subtly distinguishes the poetic text from the prose text of the preceding pages, priming the reader for a poetic, affective response. The illustration contributes to the visual effect of the poetic text. It faces the poem, forcing the reader to encounter the visual and verbal narratives simultaneously. The image of a woman hunched over from the cold walking through a stark landscape dominates both pages (Figures 3.6 and 3.7).45 Together, the poem and illustration create an alternative space for interpretation, mixing the factual with the imagined, and creating a new narrative that invites an emotional response and encourages the reader to empathise with the mother-figure. Building on my analysis of ‘Love’ and ‘Love in Death’, the remainder of this chapter

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Figure 3.6 ‘Love in Death’ by Dora Greenwell. Illustrated by Fredrick Walker. Good Words (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.)

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Figure 3.7 ‘Love in Death’ by Dora Greenwell. Illustrated by Fredrick Walker. Good Words (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.)

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considers how the landing places created by the periodical’s illustrations contributed to the self-reflexive, affective, and often devotional nature of the monthly’s poetry, creating a space for Christian contemplation within the busy pages of the periodical press. A significant number of poems in the first two volumes of Good Words, 20 per cent and 28 per cent respectively, present readers with both the imagined and illustrated natural world as a prompt for spiritual devotion.46 Of the sixty poems illustrated between 1860 and 1862, fifteen are nature poems. Such poems often allude to the current seasons. For example, between 1860 and 1899, there are sixteen poems with the word autumn in the title.47 The placement of the poems in the periodical suggests that these seasonal texts usually appeared between September and December. Regardless, the seasonal pattern of the nature poetry in Good Words draws attention to the changing world outside, providing a prompt for spiritual reflection in the industrial world of the mid-Victorian reader. Opening the September 1860 issue of Good Words, H.M.T.’s [Harriet Mary Teulon] ‘Autumn’ (1860: 593) is paradigmatic of this visual and textual trope. In ‘Autumn’, the illustration dwarfs the poem. It takes up the entire page with only a small space defined by thick white margins given to the poem’s text (Figure 3.8). The shape of the illustration matches that of an arched aperture, suggesting the presence of a doorway or large window through which one can imaginatively enter the natural landscape depicted in the image. The illustration’s perspective, in particular the two parallel lines of the pathway which run towards the horizon, give the illustration depth, drawing the eye along the path of trees to a tiny figure presumably meant to represent the speaker. The poem’s language demonstrates how the view of such a scene can lead to spiritual contemplation: The eye can longer rest on scene like this, Than that which tells of more unsullied bliss; And as we gaze, it brings the thought how sin, Ushered the morn of our existence in With cheerless sky, till Christ our evening came. (H.M.T. 1860: 593)

Like Greenwell’s ‘Pencil Marks in a Book of Devotion’ (1860a), which demonstrated the devotional potential of literary texts, H.M.T.’s ‘Autumn’ teaches readers how to engage with nature as a devotional text. In this case, the speaker links the setting sun to Christ’s crucifixion and his death for mankind’s sins through his description of the sun, ‘Sinking his blessed beams beneath our shame’ (H.M.T.

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Figure 3.8 ‘Autumn’ by H. M. T. Illustrated by J. W. McWhirter. Good Words. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.)

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1860: 593). For the speaker, the sacrifice made by Christ brightens the darkness of the mortal world with a ‘golden flood / Of light’ that is, nonetheless, tempered by the poem’s image of ‘every cloud [ . . . ] tipp’d with blood’ (593). The natural vista reminds the speaker that humanity’s experience of the world, particularly the bright elements, comes from Christ and his sacrifice. The effect of nature on the poet and reader/observer in ‘Autumn’ acts a form of Reserve similar to that seen in Keble’s Tractarian poetics. As Tennyson notes in his study of the sacramental imagination, ‘part of Keble’s purpose in The Christian Year was to show forth Nature as more than a Wordsworthian moral teacher instructing by vernal impulse; it was to show Nature as the handmaiden of theology and at times the vehicle of a sacramental grace that brought man into contact with the divine’ (1977: 371). In ‘Autumn’, the speaker transforms nature into a conduit for theology and devotional thought, and the illustration that accompanies and dominates the poem contributes to the text’s devotional lesson. The natural vista offered by the illustrator allows the periodical’s predominantly urban readers to draw spiritual inspiration from the natural world without leaving the comfort of their urban homes. In the period under consideration in this chapter (January 1860 to December 1862), at least eighteen poems, including H.M.T.’s ‘Autumn’, present nature as a prompt for spiritual thought. Another such poem is ‘The Coming of Spring’ (1861a: 224) written by Dinah Mulock Craik and illustrated by J. W. McWhirter, a Scottish landscape painter who also illustrated ‘Autumn’. An allegorical poem, ‘The Coming of Spring’ refers to the seasonal promise of spring after a harsh winter to speak of faith and the eternal hope it provides. The speaker describes how the flowers of the spring smile and, in smiling, state: ‘I die not – only sleep; / But, through all the Winter deep, / Wait the coming of the Spring’ (224). The personification of the flowers reminds the speaker about the conditions of his or her own faith: death is not final when we remember the promise of heaven and Christ’s sacrifice. The direct allusion to Christ’s words in Luke 8: 52, ‘she is not dead, she only sleepth’, enriches the meaning of both the flower’s words and the accompanying illustration, which depicts children picking flowers in the forest (Figure 3.9). On the one hand, the illustration, which faces the poem, simply provides the urban reader with the pastoral landscape necessary for the devotional thought described in Craik’s poem. However, the relationship between image and letterpress is much more complicated than it may seem on first reading. The image expands on the biblical allusion in

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Figure 3.9 ‘The Coming of Spring’ by Dinah Mulock Craik. Illustrated by J. W. McWhirter. Good Words. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.)

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the text, demonstrating that the biblical vocabulary shared by Victorian readers is both textual and visual. Good Words was particularly interested in teaching readers how to interpret ‘visual signs as emblematic representations pointing to spiritual meanings’ (Kooistra 2014: 120). In the image, spring has already come; the promise of resurrection has been fulfilled and, the poem suggests, we too can be resurrected like the flowers and the young girl in Luke 8: 40–56 if we believe in Christ. Text, image and the reader’s ‘lived experience’ (Kooistra 2014: 120) – their biblical knowledge and practices of devotional reading – thus work in tandem to remind readers about the promise of life after death if the germ of faith stays ‘enfolded’ and safely kept (Craik 1861a: 224). Rather than capturing a particular narrative, the illustration complements the poem’s more abstract ideas about faith, devotional thought, and humanity’s relationship to God in the world. However, while the majority of nature poems published in Good Words appropriate the language of nature to explore issues of faith and spiritual reflection, each poem nonetheless modifies and, on occasion, challenges the idealisation of nature as a spiritual tool. For example, the illustration provided for L.C.C.’s ‘The Two Streams’ (1861c: 656–7) complicates the representation of nature as a devotional space seen throughout Good Words. The visual language established by H.M.T.’s ‘Autumn’ and Craik’s ‘The Coming of Spring’ encourages the periodical’s readers to understand the illustration, which is appended to the poem, as prompt for devotional thought (Figure 3.10). However, the poem emphatically turns away from the natural world. Rather than framing an encounter with the natural world as an expression of faith, the poem uses natural imagery to warn against humanity’s insatiable thirst for material goods and worldly fame. The speaker of L.C.C.’s poem does not view nature as an inherently spiritual space. Instead, the poet suggests that natural elements act as substitutes for earthbound pursuits. The poem suggests that those who are thirsty need to look to heaven for ‘The streams that quench,’ which ‘have not their source below’ (L.C.C. 1861c: 657). The speaker implores the reader to ‘seek them, taught by want and pain, / And seeking find, and never thirst again’ (657). In effect, the poem highlights the dangers of materialism by dismissing the products and opportunities of modernity in order to argue that true fulfilment only comes from faith. It warns readers against the unthinking consumption of material goods, reminding them that material gain does not guarantee spiritual satisfaction or salvation as in the parable of Jesus and the Tax Collector (Luke 19: 1–10).

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Figure 3.10 ‘The Two Streams’ by L. C. C. Illustrated by H. Boyd. Good Words. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.)

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Conversely, Dora Greenwell’s ‘Hugo. – 1845’ (1861c: 689–90) emphasises the ability of material objects to inspire spiritual reflection. The poem begins with a brief epigraph that identifies the inspiration for the poem: ‘In a Churchyard in Warwickshire is a monumental stone in the form of a cross, simply inscribed, “Hugo. – 1845”’ (689). The illustration follows this prefatory information, providing the reader with a representation of the scene that inspired the poet (Figure 3.11). It introduces the poem and recreates the initial prompt for reflection. The poem ends with the speaker reflecting on the Christian promise of an afterlife in heaven. The speaker points out that ‘We too must hope, through him, restored, forgiven, / To rest within the smile that lights up heaven!’ (1861c: 690). The poem returns to an object for inspiration, and this is the dominant message behind the periodical’s poetry, nature poems or otherwise. Even L.C.C.’s ‘The Two Streams’ indirectly supports this message. Though L.C.C.’s poem disrupts the periodical’s narrative of nature as a prompt for devotional thought, the text of ‘The Two Streams’ nonetheless acts as an object written to inspire Christian thought in its readers. The poem thus reiterates the periodical’s main objective (as identified by Macleod and the anonymous poet of ‘Little Things’): to provide readers with good words that inspire and support Christian thought. The periodical’s consistent presentation of literature as a vehicle for devotional thought contributed to the redefinition of Sabbath reading, arguing that the act of leisure reading could be a devotional act. Strahan’s periodical represents a direct intervention in the literary market of the 1860s; he anticipated the shifting, increasingly segmented nature of devotional reading practices and ‘responded to the demands of everyday life’ (Lysack 2013: 458) by transforming devotional reading from a potentially laborious process into a natural part of middle-class leisure reading practices. The result was a periodical that circulated devotional poetry by some of the era’s most prolific and well-known Christian poets. Good Words now functions as a repository of ‘the literature of respectable bourgeoisie England’ (Mitchell 1983: 145). This approach to the Sabbath question and contemporary practices of leisure reading allowed the periodical to effectively meet the requirements of the periodical markets for both religious and family-friendly literature. This melding of devotional and secular literature defines the success of Good Words. As we shall see in the next chapter, Strahan’s subsequent attempt to launch a secular shilling monthly was less successful though that does not make the Argosy any less important to the history of Victorian periodicals, poetry and poetics.

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Figure 3.11 ‘Hugo. – 1845’ by Dora Greenwell. Illustrated by W. Linney. Good Words. (Source: Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.)

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Notes 1. The periodical’s title comes from this epigraph, which originally appeared in George Herbert’s Jacula Prudentum, a collection of 1,000 proverbs published in the seventeenth century. A devotional poet from the seventeenth century, Herbert is perhaps best known for his pattern poem ‘Easter Wings’ (1633). 2. In his foreword to Joseph Altholz work on religious periodicals, Henry Warner Bowden notes that ‘journals of religious opinion flourished most noticeably in the British Isles, totalling as many as three thousand between 1760 and 1900’ (1989: vii). 3. See the Introduction in this volume for a fulsome explanation of my methodology in choosing the periodicals discussed. 4. Strahan was dedicated to publishing morally improving and religious literature. After the success of Good Words, he published several other periodicals, including the Argosy (1865–1901), The Sunday Magazine (1864–1906) and The Contemporary Review (1866–1988). 5. The Free Church developed out a schism within the Church of Scotland and had evangelical roots that were deeply invested in the tenets of Calvinism. The Free Church separated from the Church of Scotland during the Disruption of 1843 (Srebrnik 1986: 3). 6. For examples of such poetry, see ‘The Last Conflict’ ([Unsigned] 1860b: 46), J.E.’s ‘He’s Risen’ (1860: 136), F.R.H.’s ‘Faith’s Question’ (1860: 174–5), H.M.T.’s ‘A Song in the Night’ (1861: 167), William Buchanan’s ‘An Artisan’s Story’ (1861: 208–10), Dora Greenwell’s ‘A Song Which None But the Redeemed Can Sing’ (1861a: 410–11) and the unsigned ‘Some Verses Written by a Working Man’ ([Unsigned] 1862: 433–4). 7. This reaction to secular literary texts was not uncommon. For example, tract societies and the Society for the Diffusion of Pure Literature ‘sought to elevate the reading tastes of the masses by promoting the sale of cheap family periodicals that met its strict evangelical requirements and by preventing the sale of those that did not’ (Altick 1998: 125). 8. For further information on the Strathbogie affair, see ‘The Free Presbytery of Strathbogie and “Good Words”’ in the Daily News, ‘The Free Presbytery of Strathbogie and Good Words’ in The Dundee Courier and Argus, ‘Are “Good Words” Good Words?’ in the Caledonian Mercury and ‘Strathbogie Testifying Against Good Words’ in the Glasgow Herald ([Unsigned] 1863a,b,c,d). All of these publications are from Scotland with the exception of the Daily News, which was published in London. 9. Unfortunately, there is no date available for this letter in Strahan’s article, which is the only available record. For another response by Macleod to the Sabbath reading question, see Macleod’s article ‘Sunday’ (1862b: 193–7).

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10. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (Gen. 1: 1). 11. As mentioned in the body of this chapter, though Sunday remained sacred as the Sabbath, the publication of literary periodicals on Saturdays caused older traditions of religious observation to give way to newer traditions of leisure reading (Turner 2002: 191). Good Words exists in a space between these two conceptions of time as a secular/sacred hybrid that creates a space for devotional thought even as it aims to entertain and entice the Victorian reader of popular literature. 12. There is ample evidence to support King’s argument about The Christian Year. For example, in her discussion of Tractarianism and The Christian Year, Blair notes that the ‘function of the Prayer-Book’, which Keble used to structure and thematise his volume, was used ‘as a tool to mould the individual into a member of an orderly community. As High Anglican discourse insisted, this community was national as well as religious’ (2012: 90). See also McKelvy (2007). 13. See Lysack (2013) for a discussion of the shift in devotional reading practices from extended reflection to segmented and periodical. 14. Emma Mason’s work on nineteenth-century female poets (2006), for instance, does not reference the mid-Victorian periodical poetry of Dora Greenwell even though she was a frequent contributor to Good Words. Exceptions to the scholarly elision of devotional periodical poetry include Elizabeth Gray’s work on the Christian Lady’s Magazine (2004, 2006), Martin Dubois’s work on The Month (2010) and Lorraine Kooistra’s work on the illustrated poetry of Good Words (2014). 15. See, for instance, King (2016), Gray (2006) and Tennyson (1981). 16. This revised approach to women’s devotional poetics emphasises the importance of female poets to the religious debates of the period. Nineteenth-century critics, including John Keble, suggested that ‘if women were considered the moral and religious guardians of the a rapidly changing society, [then] the female poet had even more power, poetry being considered the holiest of genres’ (Mason 2006: 2). 17. Gray’s essay provides a model for this kind of scholarship. Throughout her ‘“Syren Strains”: Victorian Women’s Devotional Poetry’ she compares the formal elements of poems published in the Christian Lady’s Magazine to those published in The Christian Year. She concludes, ‘[w] orking within the model of The Christian Year, women found ways to express their own theological views, incorporate female experience into the Church tradition, and ultimately offer their own work as instructive, inspired examples to those who followed them’ (2006: 74). 18. As several scholars have indicated, the poetics of Romanticism deeply influenced both the devotional poetics (Blair 2012; Mason 2006) and imagined spiritual communities (King 2016) of the long nineteenth century. 19. For more on form and Tractarian poetics, see Blair (2006a).

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20. As part of my doctoral research on Good Words, I indexed the periodical’s entire run for the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry. 21. The significance of Good Words as a publisher of poetry becomes even more apparent when compared to similar publications. (The following data comes from the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry.) Household Words published 434 poems over ten years, All the Year Round published 757 poems between 1860 and 1881 and Once a Week published 541 poems over five years, making this the only publication I look at in this book to meet the number set by Good Words during the early 1860s. Significantly, all of these publications are weekly, and the number of poems published in weekly publications tends to be higher than that of monthly periodicals due to the increased frequency of publication. While Good Words began as a weekly, it adopted a monthly publication schedule one year into its run. While similar data is not available for the popular shillings monthlies of the era, Good Words does seem to publish poetry more frequently than its contributors. For the shilling monthlies included this study, I indexed the poetry published during the first five years of each periodical: Macmillan’s Magazine published 149 poems, the Cornhill published 67 and the Argosy published 129. 22. According to The Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics, the distinction between religious and devotional ‘is never absolute’. However, ‘devotional poetry is often recognizable for its tendency to address a divinity, a sacred thing, or a religious figure’ (Graham 2012: 352). Throughout my discussion of Good Words, I use the term ‘devotional poems’ to mean those that address God, reflect on the power of ‘good words’, represent a personal mediation on faith, and examine the ‘relationship between human and divine, body and soul’ (353). 23. Greenwell’s approach to devotional poetry also captures religious and poetic debates that play out in the publication of a non-denominational religious periodical in literary market after Keble’s A Christian Year. Greenwell clearly privileged ‘feeling in faith, social activism and lyric expression’ (Mason 2006: 2), aligning her with an evangelical poetics. However, she also feared ‘the pouring forth of feeling as that which might drown her faith even as she is unable to control her expression’ (11), suggesting the need for some reserve and the control offered by form and the Tractarian poetic model. As Mason points out, Greenwell’s poetry echoes many of the themes and images common in Tractarian poetry, and Tractarian ideas were circulating around Greenwell while she was writing (74). Her brother, for instance was ‘enthralled’ by the Tractarian movement (75). Ultimately, Greenwell’s poetry falls somewhere in the middle as she, along with other female devotional poets from the century, ‘endeavour[ed] to [,] in a manner of lyric expressivity [,] convey [her] love of God without falling into extremes of emotion’ (16).

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24. Macleod’s presence and opinions overshadow the periodical in another, more material way. The running head of the periodical reminds readers on every page that Good Words is edited by Norman Macleod. 25. Of the 1,219 poems published in the periodical, only fifty-four (or 4 per cent) are unsigned. 26. After watching a poor widow place two mites (or coins) into the temple treasury, Jesus turned to his disciples and said, ‘this poor widow has put in more than all; for all these out of their abundance have put in offerings for God, but she out of her poverty put in all the livelihood that she had’ (Luke 21: 3–4). 27. Victorian hymns generally conform to Hymn Common Metre (4–3 4–3), Short Metre (3–3 4–3), and Long Metre (4–4 4–4). Musical time signatures can be adjusted accordingly. Hymn common metre and the 4/3 time signature associated with most ballads is what makes it possible to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ to the tune of the theme song for Gilligan’s Island or ‘Good King Wenceslas’, which was written in 1853. 28. Poems on this theme from the first volume include B.’s ‘Prayer’ (1860: 80), Dora Greenwell’s ‘Pencil Marks in a Book of Devotion’ (1860a: 143), J.A.’s ‘The Boy and the Captive Bird’ (1860: 207), M.’s ‘Idle Words’ (1860b: 277–8) and Dora Greenwell’s ‘Gone’ (1860c: 327) and ‘Sabbath Peace’ (1860e: 632). When the number of poems that implicitly reinforce Macleod’s editorial ideology are factored into the equation, this number increases exponentially. 29. Longfellow’s poem contains the following stanzas: Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time; Footprints, that perhaps another, Sailing o’er life’s solemn main, A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, Seeing, shall take heart again. (Longfellow 1998) 30. These short biblical narratives contain a moral lesson, and such parables and exempla represent an important part of Christianity’s history. 31. For further information on Victorian parables, see Susan Colón (2012). 32. William Robertson’s ‘The Veiled Bride’ (1862: 592–3), illustrated by Simeon Solomon, is another poem that provides a poetic interpretation of a biblical event, specifically Isaac and Rebekah’s marriage (Gen. 24). 33. The link between Keble’s poetry volume and traditional liturgical practices helped foster this sense of community, connecting the poems to the communal religious practices of the Christian public. 34. Mike Sanders (2012) discusses the role of the hymn in building and affirming the Chartist community in ‘“God is our guide! our cause is

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35.

36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

45.

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Victorian Poetry and the Literary Periodical just!”: The National Chartist Hymn Book and Victorian Hymnody’, while Hughes describes the hymn as ‘another religious genre that elicited communal response through the voice of the individual’ (2010a: 145). While the early Victorians associated the hymn with evangelical movements, by the 1860s, mainstream Church of England culture had accepted the hymn, as evidenced by the 1861 publication of Hymns Ancient and Modern (Watson 2007: 136). The hymn played a huge role in the devotional and literary cultures of Victorian Britain: Sanders reports that ‘the British Library Catalogue lists 1,200 hymn books published between 1837 and 1901’ (2012: 680). As previously mentioned, Havergal published fourteen poems in Good Words between March 1860 and 1877, Ingelow published sixteen between November 1863 and December 1870, and Greenwell published fifty-three between March 1860 and 1880. None of the hymns mentioned in this chapter appear in the Church of England Hymnbook. After all, the hymn was one of the main ways through which Victorian readers experienced poetry (O’Gorman 2004: 566). The adaptation and incorporation of hymn-like features becomes particularly apparent when form is considered. Poems composed in the metrical patterns commonly associated with the hymn make up 32 per cent of the poetry published in the periodical’s first volume. I have only excerpted the first and last stanzas here. The speaker comments on remembering the path ‘full seventy summers back’ (Greenwell 1860b: 188). Over the same period, the Cornhill provided illustrations for only 12 per cent of its poetry, maintaining a relatively low percentage of illustrated poetry over the course of Thackeray’s editorship. In the Argosy, the percentage of illustrated poetry (and illustration more broadly) steadily declines after November 1866. The last illustrated poem appears in December 1868. On the other hand, Once a Week maintained a relatively steady rate of illustrated poetry, ranging from 82 per cent in the periodical’s first volume (July 1859 to December 1859) to 69 per cent in its fourth volume (December 1860 to June 1861), though the frequency of illustrated poetry did decrease in later years. See Hughes (2007: 103) for a discussion of the significance of the white space that defines the way periodicals of the era presented poetry. For further information on Victorian love poetry and the era’s interest in Dante, see Harrison (1988), McSweeney (1998) and Arseneau (1999). For examples of this kind of discourse, see Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits (1839); John Ruskin, Sesames and Lilies (1865); and Henry Maudsley, ‘Sex and Mind in Education’ (1874). Of the nineteen illustrated poems in the third volume, only seven appear with the illustration facing the poem in this way.

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46. Between 1860 and 1885, seventy-two poems refer to a seasonal scene in their title. 47. Many more poems implicitly reference the seasons, especially the coming of spring and harvest time. For example, the layout of John Hollingshead’s ‘Summer Evening’ (1862: 376) is very similar to that of ‘Autumn’ (H.M.T. 1860), and Hollingshead’s poem begins in much the same way with a viewer gazing upon a natural scene. While ‘Summer Evening’ lacks the explicit Christian imagery of ‘Autumn’, the pause suggested by the poem and its illustration create the conditions for devotional thought, especially when they are understood as part of the devotional narrative created by the literature of Good Words.

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Chapter 4

The Poetics of Popular Poetry in the Argosy

In the previous chapters, I examined the ways in which poetry defines the brand of a periodical. It can stand in for the editor, introducing the periodical to its readers (Once a Week); it can implicitly support the editorial mandate and dominant ideologies of a periodical through its content (Household Words, All the Year Round, the Cornhill, Good Words); and it can signal both implicitly and explicitly the cultural pretentions of a publication (Macmillan’s Magazine and the Cornhill). This chapter moves away from questions of branding and periodical forms for a more sustained discussion about the poetics of periodical poetry. Focusing on the Argosy, a mid-1860s shilling monthly published by Alexander Strahan and edited by Isa Craig – the first and only female editor included in this study – this chapter argues that a careful reading of the periodical’s sentimental poetry challenges the critical dismissal of such light, entertaining verse as simplistic, marginal, and trite. Though Craig occupied the role of editor for a relatively short period of time (December 1865 to 1867), her personal and professional networks as well as her own experience as a female poet defined the Argosy’s approach to poetry and contributed to the periodical’s reformulation of feminine poetics. Under her editorship, the Argosy brought together a number of female poets whose work explores and expands the boundaries of poetic form. The periodical poems of Christina Rossetti, Isa Craig, Jean Ingelow and Sarah Williams all test, challenge and champion the conventions of the sentimental lyric form to produce a new poetics, one defined both through and against conventional representations of the Victorian poetess and her gushing, heart-inspired poetry.1 My analysis of the Argosy unpacks what Caroline Levine calls ‘the relations between culture and power’ (2006b: 104), arguing that the formal features of the periodical’s poetry, specifically its sentimental subject matter and imagery, lay bare and challenge the cultural

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binaries that came to define popular poetry from the era. As briefly alluded to in the introduction, one way to understand the power behind these cultural binaries is through Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital, which sees the market for literature and art as divided according to a product’s accessibility. Within this model, those products associated with restricted production, such as individual poetry volumes, possess more cultural value than products of large-scale cultural production like periodicals and gift books. Over time, this belief in the superiority of products of restricted production became the dominant critical narrative, informing the cultural reception of popular literature and the poets who wrote it.2 I am particularly interested in those binaries that position feminine poetics against contemporary definitions of masculine poetry and the cultural against the popular. The Argosy, with its sensational content and female editors, is the ideal periodical for exploring these issues. On the one hand, the association of the Argosy with sensation literature and female writers encourages readers to identify the periodical’s poems with the sentimental poetics associated with female poets in popular culture. This context emphasises the sentimental elements of the periodical’s poetry and encourages the type of dismissive reading practices that led critics to ignore the poetic value of such poetry until recently. However, when understood as the product of a market that demanded a certain form of poetry from women writers, we can begin to unpack how these poets adopted the sentimental, sensational and ‘feminine’ style of poetry privileged by the periodical press while simultaneously putting pressure on the very tropes that defined such poetry.

The Sensational and the Sentimental: Reading the Argosy In 1865, Alexander Strahan decided to enter the secular literary market with the Argosy. The literary mandate of the Argosy responded to the recent rise of sensation fiction in shilling monthlies like the Cornhill (Phegley 2016: 287). In imitation of its competitors, the Argosy positioned itself as suitable for middle-class families ‘hungry for serialized fiction of a higher quality than that offered by the penny periodicals’ (287). Despite the apparent appetite for sensation fiction among middle-class readers, as suggested by the success of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, the reality was more complicated. There was a limit to what middle-class readers would accept. One year before the Argosy’s debut, for example, the Cornhill

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began serialising Collins’s Armadale to disastrous effect. Critics hated the novel’s heroine, considering her ‘to be a vivid and unacceptable portrait of female depravity’, and circulation numbers for the Cornhill actually fell during the novel’s run (Wynne 2001: 34). While the Cornhill emerged from this episode relatively unscathed, the same cannot be said for the Argosy’s early experiments with sensation fiction as the periodical struggled to find the right balance between sensation and morality in its fiction under Strahan. After the periodical’s first serial novel, Charles Reade’s Griffith Gaunt, became embroiled in scandal for its depiction of immoral practices like bigamy and murder, Strahan attempted to correct the course of the Argosy with George MacDonald’s The History of Robert Falconer, a novel about a young man’s journey to manhood and his Christian service to others, especially the poor.3 This new approach to fiction did not help the Argosy gain more readers. The difficulties in managing and defining the identity of the Argosy combined with Strahan’s increasing debt lead him to sell the Argosy in October 1867 to Ellen Wood, who would go on to publish her popular but, nonetheless, morally acceptable sensation fiction in the Argosy until the end of her career. So where does poetry fit into the conversation? What little scholarship that exists on the Argosy tends to address either the scandal associated with Charles Reade’s Griffith Gaunt, the concurrent decline of Strahan’s publishing empire, or Ellen Wood’s subsequent editorship of the periodical.4 This focus on the sensational aspects of the Argosy’s production completely ignores the poetry it published, despite that fact that the poets contributing to the Argosy were some of the most popular and influential poets of the 1860s. While the poets of the Argosy could not stabilise the periodical under Strahan, they nonetheless represent the core of the periodical’s identity and speak to the role of female poets in the periodical market. The Argosy under Isa Craig and, later, Ellen Wood celebrates popular literature and suggests that traditionally feminine forms of poetry, including sentimental love poems, possessed social, cultural and political value. The poetry of the Argosy suggests a deep divide between the periodical’s publisher and its editor. While little is known about Isa Craig’s editorship, a survey of the periodical’s poetry suggests her influence over at least one aspect of the publication. Craig clearly drew on the relationships she developed as part of the Langham Place Group’s Portfolio Society, which brought her into contact with poets such as Jean Ingelow, Adelaide Anne Procter and Christina Rossetti.

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Of the sixty poems published under Craig’s editorship of the Argosy, one-fifth were written by poets associated with the Langham Place Group. The remaining poems fall under the literary aesthetic that Craig privileges and defends in her poem ‘On Board the Argosy’ (1865: 37–8): they are ‘little’ poems filled with ‘wonder-working words’ that will lead the reader to a ‘wonderland of dreams’. These are not the political poems of Macmillan’s, nor are they the serious literary texts of the Cornhill. The poems of the Argosy are entertaining verses of the type written by Craig and her peers, many of whom were known for their work in the periodical press. The poems published in the Argosy are there because they will appeal to the domestic, middle-class and female audience traditionally catered to by the shilling monthlies that were aimed at the Victorian middleclass family (Brake 2016: 344). Of course, the shilling monthlies were not the first periodicals to cater to women readers. Earlier in the century, the literary annuals redefined the market for poetry, publishing work by celebrated female poets (many of whom also edited the annuals they appeared in) alongside poets like Tennyson. As discussed in the introduction, the active participation of female editors and contributors (to say nothing of the product’s perceived female audience) led to what Patricia Pulham (2003) calls a feminisation of literary annuals, a perception that later affected the reception of all poetry published in commercial, mass-produced forms such as the gift book and the literary periodical. Early-nineteenth-century critics viewed the annuals as a product designed by women for women, and they saw such publications as promoting ‘a small and trivialized style of poetry’ best composed by female poets (Pulham 2003: 13).5 The market thus placed female poets in a double bind: they relied on the annuals to provide them with financial security, yet, by contributing to the annuals ‘the poetess’s cultural value dwindled with every poem she wrote and published’ (Vincent 2004: 141). The literary annuals thus afforded women poets a space in which to publish and circulate their poetry while also identifying them with particular poetic forms. On the one hand, female poets who participated in the gift book market, which includes the annuals and informed the development of the literary periodical, ‘elevated [their] poetic stature’ (Kooistra 2011: 177) as the preeminent poets of a particular genre of poetry: the sentimental and the commercial. On the other hand, while these women were celebrated, they were also categorised as middlebrow poets who, though successful, wrote poetry of little cultural value.

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Like the annuals thirty years earlier, then, the literary periodicals of the 1860s represented one of the main outlets for their poetry, and those female poets who became associated with the periodical press did so to the detriment of their reputations. The critical dismissal of popular, periodical poetry and the female poets who wrote it – down to the very language used to describe it – continued to reign throughout the nineteenth century. In effect, this reception created a specific market and set of readerly expectations that came to define women’s poetry for the poet, the reader and the critic alike. In her work on form, Levine describes how ‘the gender binary is always working with and against other identity categories, such as race, class, and sexuality’ (2015: 95). For Victorian-era poets, the identity category of the poet was consistently defined, redefined and tested by existing gender binaries. For female poets, this meant that their identity as poets was always already determined. With very few exceptions, they were poetesses. And even when they adopted conventional poetic forms, their work with these forms was evaluated in terms of their gender. As Eliza Richards points out, for example, while ‘all writers engage the mimic function of lyric, echo, quotation, paraphrase, [and] repetition’ (2004: 25), when female poets included these features in their poems, their work became derisively associated with the poetess tradition. It is within this matrix of cultural and critical voices, forms and identities that the poets of the Argosy, including Jean Ingelow, Sarah Williams, Isa Craig and Christina Rossetti, composed their poetry. The definition of women’s poetry as sentimental and perfectly suited to the periodical press served to group women’s poetry into a single, easily dismissed category positioned against so-called masculine poetics, which was seen to focus on philosophy, politics, and theological questions. For critics such as Armstrong (1993), Easley (2004) and Ledbetter (2009), the assimilation of a distinctly feminine aesthetic by female poets contributes to a genre of women’s writing that subverts gendered forms of poetry from within, creating a version of the double poem, one defined by women’s voices (Armstrong 1993: 324). In the Victorian periodical, female poets adopted the established conventions of women’s poetry to develop what Armstrong calls ‘a ‘music’ of their own’ (323). Armstrong suggests that readers can access this tradition, this music of their own, by listening for the dissonances in women’s poetry. These discordant moments represent an interrogation of and critical engagement with the feminine conventions and poetic forms, namely the pose of the poetess, that contemporary critics imposed on female poets. This

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development and recognition of a distinct poetic modality effectively reclaims the poetess tradition, simultaneously celebrating and transforming it. One visible example of this practice is seen in the way female poets responded to and frequently revised the poetic tradition established by Hemans and Landon by writing elegies to their perceived foremothers.6 However, according to Armstrong, this reflexive engagement with poetic traditions occurs even when female poets are working within and seemingly conforming to the feminine modality associated with nineteenth-century women’s poetry.7 Because women writers had to write within the pre-existing traditions associated with their gender, to overtly stray from the confines of the masculine/feminine poetic binary disrupted accepted forms of reading, writing and reception – at least in the eyes of critics and some readers. The critical response to one of Isa Craig’s most wellknown and public poems provides a quick case study of what happens to female poets when they write outside of the accepted and expected form of the poetess. Throughout her career, Craig’s reviewers consistently defined her work as popular poetry with no literary substance, damning her poetry with a faint praise that isolates her from both the poets and poetesses of the period. A review in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine makes this attitude apparent. It describes her award-winning ode to Burns, composed for a poetry competition celebrating his centenary, as good, [though it] has none of that impulsive, illicit outburst which betrays the inspiration of the moment. It is both too good and too bad for an impromptu. It has the heroic look of armor that has been polished, and none of the homeliness of those deep but death-strokes which are made with homely weapons. ([Unsigned] n.d.)

The review is unable to define her. Although the author deploys terms and phrases traditionally used to describe the poetry of the poetess such as impulsive, illicit outburst, inspiration of the moment and impromptu, he or she ultimately decides that Craig’s poetry does not fit the criteria assigned to the poetess. Instead, the poem has what the author calls a ‘heroic look of armour’, suggesting a link between Craig’s ode and the masculine poetics of the period. The reviewer is obviously uncomfortable with this reading of Craig’s poem, viewing the poem as an aberration of sorts: a poem written by a woman that does not entirely follow the conventions of feminine poetry. By the end of the review, Craig is neither poetess nor poet, neither good nor bad, just popular.8 Craig’s poetry (and the critical response to her)

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supports Eliza Richards’s contention that ‘the gendering of poetic practices is far more fluid and complex than has been previously portrayed’ (2004: 1). ‘[M]en’s and women’s literary traditions’, she continues, ‘are overlapping and interdependent, though not identical’ (1). The problem is that critics of poets such as Craig did not and still do not know what to do with female poets who produced poetry for the masses and, within this popular poetry, tested the boundaries of gendered literary traditions. Such critics are bound by what happens when, to borrow from Levine, gender encounters forms of poetry and forms of reception (2015: 95).9 As the preceding paragraphs begin to demonstrate, critics of nineteenth-century poetry have tended to ‘consistently [dismiss] women’s poetry of the period as overly derivative, echoic, and secondary’ (Richards 2004: 25), and the feminisation of periodical poetry, especially that written for a female audience, means that the same critical lens has often been applied to periodical poetry. Evaluating the poems of the Argosy on their own merits as poetic forms produced as part of the era’s complex, interconnected literary culture provides a way to discuss sentimental poetry and female poets without falling back on the defensive and sometimes dismissive language found in much of the critical work published on women’s popular poetry.10 In this chapter, I use Isobel Armstrong’s concept of the double poem as the foundation for my argument that the lyrics (and other poetic forms) that Isa Craig, Jean Ingelow, Christina Rossetti and Sarah Williams published in the Argosy are part of the era’s poetics rather than examples of an inferior sub-genre. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the lyric ‘under[stood] itself variously as preserving, succeeding, incorporating, or remaking earlier lyric forms with other modes of circulation and reception’ (Rowlinson 2007: 59). As such, lyric poems create space for experimentation and modification, potentially countering the myth of poetic innovation and singular genius. The echoes and repetitions found in women’s lyric poetry are, I argue, not derivative.11 Within this framework, they become a central part of both the lyric genre and poetic history as a whole. The female poets of the Argosy were not necessarily trying to ‘find a way beyond hierarchies’; rather, their work demonstrates their attempts ‘to figure out how to work productively with them’ (Levine 2015: 87), and reading the poetry of Craig, Ingelow, Rossetti and Williams within the sensational and sentimental context of the Argosy highlights their respective interactions with the era’s poetic hierarchies and reveals how such poets manipulated the language and conventions of sentimental poetry applied to them.

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‘This little coasting trade’: Isa Craig’s Defence of the Argosy and Popular Poetry As suggested throughout this book, the inaugural poem published in a periodical plays an important part in the publication’s initial branding. The inaugural poetry of the Argosy is no different. Published immediately after the first instalment of the lead serial, Jean Ingelow’s ‘Sand-Martins’ (1865: 20–1) is indicative of the type of poetry readers will find in the periodical. The seemingly light subject matter (gossiping birds) and conventional form of Ingelow’s poem, which she wrote in iambic pentameter with an abab rhyme scheme, immediately identify the Argosy as a publisher of familiar, light, uncomplicated verse.12 Published a few pages after Ingelow’s verse, Isa Craig’s ‘On Board the Argosy’ (1865: 37–8) argues that the light, entertaining and implicitly feminised verse circulated by periodicals such as the Argosy is crucial to the development of a moral and charitable society. The poem’s second stanza ends with the speaker articulating the periodical’s investment in light, entertaining texts that appeal to the imagination, ultimately arguing that such literature is an important part of everyday life: This little coasting trade let none despise, None may dispense with it, and so it should Teach us the virtues of good neighbourhood, And fetch and carry daily charities. (Craig 1865: 37)

Though the phrase ‘little coasting trade’ (37) may seem to trivialise periodical literature, Craig’s discussion of how literature’s ‘wonderworking words’ (38) can teach the reader about virtue and charity affirms the cultural value and power of the literary imagination. Craig’s poem positions the periodical as carrying and distributing the important social and cultural ideas explored in contemporary literature. Ingelow’s inaugural poem effectively anticipates Craig’s editorial statement in ‘On Board the Argosy’. The content of and metaphors used in Ingelow’s poem clearly align with Craig’s editorial mandate. While the poem opens with the gossiping twitters of the sand-martins, the imagined journey that the speaker takes with the birds identifies mothers and women as sources of generational knowledge. The female sand-martins guide their society and inform the behaviours of their community through their “Fantastic chatter! Fast, glad, and gay” (Ingelow 1865: 20) as the poem ultimately celebrates the circulation and distribution of women’s knowledge.

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In this case, the first poem in the Argosy implicitly establishes the periodical’s literary style while the seemingly more conventional, eponymous inaugural poem explicitly outlines the periodical’s editorial stance, enriching and perhaps even highlighting the value of Ingelow’s (and by extension, women’s) poetry. As the clearest (and only) articulation of Craig’s editorial approach to the Argosy and its literary contents, ‘On Board the Argosy’ deserves further attention for how it both challenges nineteenthcentury responses to the light, entertaining and sentimental poems found in the periodical press and theorises the role of the periodical form in Victorian society. For Craig, the periodical press and its poetry remain indispensable to the development of a virtuous and socially engaged society.13 The central metaphor of both the poem and the periodical, the Argosy, as ship, further stresses the role of literature and popular literary publications as both objects of entertainment and participants in the circulation of cultural values. In her description of the Argosy, Craig repeats words associated with trade and the movement of goods (dispense, fetch and carry), supporting the poem’s initial nautical metaphors and linking the periodical as a mass-produced literary product to trade and the dissemination of British culture. At one point, the poem promotes the power of literature to define Britain’s national identity and its empire: ‘Such commerce one great nation makes of men, / The world their city, each a citizen’ (Craig 1865: 37). The periodical, Craig’s poem suggests, mimics such patterns of circulation, making it the ideal vessel for containing and transmitting contemporary literature and social ideas. Craig’s allusions to the distribution networks of the periodical, the weight and importance of language, and the commercial aspects of the publishing trade provide evidence of her astute understanding of the literary periodical as a genre. It circulates knowledge, its words define and reaffirm specific social ideologies, and it acts as a repository of the era’s literature.14 For Craig, the ‘wonder-working words’ (38) of literature have power. The alliteration in this phrase and others emphasises the power of language, drawing attention to the very form and sound of the poetic line. These words are ‘Blown by a breath, and with their fit words freighted, / All up and down the world’ (37). Similar to her use of words like dispense, fetch and carry, Craig’s choice of the word freighted to open ‘On Board the Argosy’ acknowledges the poem’s dominant metaphor: the words themselves are contained and circulated through vessels like the Argosy and its poetry. But these words are also laden with meaning. The contents of

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the periodical become both a ‘wonder-land of dreams’ (37) designed to fill moments of leisure and, as previously mentioned, a social tool. The poem’s overt discussion of popular poetry and its cultural and social relevance serves as a reminder that words can, as Craig states, ‘Still wound, and heal, and make alive, and kill’ (38). ‘On Board the Argosy’ thus positions the ephemeral and popular works of the periodical press as important contributors to the literary culture and social consciousness of mid-Victorian Britain. The publication of Craig’s commentary on popular literature in a literary periodical such as the Argosy positions the poem as an implicit response to contemporary debates about women readers, the didactic function of the literary periodical, and the cultural value of art. As the next two sections of this chapter demonstrate, Rossetti, Ingelow and Williams similarly respond to contemporary narratives of high and low art and feminine and masculine aesthetics – albeit in a less obvious and direct manner. Their poems implicitly interrogate the conventions of sentimental poetry by testing and manipulating the poetic forms associated with the feminine aesthetic of popular poetics. On the surface, their poems seem to overflow with emotion and address sentimental topics such as unrequited love, shipwrecks and doomed romances. Upon closer examination, however, each poet uses these tropes to tackle very different issues, including religion and the role of the poet. Similar to Barrett Browning’s 1836 critique of the poetess tradition in ‘L.E.L.’s Last Question’ (which I discuss in the introduction), the poetry of these women deploys the language and forms of sentimental poetry to open a new poetic space for feminine poetics, one that widens the domain of women’s poetry beyond the identity of the poetess.

‘Wonder-working words’: The Feminine Poetics of the Argosy Christina Rossetti’s contributions to the Argosy are ideally suited to an extended discussion of feminine poetics in the periodical press, even if she viewed such poems as pot-boilers.15 Rossetti contributed three poems the Argosy under Craig’s editorship: ‘Who Shall Deliver Me?’ (1866a: 241), ‘If’ (1866b: 366) and ‘Twilight Night’ (1868: 103). All three of these poems meet the expectations of periodical poetry produced by a poetess: they use sentimental imagery and language, they are devotional and/or they are about love. ‘Who Shall Deliver Me?’, for instance, is a fairly straightforward devotional

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poem addressed to God. The speaker implores God to deliver her from herself, specifically her cravings for ‘ease and rest and joys’ (1866a: 288), and help her ‘start with lightened heart upon / The road by all men overgone!’ (288).16 In Rossetti’s second contribution, ‘If’ (1866b: 336), she writes in the voice of the sentimental abandoned/betrayed lover – a character type common to the periodical press. The first-person agency and bitterness of the poem’s speaker, however, differentiates Rossetti’s poem from similar texts, including her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Down Stream’ (published in the October 1871 issue of The Dark Blue) and Sarah T. Bolton’s ‘The Betrayed’ (published in the 4 August 1860 issue of Once a Week). Both of these poems depict women who, abandoned and ruined by their lovers, commit suicide by drowning in a river. While the female figure depicted in Rossetti’s ‘If’ adopts a pose similar to that of the woman described in Bolton’s ‘The Betrayed’, Rossetti uses the lyric form to give her abandoned woman a voice, presenting readers with a more nuanced portrayal of this commonplace figure, one that explores the emotional gap left by her lover’s absence. The speaker of ‘If’ exists, at least at the start of the poem, in a kind of limbo, torn between hope and resignation. While the repetition, metre and punctuation of the stanza’s opening lines suggest a measure of hope and anticipation, ‘If he would come to-day, to-day, to-day / O, what a day to-day would be!’ (Rossetti 1866b: 336), the conditional if immediately introduces a spectre of doubt concerning the lover’s arrival. Furthermore, the third to-day weighs down and disrupts the flow of the line, which, at least initially, seemed to prime the reader for a more hopeful poem written using ballad metre. The extra to-day exaggerates the moment of repetition and anticipation, souring it as the repetition comes to signify the burden of waiting rather than hope or anticipation of a change. The next two lines of the stanza confirm the futility of the speaker’s pose: ‘But now he’s away, miles and miles away, / From me across the sea’ (288). The line break here further separates the lovers, and the poem concludes with the speaker’s resignation that while she waits for her love, he may never return to her. The speaker takes solace in death, however, noting, ‘If he never comes, I shall never know it, / But sleep on all the same’ (336). Significantly, the poem does not offer any definite conclusion as to the speaker’s fate. All we know is that she will no longer wait and ‘grow old’ (336). The poem thus defers any sense of closure or narrative certainty, disrupting the sentimental conclusion of such poems which tend to end with the death of the waiting woman, and giving the female subject agency. She is not the fallen woman who

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must die for her sins (and, in fact, there is no evidence that she is ruined like the women in ‘Down Stream’ and ‘The Betrayed’). Rather she acts for herself and her own comfort. Frederick Sandys’s illustration for ‘If’ captures the agency of Rossetti’s speaker. The kinetic energy of Sandys’s illustration revises and rewrites the visual narrative of the abandoned woman just as Rossetti’s poem subtly revises the textual. While the pose of the speaker waiting on the rock visually echoes that of M. J. Lawless’s illustration for Bolton’s ‘The Betrayed’, Sandys’s representation of the female subject emphasises the speaker’s desire for action and her sense of longing as she grasps some long grass as if to hold herself in place.17 It is almost as if the repeated to-days are drawing the speaker forward in anticipation. Sandys’s illustration freezes the speaker in the moment of anticipatory tension: a pose that the poem ultimately rejects, highlighting the ironic relationship that often exists between image and text as the image isolates and extends a single moment, suggesting an emotion, while the lyrical letterpress explores the speaker’s evolving subjectivity.18 However, while the verbal-visual relationship between Sandys’s illustration and Rossetti’s letterpress is undoubtedly interesting and worth further discussion, I am more interested in the relationship between the illustration and the presentation of the first volume edition of the Argosy. The stasis of waiting suggested by the illustration casts a shadow over the periodical’s poetry when the layout afforded to Sandys’s illustration is considered. While the full-page rendition of Sandys’s illustration accompanies the poem, a cropped version (focusing on the woman’s Pre-Raphaelite features) also appears on the title page of the first volume edition. Below the image is a page number, directing the reader to the image and the poem it accompanies. The prominent placement of Sandys’s illustration on the title page suggests that, in this repackaging of the periodical, Strahan’s publishing firm wished to draw attention to the Pre-Raphaelite illustrations it commissioned – drawing attention to the contributions of a well-known poet like Rossetti through the page reference simply increases the cultural value of the illustration and the periodical as a whole.19 According to the paratext of the periodical, Sandys’s illustration and the illustrations accompanying Reade’s Griffith Gaunt – a full-page illustration from the serial faces the title page – become the defining features of the periodical. The fact that the full-page layout given to the illustration overpowers the visual weight of the letterpress only furthers this understanding of the publisher’s priorities.20 The stanzas of ‘If’ take up a mere two-thirds of the page and are immediately

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followed by a fantasy tale ‘The Night Wayfarer’; the poem is not given its own page. The periodical’s layout clearly privileges the illustration over the poem as Rossetti’s poem becomes the value-added feature accompanying the illustration. Ultimately, the image overwrites the poem in that same way that the perceptions of sentimental literature overwrite the aesthetic form of such poetry. The pose of the contemplative, lovelorn figure (in this case a woman) waiting to reunite with her lover becomes the pose of the speaker, and this pose, which appears on the title page of the periodical’s midsummer volume, imposes the role of the sentimental speaker onto the poems and poets that appear throughout the Argosy. The imposition of a sentimental pose on the periodical’s poetry highlights the complexity of the Argosy’s resistive feminine poetics. Despite the sentimental framing, the periodical’s female poets continuously produced what Gray describes as ‘corrective rewritings . . . transfigur[ing] not just of generic but also gender paradigms’ (2006: 64) in her work on female poets in the Christian Ladies’ Magazine. As the previous paragraphs demonstrate, Rossetti’s ‘If’ reworks the trope of the abandoned woman, giving her a voice and an agency often denied the female subjects of periodical poetry.21 Similar to Rossetti’s ‘If’, Ingelow’s ‘The Coming in of the “Mermaiden”’ (1866: 52) suggests that there are alternatives to traditional sentimental stereotypes even as her poem plays with sentimental ideas of loss, waiting and shipwreck.22 Ingelow refuses the narrative of loss and sorrow implied by the diction of the poem’s early lines – the bleached moon, the starless sky, ‘sea-ghost all in grey’ (52) – juxtaposing such images with words of hope and wonder. The return of the Mermaidan defies the connotations of the kenning ‘sea ghost’. It is the exception as ‘For once, the best is come, that hope / Promised them “to-morrow”’ (52). Ingelow’s poem thus disrupts the narrative expectations built through the diction of the poem’s opening stanzas, and, in doing so, Ingelow inverts the sentimental narrative of the doomed shipwreck and, implicitly, the pose of the abandoned, waiting woman, who, for once, ‘Their lost they have, they hold’ (52).23 This subtle subversion and revision of poetic tropes occurs throughout the periodical as the women poets of the Argosy seem to share a resistive periodical poetics that grows out of the gendered forms of the period. Rossetti’s final appearance in the Argosy, ‘Twilight Night’ (1868: 103), both contributes to the periodical’s poetics and reinforces how even ‘pot-boilers’ participated in the development of women’s poetry as a distinct genre that reimagined and reclaimed the form of the poetess.

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‘Twilight Night’ was published as part of the first issue printed under Ellen Wood’s name, acting as a bridge between Wood’s Argosy and that of Isa Craig who solicited Rossetti’s contributions.24 Unlike the layout afforded to ‘If’, the two-part poem takes up a full page; the white space surrounding it signifying the poem’s cultural value (see Kooistra 2014: 121). Rossetti initially composed part 1 of what would become ‘Twilight Night’ on 26 August 1864. She composed part 2 on 25 June 1863, combining the two poems under one title for publication in the Argosy.25 The seemingly happenstance origin of ‘Twilight Night’ emphasises Rossetti’s lack of interest in the artistic merit of her periodical poetry. Nevertheless, while the two poems are clearly separate lyrics, their content connects them as the second lyric can be read as the more emotional and sentimental response to the first. The publication of these two distinct poems as one unit draws attention to the ways in which Rossetti puts pressure on and revises a variety of poetic tropes, creating a feminine poetics that is all her own. For instance, the first lyric included in ‘Twilight Night’, which I have reproduced in full, puts pressure on the image of clasped hands as a symbol of connection: We met, hand to hand, We clasped hands close and fast, As close as oak and ivy stand; But it is past: Come day, come night, day comes at last. We loosed hand from hand, We parted face from face; Each went his way to his own land At his own pace, Each went to fill his separate place. If we should meet one day, If both should not forget, We shall clasp hands the accustomed way, As when we met So long ago, as I remember yet. (Rossetti 1868: 103)

The image of clasped hands alludes to both a lover’s greeting and the pose of prayer, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s sonnet recounting the meeting of Romeo and Juliet (V.i.104–17), which similarly plays on such double meanings. The formal parallel that Rossetti draws between the image of the clasped hands and their separation

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combined with the masculine pronoun suggests the act of prayer: a meeting with and a parting from God after the act of prayer ends. The repetition of the masculine pronoun his in the second stanza suggests that the moment described could be something other than a meeting between lovers. The conditional ifs of the final stanza further disrupt the potentially sentimental and romantic connection forged in the first stanza. Reminiscent of ‘If’, the speaker in the first lyric of ‘Twilight Night’ recognises that a reunion, while possible, is not a foregone conclusion. The speaker’s assertion that ‘Each went to fill his separate place’ (Rossetti 1868: 103) implies action on the part of both the speaker and his companion. Each figure sets out to find his own place, equally and separately. The lyric thus almost resists interpretation as Rossetti vacillates between the devotional and sentimental modes. The second section of ‘Twilight Night’, which presents readers with a speaker similar to that found in ‘If’, also resists a conventional reading of the poem as sentimental, even though this second poem is arguably more sentimental than the preceding lyric. Here, Rossetti relies on the numerous metaphorical connotations of the word heart to undermine any superficial reading of her poem. The second lyric opens with the following stanza: Where my heart is (wherever that may be) Might I but follow! If you fly thither over heath and lea, O honey-seeking bee, O careless swallow, Bid some for whom I watch keep watch for me. (Rossetti 1868: 103)

On the surface, Rossetti’s use of the word heart locates the poem in the sentimental tradition. It acts as a symbol of both love and the beloved, and this meaning is amplified by the speaker’s plea to the poetic tropes of the swallow and the bee. The speaker bids these tokens of love to inspire a similar yearning in her beloved; the bee and the swallow bear the burden of love and emotion in the poem, which then quickly moves on to describe the speaker’s perpetual waiting.26 However, the poetic trope of the heart has two potential registers of meaning: the sentimental and the devotional. This is especially true for Victorian women writers, such as Rossetti, whom critics and readers expected to write from the heart and produce affective and frequently devotional poetry. In her work on Victorian poetics of the heart, Kirstie Blair argues that Christina Rossetti’s poetry requires

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this kind of bifocal understanding of the poetic heart (2006b: 159). ‘Twilight Night’ is at once a sentimental poem and devotional text, a product of the affective and faith-filled heart, as Rossetti shapes her representation of the sentimental, feminine heart in response to her knowledge of the religious poetics of the era, including Christian typology and Tractarian poetics and theology.27 Read in the context of the Argosy’s sentimental and affective poetics, the heart referenced in the poem is clearly synecdochal, standing in for the speaker’s absent lover. On the surface, then, the poem reads as a sentimental narrative about love and waiting similar to ‘If’ though decidedly more hopeful. However, as Blair suggests, for the Victorians, poetry offered ‘a way of representing and understanding the profound emotions that stem from the love of God’ (2012: 34–5). In ‘Twilight Night’, Rossetti uses the affective poetics of secular, sentimental love to express and work through the speaker’s love of God. Reading the poem as a devotional text draws attention to the double meaning of words such as heart, bee and swallow. Though I am not going to dwell on Rossetti’s interactions with Tractarian theology and poetics, it is important to note that for Tractarians, the heart was essential to the experience of faith but only insofar as the heart was ‘shaped and disciplined by God and Church rather than dictating faith itself’ (Blair 2006b: 154). Rossetti seemingly adopts and resists this reading of the heart in ‘Twilight Night’. The speaker longs for her heart; she wants to follow it. However, she ultimately accepts that she must ‘wait and wonder’, disciplining herself to ‘watch the accustomed way’ (Rossetti 1868: 103). Moreover, in Christian symbolism, the heart represents the centre of spiritual activity, the place where salvation occurs. The bee represents Christian diligence and eloquence and the swallow represents the Incarnation of Jesus and the resurrection through its migration patterns (the birds reappear each spring like the Christian celebration of Easter) (Ferguson 1961: 25–6). Once these Christian connotations are applied, the poem becomes bifocal in nature. It is a poem both about two lovers and about faith as the absence of the speaker’s heart seems to test her faith, requiring her faithful patience before a reunion can occur. The potential religious connotations of the poem create what Armstrong would characterise as a second and more difficult poem (and what Tractarians may classify as an example of Reserve), emphasising the connection that exists between the sentimental aesthetic associated with periodical literature and devotional poetics.28 Rossetti fills her poem with the ‘fit words freighted’ (Craig 1865: 37) referenced by Craig in her inaugural poem ‘On Board the Argosy’,

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reapplying the conventions of sentimental and devotional poetry in order to define and reinforce her own poetics. Re-examining the periodical poetry of canonical and non-canonical female poets as periodical poets challenges the critical narrative that understands periodical poetry as trite, sentimental filler worth no one’s time. The poetry of Rossetti and her contemporaries was not merely filler to the editors and readers of the periodical press. Rather, their periodical poetry shows how female poets managed to work within the affordances of the periodical press, one of most welcoming venues for midVictorian women writers, manipulating the language and conventions of sentimental and/or traditionally feminine poetic modes to create complex poems that engage with contemporary literary forms in interesting ways. The final section of this chapter turns its attention to a long-forgotten periodical poet, Sarah Williams, whose career and poetry aligns almost perfectly with the conventional narrative of the nineteenthcentury poetess: her biographer emphasises the ‘naturalness’ and ‘spontaneity’ of her poems, likening them to the ‘utterance of one who sang “as the birds do,” because the song was in her’ (Plumptre 1868: viii). Yet, a closer examination of her poetry shows that just as Rossetti’s poetry engages with a variety of influences and literary traditions, so too does Williams’s, proving that periodical poets engaged with much the same aesthetic and cultural issues as now-canonical authors. Such poetry is thus part of the era’s poetics and not subordinate to it.

‘New Orphics yet to rise’: The Popular Poetry of Sarah Williams A young poet from a solidly middle-class family, Sarah Williams met Alexander Strahan in the 1860s. Strahan added her to his stable of periodical contributors shortly thereafter, and her work appeared in several of his popular periodicals, including Good Words, Sunday Magazine and the Argosy. Strahan also published her only poetry volume, Twilight Hours: A Legacy in Verse, in April 1868. In his entry on Williams for Alfred Miles’s late-nineteenth-century encyclopaedia, The Poets and the Poetry of the Century, Alex H. Japp defines Twilight Hours as a book ‘from a woman’s heart’ (1892: 582), linking the poetry volume to Williams’s body and the cultural pose of the poetess, a figure understood to produce simple, spontaneous and sentimental poetry from the heart. Japp’s description of

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Williams builds on that of Plumptre’s and confirms Williams’s cultural position as a poetess, isolating her from the era’s male poets and the realm of high art. The structure of Miles’s work supports this division. He removes female poets from the encyclopaedia’s general chronology, which begins with George Crabbe and ends with an entry on William Morris. In effect, he creates a separate chronology for female poets. He also banishes those poets who write humorous poetry, parodies, occasional poems and sacred/religious poetry to separate volumes. The separation of male poets from female poets and poets of humorous or religious verse aligns the encyclopaedia with contemporary conceptions of cultural value, demonstrating, once again, how the critical discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries constructed binaries between high/low and masculine/ feminine art. However, even as her biographers defined Williams as a poetess, their descriptions of the poet also unsettle any attempt to limit Williams’s poetic identity, ultimately demonstrating the instability of such binaries. Like Craig, Williams is almost indescribable. Her main biographer and mentor, Plumptre, identified something deeper in Williams, ‘a soul working its way through the problems of life as they present themselves to all thinkers, bearing bravely also some special burden of its own’ (1868: xiii). The inclusion of Williams among ‘all thinkers’ positions her as part of the broader cultural world, including the iconic poetess, while the reference to her ‘special burden’ alludes to both her function as the poetess and the originality of her poetic voice. One way to understand the paradoxical position occupied by Williams in such criticism is through her Welsh heritage. The popular and sensational poems she wrote for the Argosy include numerous references to her Welsh ancestry, and though Williams spent her life in London, both Catherine Brennan and Elisabeth Jay agree that Williams valued her Welsh ancestry, ‘retain[ing] profound emotional links with the country’ (Brennan 2003: 5). She spoke Welsh and frequently visited Wales with her Welsh-born parents on family vacations, and Williams even linked her poetic abilities to her Welsh background. Williams’s Welsh-ness became an important part of her public and poetic identity in the periodical press. For example, shortly after her death, an essay in Good Words celebrates Williams’s ‘keen sense’ and her ‘warm Welsh temperament’, which, the author suggests, could ‘throw a halo round the patriotic sentiment’ (Japp 1868: 382) expressed in her Welsh poems.29 Written shortly after her death, this essay provides some important clues about Williams’s poetic reputation and place in the literary market beyond her Welshness.

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On the one hand, the fact that the essay even exists suggests that her poetry, written under the pseudonym Sadie, drew enough of an audience for Good Words that the editor (or, more likely, the periodical’s publisher) felt the need to publish an essay on her poetics. However, since Williams only contributed five poems to Good Words before her death and such literary essays are relatively rare in Good Words, it seems equally probable that Strahan, the publisher of Good Words, used the periodical essay as a form of advertisement for Williams’s forthcoming (and now posthumous) poetry volume, Twilight Hours, reminding us that a poet’s participation in the periodical press was often a commercial endeavour – for both poet and publisher – above all else. Williams’s reputation as a poet seemingly faded shortly after the publication of her posthumous poetry volume, and there is little scholarship available on her. Aside from a brief entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Catherine Brennan and Jane Aaron offer the only modern critical examinations of Williams’s poetry, and, like Williams’s nineteenth-century critics, both scholars read Williams as a Welsh poet. Brennan, for example, uses the poet’s biography and her emphasis on language and exile in ‘O Fy Hen Gymraeg’ (‘O [for a word of] mine own old Welsh’) to read Williams’s most substantial contribution to the Argosy, ‘The Doom of the Prynnes’, as a Welsh text (Williams 1868). She notes that the proximity of ‘O Fy Hen Gymraeg’ and ‘The Doom of the Prynnes’ in Twilight Hours heightens the Welsh content of the latter poem. She does not, however, discuss the poem’s origins in the Argosy. Reading the poem within its original periodical context emphasises its hybridity as the expanding and contracting margins surrounding ‘The Doom of the Prynnes’ highlight the poem’s lyrical interludes, making them a visual feature within the poem when compared to its longer lines of blank verse and, more broadly, the densely packed prose of the periodical. While this formatting has thematic implications, it also serves to stress the text’s hybridity, a feature that locates it within the tradition of British rather than English poetry (see Campbell 2007).30 In ‘The Doom of the Prynnes’, Williams draws on a combination genres, phrases, images and narratives from the shared literary language of what Matthew Campbell (2007) terms the four nations (England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland) in order to rewrite narratives of exile and isolation, supporting Brennan’s reading of the poem. However, this notion of hybridity also opens up a new way to engage with Williams’s periodical poetry, one that acknowledges both her

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Welshness and her identity as a poet who engaged with contemporary understandings of poetry, poetics, and authorship. Locating Williams’s contributions to the Argosy as implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) engaging with contemporary debates about poetry and the poet allows me to argue that her poems are more than just a product of the era’s shifting and permeable geographical and literary borders; they are also a product of the periodical press.31 The following case study of Williams’s two significant contributions to the Argosy, ‘The Doom of the Prynnes’ and ‘A Poet’s Moods’, demonstrates how periodical poets like Williams simultaneously adhered to the aesthetic standards of the periodical press while also subverting popular poetic forms to create formally complex poems that engage with the forms of contemporary poetics and the realities of the literary market. The collision of genres and styles in both poems serves to defy the notion of a pure poetic genre, demonstrating how Victorian poets used popular narrative and lyric forms to market their poetry, to align their texts with the familiar tropes of popular literature, and to challenge basic cultural assumptions, including contemporary and modern conceptions of history and the conventions of poetic form.32 The serial context of ‘The Doom of the Prynnes’, the first poem I will discuss, highlights these issues as the poem’s content and form work together to implicitly draw attention to the formal and cultural problems facing the periodical poet, namely the critical perception of popular poetry as inferior to and derivative of that composed by poets who do not write for the periodical press. In brief, ‘The Doom of the Prynnes’ is a narrative poem told from the perspective of a young girl named Elin. In part 1 (Williams 1867a: 295–9), Williams introduces the Prynnes, who inhabit a once proud but now decaying home in ‘The dark, tumultuous heart of London town’ (296). From this initial description of the Prynne household unfolds a melodramatic narrative centred on Elin and her two cousins, Agnes and Mark, on whose shoulders the poem lays the burden of the declining Prynnes. The lovers represent a sense of salvation and despair, respectively, with Agnes attempting to ‘control the stormy passions of her family’ through her lyrics (Aaron 2010). The second part of the poem (Williams 1867b: 339–42) opens with Mark lamenting that he must write what his publishers want, even if this goes against his conscience and poetic desires. Immediately after the realism of this moment, the mad figure of Mark’s mother enters the room, casting a pall over the poem as she utters a Gothic curse:

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Victorian Poetry and the Literary Periodical A Prynne can only love a Prynne: Doom one. A Prynne who weds a Prynne, weds Death: Doom two. A Prynne who weds not Death goes mad, like me: Doom three. (Williams 1867b: 340)

The remainder of this part finds the three cousins, Elin, Agnes and Mark, recovering from the pronouncement. The poem’s final part (Williams 1867c: 435–8) opens with a direct reference to the second serial part as the curse begins to take hold of Mark. It ends with Mark’s and Agnes’s simultaneous declarations of love as the home’s ancestral tree falls, shaking the foundations of the house and causing a beam to fall on the couple. Aaron (2010), who identifies Agnes as the protagonist of the verse narrative, reads the conclusion of the poem as implying ‘that the Welsh, and particularly Welsh women, are excessively passionate and ultimately uncontrollable; only her early death, it would appear, has saved Agnes from the third “Doom” of madness, which has overcome her aunt’. I read the ending a bit differently. Given Elin’s rejection of modernity and her alignment with her cousins, I find the ending much more ambiguous: the speaker survives, but the reader is left to imagine Elin’s fate as eventually fulfilling the last portion of the curse. The conclusion of ‘The Doom of the Prynnes’ also has interesting implications for Mark’s narrative and, more specifically, Williams’s representation of Mark as a Welsh poet forced to engage with modern forms of publishing and the demands of the periodical press. As mentioned in my brief summary of the poem, part 2 opens with a realistic depiction of the financial concerns of the mid-Victorian poet. Mark complains about writing against his artistic conscience because in order to support his family, he must write for the periodical press. The poem’s narrator, Elin, tells the reader that ‘Mark wrote too much and hated what he wrote’ (Williams 1867b: 339). He resents the assignments given to him by editors of the periodicals he is forced to contribute to in order to support his family. Such assignments, he states, require him to write saleable news in which he must ‘Sneer at the Emperor [ . . . ] / Declare that Gladstone is too eloquent, / And that the peril of the land demands / A jocund premier’ (339). Mark’s complaint is very similar to Aurora’s description of her literary life in the by now familiar lines from Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. Like Aurora, Mark must write with ‘with one hand for the booksellers / While working with the other for [him]self” (Barrett Browning 1996: 302–4). On the one hand, the implicit echo of Aurora Leigh in

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Williams’s description of Mark’s situation collapses the boundary between canonical and periodical poetry, demonstrating that periodical poems engaged with the same issues and concerns that preoccupied the poets we now consider canonical. However, the situation described by Mark and Aurora in their respective texts also represents the reality for many writers from the period, especially the poetess. The very appearance of Williams’s poem in the Argosy acts as an example of this trend. Her work for Alexander Strahan’s periodicals gave her access to the publishing world though it did not guarantee literary fame or immortality.33 Mark’s anxiety over publishing in the press mirrors the conditions under which both Aurora’s and Williams’s poems were produced; however, unlike Aurora (and unknowingly foreshadowing Williams’s own fate), Mark’s career is cut short. He dies before he can write solely for his conscience. His fate suggests the difficulty of meeting such literary ideals in the modern market even as the intertextual nature of this brief episode functions to remind us that an author’s work for the press, whether they are a poetess or not, does not define their skill, ability or politics: a more complex individual (and poem) can and often does lie beneath. The metapoetics of the opening stanzas of part 2 subtly emphasises Williams’s experimentation with literary forms in ‘The Doom of the Prynnes’. The lyric turn that occurs immediately after Mark’s commentary about the literary market and the demands of the periodical press highlights how Williams used the close relationship between content and form to reiterate the poem’s implicit rejection of conventional modes of poetry and storytelling. Williams interrupts Mark’s complaints about writing for the periodicals, which he utters in blank verse, with a lyric sung by Agnes. This switch in verse form disrupts the narrative thrust of the blank verse and creates a moment of calm contemplation within the world of the poem. The appearance of such moments throughout the poem suggests Williams’s keen awareness of the periodical context in which her poem will first appear, furthering the poem’s embeddedness in contemporary literary culture. These episodes simultaneously mirror the very structure and visual composition of the periodical press, echoing the way that periodical poetry occupies the spaces between prose pieces, and develop the poem’s intertextuality, specifically the connections that exist between Williams’s periodical poetry and the respected poets and poetry of the period. In this case, the interruption created by Agnes’s lyrics recalls the format of Tennyson’s The Princess, which was first published in 1847 though the songs were added in subsequent editions.

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Interspersed among the narrative portions of the poem, Agnes’s songs make up almost 25 per cent of the poem’s text. They define the structure of the poem and respond to specific moments of anxiety in the narrative such as Mark’s commentary on his writing. Like the songs scattered throughout The Princess, Williams’s songs respond to narrative events, affirm specific themes, and perhaps most importantly, disorient the reader, by suggesting a false sense of security and thus increasing the melodramatic pace of the poem. For instance, Agnes responds to Mark’s agitation over periodical literature with the following ‘simple village lay’ (Williams 1867b: 340): Down the mountain came the stream, Leaping in the glowing beam Of the daylight’s brightening gleam, On the sunny morning. Crimson foxglove, tall and high; Bowed as though a king went by, Heather stood up, proud and shy, On, the sunny morning. By the streamlet sat we two, Throned among wild heartsease blue, While he said ‘Dear, I love you.’ Oh, the sunny morning! (Williams 1867b: 340)

Agnes’s song counters the modern references strewn throughout Mark’s speech, which refers to Gladstone and debates about the plight of the working classes (339). The singsong rhythm, regular rhyme scheme, and visual appearance of the lyric (namely the shorted lines of tetrameter) counter the unrelenting progression of the plot and provide a moment of peace in a poem otherwise dominated by Gothic portents of doom. However, the comfort offered by Agnes’s song is short-lived.34 Williams immediately counters Agnes’s bright song with the entrance of Mark’s mother, who brings with her ‘a sudden chillness’ (340). She appears to Elin and her cousins as ‘A figure worse than horrid hideousness, / For this was horrid beauty’ (340). The juxtaposition of the lyric’s sunny morning with the sudden arrival of a strange and chilling figure reinforces the hybridity of the poem, introducing a suggestion of the supernatural – though the reader later finds out that the figure is Mark’s mother – and emphasising the instability of the poetic text. Williams’s poem refuses to separate the dramatic tensions of the poem from these lyrical interludes.35 Instead, Williams uses the

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lyrics embedded in ‘The Doom of the Prynnes’ to enact and emphasise moments of tension. Williams, like Mark, appears interested in creating a text that challenges and plays with the conventions of popular literature (even as she writes for a broad middle-class audience), and she accomplishes this task by using intertextual allusions (such as those to Tennyson and Barrett Browning) to play with the expectations of poetic form and genre. The lyric interludes also function to reinforce one of the poem’s main thematic threads. Williams presents the lyrics as songs and short ballads, gesturing towards the origins of the printed nineteenthcentury lyric, which came to mediate the oral culture of preceding generations (Rowlinson 2007: 59). This application of the lyric form locates the poem and poetry in an ahistorical past. It transforms the poem from a contemporary narrative into an almost folkloric tale that exists alongside the modern world its characters reject. Upon looking at cells through her father’s microscope, a modern technology, Elin, the narrator of ‘The Doom of the Prynnes’, states: ‘I do not like our world at all. / It is so ghastly ugly underneath’ (Williams 1867c: 296). Similarly, Agnes and Mark cannot accept the ghastliness of the modern world. Mark struggles with the expectations of modern publishing practices, while Agnes struggles to find peace as the pressures of her life and her family’s anxieties press down upon her. The gothic (or folkloric) worldview of the Prynne cousins cannot be sustained in the face of modernity, and the failure of the Prynnes to adapt to the modern English world is their doom. Elin, Mark and Agnes cling to tradition and the fading influence of their Welsh ancestry.36 Their inability to reconcile their Welsh identities (and the history and majesty therein) with their reality makes death of the cousins and the probable madness of Elin the only possible outcome. The conditions of modernity and exile are inescapable: ‘the “tenacity” of the Saxon has by now become stronger than they can withstand’ (Aaron 2013). The poem’s structure mirrors the Prynne’s liminal position between the past and the present, sanity and madness, as well as Williams’s liminal identity as a self-defined Welsh poet living in London. It is a piecemeal poem, drawing on a number of literary traditions to create a contemporary poem that implicitly acknowledges the intertextual nature of Victorian literature, poetry, and identity. The form of the poem resists definition and classification at every level. For instance, if we understand the serial form as progressive and moving towards a defined end often linked to major life events, especially marriage or death, then the poem’s conclusion, which suggests a continuous present, tests the boundaries of the serial form.37 One

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way the poem destabilises the idea of fixed genre and form is through its repetition and reworking of lyric tropes and Gothic themes.38 Williams’s movement between the lyrical songs of Agnes and the blank verse of the poem’s narrative action provide one obvious example of the poem’s unstable form. For instance, the ballad sung by Agnes in part two of the poem appears jarring because the sunny landscape Agnes describes is at odds with the decaying Gothic structures of the poem. Such dissonances in both form and content capture the speaker’s overall sense of unease as well as her potential mental instability – an instability that Williams hints at in the poem’s final stanza as the speaker ‘grope[s her] way out to the darkened world’ (3: 438) muttering Agnes’s song. The gap between Agnes’s songs of peace and the turmoil Elin describes also emphasises the Gothic atmosphere of the poem’s main narrative, which opens with a description of the family’s ‘strange old house, / That like the fortunes of our family, / Had shrunk and withered to pathetic age’ (3: 295). At a glance, the Gothic attributes of the house and the poem seem like products of repetition and, perhaps, mimicry, confirming critical readings of the poetess and her poetics (see Richards 2004). A decidedly Gothic setting, the Prynnes’s ancestral home is similar to the crumbling homes and households represented in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1848), and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (March 1852 to September 1853). Indeed, when the speaker of Williams’s poem mentions that ‘men said we should someday be crushed, / A nest of eagles ‘neath a crumbling rock’ (3: 295), one cannot help but think of the famous casque episode in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), which begins the fall of Prince Manfred’s house. Interestingly, the conclusion of the poem also closely resembles that of Edgar Allen Poe’s 1839 short story ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. Like Williams’s poem, Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ documents the decline of an ancient family whose doom bears a striking resemblance to the Prynne family curse. The consequences of each family’s ancestry, namely the Prynnes’ historical Welshness and the patrimony of the House of Usher, is the death of its last descendant as the climax of each text records the destruction of both family and home. In ‘The Doom of the Prynnes’, the ambiguity of the conclusion complicates this somewhat simplified reading of the poem. Nonetheless, despite the irresolution of the poem, the narrative patterns embedded and alluded to in the letterpress suggest that the last part of the curse is still to come. The only Prynne left is the speaker, and her potential madness may eventually fulfil the curse. The echo

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between the final sections of each text reinforces the potential allusion to Poe. Both texts feature a storm that appears to centre on the ancestral homes of Prynne and Usher, and the final destruction of each home features similar sensational effects. The issue is not whether Williams read or deliberately mimicked Poe, but how Williams, like Poe, participated in what Richards calls ‘the process of cultural transmission’ (2004: 1): the circulation of poetic forms, cultural narratives, and popular literary tropes. Such elements define the literature of the period. The connection between Williams’s poem and the sensation culture of the 1860s makes this circulation of literary forms and tropes even more evident. The miscellany of poetic forms and cultural references found in ‘The Doom of the Prynnes’ is reminiscent of Nicholas Daly’s description of sensational literary forms as ‘polymorphous and polygenetic’ (2009: 28). Williams’s poem repeats the tropes and structures of sensational literature on multiple levels: it adopts several elements commonly associated with sensational narratives, which themselves adapted and modified elements associated with the gothic, including familial curses, questionable heritage and madness, and the concluding stanzas are paradigmatic of the era’s interest in sensational literary moments. As the climactic storm descends, it pulls the home’s ancestral tree from its roots and flings it onto the house, killing Agnes and Mark in the impact. They die in each other’s arms, ‘a sleeping king and queen, at rest’ (Williams 1867c: 438). The scene is intensely visual as the building shifts and smoke obscures the speaker’s vision. The climactic scene of Williams’s poem layers the allusion to Poe’s supernatural ending with sensational literary tropes from a variety of popular texts. In addition to those previously listed, the ending of Williams’s poem echoes events in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859) and even Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). Such connections complicate any reading of Williams’s poem as simple mimicry. The poem is a curious tissue of quotations that emphasises the popular poet’s interaction with and adaptation of contemporary literary forms and practices. Overall, the poem’s literary allusions – both formal and thematic – display a poetic self-consciousness reminiscent of Armstrong’s double poem, in which the speaker’s utterance both drives the narrative movement of the poem and becomes the object of critical inquiry. Though Armstrong associates the idea of the double poem with the era’s dramatic monologues, it serves as a useful critical paradigm for reading Williams’s poetry. When applied to ‘The Doom of the

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Prynnes’, Armstrong’s conception of the double poem provides a theoretical model for understanding the effect of the poem’s sometimes overwhelming intertextuality. Within this model, the poem becomes Williams’s self-conscious assertion of her own unique poetic discourse, which demonstrates an interest in the complexities of language and artistic experimentation. Her collage of poetic and literary genres challenges the conception of popular poetry as inferior and derivative: the instances of quotation and paraphrase in ‘The Doom of the Prynnes’ construct a new text, one that echoes the miscellaneous yet unified nature of the periodical itself while also commenting on the challenges and realities of modernity, identity and contemporary literary culture. Williams’s second significant contribution to the Argosy moves away from the Gothic landscape of the Prynne home as she turns to a more sustained exploration of the lyric in ‘A Poet’s Moods’ (1867d: 261–3, 1867e: 361–3). Here, Williams demonstrates the flexibility and mutability of the lyric form and the traditional tropes associated with women’s lyric poetry, publishing twelve lyrics (numbered I to XII) over two instalments. A series of short lyric poems thus make up each part of ‘A Poet’s Moods’, and each of these lyrics addresses topics traditionally associated with sentimental poetry, specifically love, loss and death, ultimately playing with the conventions of the genre. For example, in several of the lyrics, Williams adopts the feminine aesthetic of the domestic, sickly, lovelorn female poet only to subvert this characterisation of the feminine lyric voice, using the era’s assumptions about women’s poetry and its reductive approach to female poets ‘to explore the way a female subject comes into being’ (Armstrong 1993: 324). The title of the cycle is particularly representative of this project. The identification of the poems as representing a poet’s moods simultaneously defines the poet of the title as part of an indefinite class of poets, eschewing the gender restrictions associated with the term poetess, and links the poems to Williams’s individualised poetic persona through her signature, S.A.D.I. (or Sadie).39 The adaptation of a pen name was particularly important to Williams’s identity as a poet. She viewed her pen name as her ‘her true identity’ (Brennan 2003: 130).40 The relative anonymity it provided allowed her to develop an independent, self-chosen poetic voice that represents ‘what Barrett Browning term[ed] the “better self,” the identity which must be read, written and acknowledged’ (130). In this series of lyrics, Williams as S.A.D.I. explores her better poetic self, manipulating the conventions and readerly expectations of the lyric form to create a serial text that demonstrates the scope of her poetic skill and

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the ability of her better self to write unfettered by the expectations and narratives imposed on her by her gender and her critics. The publication of the twelve lyrics that make up ‘A Poet’s Moods’ as a cycle underlines the thematic connections between the poems and highlights how each poem challenges the clichés of sentimental, periodical poetry. For instance, the first lyric included in ‘A Poet’s Moods’, I [‘This world is all too sad for tears’] (Williams 1867d: 261), subverts the hymn form from within. Williams adopts the metrical form of iambic tetrameter, a metre traditionally associated with the hymn and, by extension, with female poets (see Chapter 3 in this volume). The lyric presents life as something to bear until one’s burden is relieved by God or death. Williams’s diction builds on the mood of the poem, making the speaker’s sense of life as a burden a palpable feature of the text and cancelling out the musicality of the poem’s phrasing. The repeated long vowel sounds in the first line of the third stanza, ‘Not so, not so; no load of woe’ (1867d: 261), create an aural sense of despair within the text as the repetition of Williams’s weary phrases (‘not so, not so’ and ‘we bear it, we can bear’) compound the tone of resignation in the poem. Williams’s diction and the poem’s metre increase the tension of the poem. The poem’s diction weighs the poem down even as the hymn form offers a lyrical mode for reflection and redemption. The poem also manages to dismiss the solace of nature so celebrated in Alexander Strahan’s other periodical, Good Words. Though the little flowers viewed by the speaker lead her to recognise that she, like the flowers, can bear life, the poem’s concluding lines retain a gloomy sensibility. The next lyric, II [‘Is the world so very sad a place?’], emphasises the experimental and changing nature of a poet’s moods both formally and thematically as Williams rephrases the claim made by the first lyric, ‘This world is all too sad for tears’ (Williams 1867d: 261), and turns it into a question, introducing an element of doubt to the previous assertion by asking, ‘Is the world so very sad a place?’ (261). The poem then goes on to challenge the claims made in the first lyric, discussing how nature acts as a balm for the trials of life. The juxtaposition of these two lyrics serves as a demonstration of how a poet can skilfully manipulate and expose the conventions associated with a specific genre of poetry. Each poem in the cycle exposes the work of poetry (just as the publication of Rossetti’s ‘Twilight Night’ represents a poet at work); the poems become the fragments and experiments produced – and, in Rossetti’s case, discarded – as part of the writing process. As the cycle continues, the reader witnesses Williams adopting a variety of poetic voices and poses, all of which

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demonstrate her ability to consciously isolate a genre’s features to create poems that express literary skill and a keen poetic mind. In this way, ‘A Poet’s Moods’ functions as a double poem insofar as the poems and their form become the objects of inquiry alongside their lyrical narrative. The cycle invites the reader to engage with both the content and the form of each short lyric as Williams takes the Argosy’s readers through her many poetic moods. The third lyric, for example, revises the persona of the jilted lover. The speaker exclaims, ‘Pining, said I – Not for me’ (Williams 1867d: 262). She does not muse on ground ‘Where my lover once hath trod’ (262). Rather, the speaker refuses to turn into one of the ‘maids whose hearts are cold’ (262), and, in direct contrast to the weariness of the first lyric, the third lyric ends with defiance: ‘think you I am fearing? / [ . . . ] / Thus shall be our story told, / Sweet will be the hearing’ (262). Williams shifts gears once again in IV [‘In a bed of rushes woven’]. Here, she adopts the persona of a mother, singing a lullaby to her child as she abandons him among the rushes. The strong end rhymes that dominate the poem (sleep and keep; dry, lie and die) emphasise the sing-song quality of the lyric while the discordant forced and half rhymes present in first two stanzas (woven and him; me and dreamy) unsettle the poem’s lulling rhythm. These deviations from perfect rhymes reflect the speaker’s emotional turbulence as she abandons her child, and they embody the tensions inherent in the lullaby’s form. According to Whearty, lullabies often contain a ‘contest of wills: between the singer and listener, between a lover and a beloved, between the hopes of the singer and the cruelty of the world’ (2012: 825). In IV, the singer’s contest of wills is an internal one represented by the aforementioned forced and halfrhymes, and the moments of pleading repetition, ‘Clinging hands must loose me, loose me’ (Williams 1867d: 262), as she battles with herself over the abandonment of her child. The circumstances surrounding this lullaby of abandonment are never explicitly stated; however, the location along a river and the abandonment of the child strongly suggests that the child is the result of an illicit relationship. The suggestion of adult sexuality in the poem implicitly links Williams’s poetic moods to the ‘child songs’ of William Blake who ‘use[d] the form to produce sophisticated explorations of the innocence of infancy and the ensnaring chains of adult sexuality’ (Whearty 2012: 825). Now, IV [‘In a bed of rushes woven,’] is no Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, but Williams’s lullaby nonetheless acknowledges the innocence of infancy and the loss of this innocence – ‘Baby must in peace forget me, / And his love must die’ (Williams 1867d:

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262) – as well as chains of adult sexuality which lead to the singer’s abandonment of her child. Like ‘The Doom of the Prynnes’, then, IV is an intertextual poem, a composite text, that borrows from broader traditions and literary patterns and inserts Williams into the history of British poetry. Moreover, the poem’s opening image of a child being placed ‘In a bed of rushes woven’ among ‘the reeds spread out above them’ (1867d: 262) undoubtedly alludes to the birth of Moses (Exodus 2:3), drawing, once again, on the history of the form as early, pre-Reformation lullabies were often religious in nature (Whearty 2012: 825). As this brief analysis of IV suggests, Williams’s lyrics reward close reading; her poems are just as complex and interesting as her more renowned peers. The final two lyrics in Part I of ‘A Poet’s Moods’, V [‘How shall I comfort thee, O friend of friends?’] and VI [‘Wait a moment Death, I pray you wait’], explore devotional poetics and the spectre of death. Since I discussed devotional poetics at length in the previous chapter, I want to focus on Williams’s meditation on death and work in VI [‘Wait a moment Death, I pray you wait’]. In this lyric, the sixth and final mood depicted in Part I, Williams personifies death, and the speaker, a poetess figure, stands with him hand in hand as she looks back over her life and mourns that she must leave her ‘tale half told,’ her ‘message incomplete’ (263).41 The irony of the poem becomes evident when we consider the sixth lyric as part of the serialised, and thus extended, cycle of ‘A Poet’s Moods’. The final stanza of the lyric finds the speaker lamenting both the incompleteness of her message and the fact that ‘All that I would have said will some one say,– / Some one with wings where I had weary feet’ (263). The speaker’s premonition comes true with the publication of the second half of ‘A Poet’s Moods’ as another poetic voice picks up the lyric cycle and continues it with VII [‘As day by day the years go on,’], a short lyric that reflects on what life would be like without love. The speaker of VII thus continues the pattern of poetic exploration and experimentation established in lyrics I to VI. Indeed, each poem in the second instalment of ‘A Poet’s Moods’ (lyrics VII to XII) explores the moods and poetic forms available to Williams as she demonstrates her skill through these disparate and yet singular poetic voices, saying all she has to say. The call and response between lyrics six and seven represents only one of the methods that Williams used to forge a connection between her lyrics. She also develops the internal coherency of ‘A Poet’s Moods’ through the shared syntax of the cycle’s lyrics. In the poem’s first three lyrics, for instance, her use of the pronoun we

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suggests both the universal nature of each poem’s content and the specific mood/experience of the speaker. In lyric I [‘This world is all too sad for tears’], the speaker shifts from the first person I to the third person we over the course of the poem, invoking the illusion of a collective experience that continues into II [‘Is the world so very sad a place?’] as follows: So we breathe away these hours of balm, Rise with strengthened hearts within our breasts, Go, dear, but remember, through all weather, We are friends, we were in heaven together. (Williams 1867d: 261, emphasis mine)

In this passage from the second lyric, Williams’s use of the indefinite pronouns we and our implicitly references the broader sense of humanity invoked by her use of we in the last lines of the previous poem. However, the pairing of these pronouns with the endearment dear suggests that the second lyric of the cycle documents the speaker’s individual experience with his or her auditor. The poem thus simultaneously speaks to a collective human experience and represents a poet’s individual moods. The pronouns used in III [‘Eyes that once looked into mine’] (the plural we and singular I) respond to those used in the first two lyrics, and the proximity of the poems suggests a continuation of the speaker’s individual experience even as she recognises the collective to which she belongs: ‘Thus shall our story be told’ (Williams 1867d: 262, emphasis mine). Such implied connections and the movement between the universal and singular reinforce my reading of the cycle’s title and overarching narrative, which traces both the poetic process and the many voices of the poet at work. ‘A Poet’s Moods’ is at once a representation of the endless possibilities open to all poets with each lyric representing the poet’s exploration of various stories, poetic conventions, and moods, and a product of the individual poet Sadie. While I have primarily focused on the poems that make up the first half of the cycle, the second instalment of ‘A Poet’s Moods’ continues Williams’s exploration of her voice as a poet, presenting the reader with a variety of poetic forms and themes. The skill and literary knowledge displayed in ‘A Poet’s Moods’ serves as an important reminder that professional periodical poets wrote both within and in response to the poetic tradition. Her series of short lyrics demonstrate how one poet manipulated and transformed the lyric form to explore the possibilities of poetic expression beyond

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both the limits established by critics and the cultural expectations placed on both women writers and the literary periodical as a genre. In many ways, the Argosy appears as ‘A Poet’s Moods’ writ large. As I argue throughout this chapter, the Argosy’s poetry shows how women writers negotiated their public roles as professional poetesses with their own need to produce relevant and challenging literary works. Although the Argosy’s editors filled the periodical with sentimental love poems, sensational narratives and bitter musings on past loves, a careful reading of the journal’s poems exposes the formal and thematic skill of the periodical’s poets. The recognition of poetic skill suggests that as with the majority of women’s poetry, a second, more difficult poem exists beneath the commercial veneer of the often-dismissed periodical poem. These popular double poems engage with the poetics and literary traditions of the era, displaying a sophisticated knowledge of form and audience. Rather than existing at the margins of Victorian poetics and poetry, such poems form the foundation of Victorian poetry. Richards has already made this argument for the American poetess, writing that ‘the practices of poetesses became so wholly identified with the genre of poetry that their influence lives on anonymously, not as canonical poetry’s opposite, but as its generic underpinning’ (2004: 3). As I argue throughout this chapter (and, more broadly, this book), the same can be said for the British poetesses and those poets who wrote popular periodical poetry throughout the nineteenth century. Periodical poetry was built from the same traditions that inform the era’s canonical poetry, defining the genre for thousands of readers. The popular poetry of the period connected writers to publishers and their peers and created a place where women writers thrived, while also unwittingly (and unfortunately) contributing to and reinforcing the binate relationship between high and low art. An examination of poetry in the mass-produced periodical press destabilises this binary, demonstrating how both popular and canonical poems participated in the development of Victorian poetics. Neither the popular nor the canonical poet existed in isolation. They worked with the same forms and were preoccupied with the same questions. The dismissal of popular poetry as trite is a product of Victorian conceptions of gender and a poetry market that viewed mass-produced texts as commercial rather than cultural products. Beginning with the annuals, Victorian critics and poets perceived popular poetry as feminine and sentimental: the ideal outlet and product for woman poets and women readers. This reception of the era’s popular poetry came to define what Richards calls ‘the terms of poetic production’ (2004: 3).

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Readers and critics alike expected periodical poetry, and the work of female poets in particular, to fill a specific niche. The acceptance of this narrative resulted in the critical dismissal of such poetry long into the twentieth century. However, a study of the forms adopted, interrogated and modified by these women reveals that such assumptions are false: the poems published in the Argosy are indispensable to the history of Victorian poetics and poetry.

Notes 1. I decided to focus on these four poets because I felt their work best represented the revised sentimental poetics of the Argosy. I also wanted to focus on female poets and the production of feminine poetics in the periodical press. As stated in my introduction, my choice of which poets and poems I discuss came after I had read all the poems published during a particular time frame. 2. For further information about the application of Bourdieu’s theory to the Victorian publishing industry, see Kooistra (2011). 3. See Srebrnik (1986) for a full history of the Argosy and the debt that affected Strahan’s publishing house. 4. Phegley (2005) considers how Wood used her position and acceptability as the editor of the Argosy – a family magazine –to develop her public persona as a ‘respectable professional female writer’ (181) and Malcolm Elwin (1966) traces both the decline of the Argosy under Strahan and the periodical’s rise under Wood, who still published sensation fiction in the Argosy, but ‘never overstepped the conventional bounds protecting tender moral sensibilities’ (241). 5. As Kooistra’s Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing (2011) demonstrates, the illustrations that appeared alongside poetry in the literary annuals also affected their critical reception. She cites Arthur Henry Hallam’s 1831 review of Tennyson’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical as an example of that kind of critical discourse. In Hallam’s mind, the rise of visual culture and the ‘luxurious passivity’ (Hallam 1831: 619) of illustrated poetry threatened the rhetorical power of picturesque poetry (or that poetry which possess cultural value and requires active reading). Literary and cultural critics reinterpreted and rearticulated the aesthetic promoted by Hallam’s argument throughout the century (Armstrong 1993: 38). For instance, such discussions about art and the need for close, careful reading reappear in texts as disparate as John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851–3), Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1864), Emily Davies’s The Higher Education of Women (1866), and essays on English at the universities by William Morris, John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold and J. A. Froude (1886–7).

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6. Mason (2006) traces the aesthetic connections between Hemans, Greenwell and Procter, while I have discussed Barrett Browning’s elegies for her poetic foremothers elsewhere, see Ehnes (2017a). 7. Armstrong notes, ‘[e]ven when there seems no direct link between these earlier and later writers, it does seem as if they worked within a recognisable tradition understood by them to belong to women’ (1993: 323). 8. Gerald Massey’s 1865 review of Craig’s Duchess Agnes for the Athenaeum anticipates Craig’s lack of poetic stature. He writes, ‘Miss Craig now presents us with a book of verse which will certainly give her a place among the sisterhood of living singers, whether or not she may win and wear a wreath.’ As history shows, Craig never wins the wreath. 9. Levine continues: ‘And not only other identities: gender also encounters other forms – forms of knowledge, forms of narrative, forms of subjectivity, space, administration, education, repetition, circulation, collectivity, worship, and intimacy, among many others’ (2015: 95). 10. McGann (1996) models this methodology in his discussion of the poetics of sensibility in the Romantic period. He observes that ‘[t]he discourse of sensibility typically develops through an ethics of loss and suffering, and that moral urgency can just as easily obscure the specifically aesthetic character of the poetries’ sensibility’ (46). The same can be said about the effects of the strong thematic patterns associated with sentimental poetry, the emotions of which contribute to a poetics of sentimentality. 11. Gray (2006) makes a similar argument about repetition, quotation and echo, and women’s religious poetics in the nineteenth century. 12. By this time, Ingelow had already established herself as a poet, publishing her first poetry volume in 1863. Prior to publishing her work in the Argosy, Ingelow contributed some poems to Good Words. 13. She clearly emphasises the role that poetry plays in this project in the poem’s final lines by referring to the ‘new orphics yet to rise’ (Craig 1866: 38) from the periodical’s pages. 14. For further information about how a literary periodical can script or reaffirm social beliefs and/or positions, see Phegley (2004). 15. I discuss Rossetti’s view of her periodical poems in more detail in Chapter 2. 16. Perhaps the very road described in ‘Up-Hill’ (Rossetti 1861a). 17. Lawless’s portrayal of the betrayed/abandoned woman, on the other hand, represents the female subject in a static pose that screams of defeat and despair. 18. I am borrowing this understanding of irony from Perry Nodelman’s (1988) work on picture books, in which he theorises the presence of an ironic relationship between pictures and words. While Nodelman’s work focuses on children’s picture books, his ideas are equally applicable to other illustrated texts. 19. Illustrations, of course, were expensive, and Strahan hired prominent illustrators in an attempt to boast the sale of his periodical.

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20. The connotations of this particular layout become especially noticeable when compared to the presentation of illustrated poems in Good Words. For further information about layout, see Kooistra (2014). 21. This is true even when the women depicted are not fallen. 22. For other periodical poems on doomed ships and sailors, see ‘The Cilician Pirates’ in the Cornhill (Smith 1863: 530–1); ‘The Return of the Fire-Fly’ in Once a Week (A.M. 1860: 54), and ‘God Help Our Men at Sea’ in Once a Week (Hole 1860: 198). 23. The third lyric in Sarah Williams’s ‘A Poet’s Moods’ (1867d, Part I) does something similar. The speaker reflects on her emotional survival rather than describing the dissolution of the relationship, rewriting the sentimental narrative discussed above. Like Rossetti and Ingelow, even as Williams’s lyric addresses a narrative common to the Argosy’s poetry (and sentimental poetry in general), it rewrites the tropes of that narrative. 24. For example, there is evidence to suggest that Craig was in contact with Dante Gabriel Rossetti about Christina Rossetti’s contributions to the Argosy (Chapman and Meacock 2007: 151). 25. The first part of the poem ‘originally comprised lines 71–85 of the notebook version of “Songs in a Cornfield”’ (Crump 1979: 306). 26. I am identifying the speaker of the poem as a female, based on the tradition that reads women’s lyric poetry as representing women’s voices. 27. Rossetti’s interaction and adoption of Tractarian thought has received ample critical attention. See Arseneau (1993); Blair (2006b, 2012); Knight and Mason (2006); Mason (2006); Tennyson (1977, 1981). Their work and explanation of Tractarian poetics informs my reading of Rossetti’s poem though I do not address her Tractarianism directly. For a survey of the scholarship available on Rossetti’s relationship to Tractarian poetics, see D’Amico and Kent (2006). 28. The Tractarian principle of Reserve argues that ‘God’s scriptural laws should remain hidden to all by the faithful, and urged commentators on theology for encode or restrict their presentation of religious knowledge’ (Mason 2006: 75). Commentators and poets were encouraged to use ‘[m]etaphor, figure, and allegory of the kind only an initiated believer might understand’ (Mason 2006: 75). See also Mason and Knight (2006: 101). 29. Her entire poetic career appears to have been linked to her business relationship with Alexander Strahan and his London-based periodicals. For further information, see Jay (2004). 30. For Campbell, the geographical boundaries that define the four nations of British poetry are mirrored by the generic borders of romance and epic, lyric and ballad, [which . . . ] contribute to the great synthetic genres of the Romantic and Victorian recreation of all things Arthurian in poetry, fiction and art,

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through John Keats, Walter Scott, Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, the Pre-Raphaelites, Algernon Swinburne and William Morris. (2002: 446) 31. The periodicals helped facilitate this permeability. The complexity, hybridity and popularity of Williams’s Welsh poetry (commissioned by a Scottish publisher) invites us to rethink how we define Victorian poetry and poetics in light of the publishing opportunities offered by the periodicals of the era but that is a topic for another book. 32. See Felluga for a discussion about how experimental poetic forms, such as the verse novel, prove that ‘there is no such thing as a pure poetry, no such thing as a poetry that does not engage the historical, cultural, and technological changes of its time’ (2003: 494). 33. Not all poets fared as well as Williams, who did manage to earn enough cultural capital to warrant the publication of a poetry volume. For instance, evidence from the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry on the Victorian Poetry Network suggests of the 111 poets published in the Argosy, thirty-nine remain unidentified, and the problem of their identification suggests that they did not publish separate poetry volumes. 34. This is true of all of Agnes’s songs throughout the poem. 35. In his biography of the poet, Japp describes Williams’s poetry as ‘really dramatic, though she loved to abide by the lyric form’ (1892: 580). 36. The narrator highlights the family’s ancestry, describing what once had been the family’s shield underneath which ‘one had carved; / With mingled vanity and insolence / “Here dined with Owain Prynne, King James the Small”’ (Williams 1867c: 296). 37. This is very different from the serial ending of a novel like Reade’s Griffith Gaunt, which brings the events of the novel to a neat conclusion, even outlining the future success of Mrs Neville’s descendants. 38. See Aaron (2013) for an exploration of the poem’s gothic elements and the Welsh Gothic more broadly. 39. For Williams, the name Sadie and its variant spellings was central to her identity in a way that her other names, such as those given to her by her parents, were not: ‘the given name of Sarah is described as uncomfortable and imposed; the inherited name, Miss Williams, is seen as applied to her by default in the absence of another candidate’ (Brennan 2003: 130). I read the imposed identity referenced here as referring to what the era expected of its female poets or poetesses. 40. In her work on the poet, Brennan notes that [f]or Williams, an understanding of the compulsion to write involves a fusion between persona and poetic identity. Separation occurs at the level of the identity over which she has no control, the imposed identity which is seen by the world at large, and which allows for no independent ‘voice’ to emerge. (2003: 130–1)

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41. The lyric supports an interpretation of the speaker of as a poetess figure; specifically, the dying poetess modelled on Sappho and Germaine de Staël’s Corrine, or Italy. For example, the recognition that others will finish her song echoes the conclusion of Madame du Staël’s Corrine in which ‘one with wings’ reads the weary and dying Corrine’s final message. Moreover, this allusion to others finishing her tale is reminiscent of the elegies that women poets often wrote for their foremothers. An example of such elegies is Barrett Browning’s ‘L.E.L.’s Last Question’ (1836), which finishes Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s weary tale.

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Conclusion: Where Do We Go From Here?

The history of nineteenth-century literature cannot be separated from the rise of new media and the expansion of the periodical market to encompass all facets of the era’s mass readership from rural readers of the local press to urban working-class audiences and those reading in middle-class parlours. By the middle of the century, ‘[p]rint was proliferating in exponential numbers more cheaply and more rapidly than before . . . and there was a literate, eager readership’ looking for print material to fill their leisure time (Chapman and Ehnes 2014: 8).1 The literary periodical – be it a weekly like Household Words or a monthly like the Cornhill – represents one response to the rapid rise of and appetite for the periodical press as publishers adapted their catalogues in response to the evolving and overlapping social, cultural and literary forms of the period. The changing demands of Victorian readers and publishers determined the market available to poets. If poets wanted access to the mass readership (and related financial opportunities) of Dickens, Eliot and Trollope, they had to publish their poems in the periodical press alongside the era’s popular serial fiction. Each chapter in this book has explored the implications of this shift for Victorian poetry and poetics, concluding that periodical poems do not sit apart from the canon of Victorian literature and poetry. Rather, the poetry of the periodical press is the poetry of the Victorian period. In other words, to paraphrase and slightly revise Hughes’s seminal argument (2007: 91), periodical poems should matter to all those interested in Victorian poetry whether they care for periodicals or not. Indeed, with the rise of digital projects related to Victorian periodicals and poetry, we can no longer ignore the presence of poetry in the era’s popular press. The new media of the twenty-first century has allowed scholars to access and claim space for periodical poetry in a way that was seemingly impossible prior to the digital turn.

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Going Digital: Accessing Periodical Poetry Over the past decade, the new media of the Victorian period, including its periodicals and illustrations, has gone digital. Victorian texts, including the era’s periodicals, are now more accessible than ever. As I have noted elsewhere, Google Books includes ‘over 1.6 million books published in nineteenth-century Britain’, while British Periodicals (ProQuest) archives 6.1 million pages of British periodicals from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries (Chapman and Ehnes 2014: 15). The HathiTrust Digital Library boasts over 15 million digitised titles with 37 per cent (or approximately 5 million) held in the public domain; 19th Century UK Periodicals (Gale) currently provides access to 2.1 million periodical pages (with the goal of 6 million pages digitised upon completion of the project); and the British Newspaper Archive provides access to over 21 million pages dating from the 1700s with more added every day. In addition to these mass-digitisation projects, curated resources like Dickens Journals Online and The Yellow Nineties Online provide students with access to scholarly editions of Victorian periodicals. Patrick Leary (2005), Sean Latham and Robert Scholes (2006), and Andrew Stauffer (2011a) have all written about this shift in the availability of primary sources, and as Leary points out in ‘Googling the Victorians’, the mass digitisation of nineteenthcentury literature has transformed ‘our everyday working relationship to the Victorian past, a relationship now crucially mediated by digital technology’ (2005: 73).2 The possibilities and limitations of digital representation have changed the way scholars can access, view and interact with Victorian literature. My own research was inspired by an unanticipated encounter with a digitised text when, in the autumn of 2007, a Google Books search for information about the periodical contexts of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem ‘L.E.L.’s Last Question’ led me to its reproduction in a digitised copy of the Ladies’ Pocket Magazine. While I still needed to access a physical copy of the periodical in order to get a sense of its size and material composition (e.g. the thickness of the pages), the initial digital search enabled me to uncover what Leary describes as a series of ‘unexpected connections to both information and people’ (2005: 74) – connections that may not have been otherwise noted due to the rarity and lack of scholarly interest in the Ladies’ Pocket Magazine. The digital turn in the scholarship of Victorian literature has caused what Stauffer describes as ‘a basic change to our discipline’ (2011b: 64), and I would argue that this turn towards digitisation and the rise of the digital humanities in Victorian studies has been – and will

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continue to be – central to the development of the emerging field of periodical poetry studies as the search functions and metadata generated by digital tools such as the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry (Chapman 2010) begin to guide researchers ‘toward[s] new patterns and connections that’ can only become ‘visible through the power of digital processing: reading by machinery’ (Stauffer 2011b: 64).3 Digital resources provide ways to read, analyse and engage with the large datasets necessary to analyse periodical poems, and thus address one of the main methodological problems that arises when working with periodical poetry. Open-access resources, such as Periodical Poetry Index and the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry, aid in the collection of quantitative data and the identification of patterns within a periodical; support intertextual analysis across periodical titles; and record important bibliographic information. While digital databases/indexes provide access to digitally mediated copies of periodical poems, projects such as Natalie Houston’s Visual Page as Interface, Understanding Victorian Poetic Style, and even The Field of Victorian Poetry demonstrate how digital tools could help future scholars of periodical poetry address some of the key issues raised in this book. The Visual Page, for instance, proposes to analyse the visual as opposed to linguistic components of digitised poetry, a method particularly useful for large-scale analysis of the visual presence and function of poetry in the periodical press, while Understanding Victorian Poetic Style ‘examines the linguistic codes of poetic form’ (see http://nmhouston.com/research). The results of Houston’s latter project will have major implications for the study of periodical poetry as a distinct form. The methodologies developed by Houston anticipate and provide models for the next stage of digital humanities work on Victorian periodical poetry: the development of tools designed to use and interrogate the datasets offered by the digital archive with a focus on the poetic forms and material features of nineteenth-century texts. However, even as these digital resources provide access and suggest new avenues of inquiry, those using them must ‘engage critically with’ both the literary content archived ‘and the digital resources’ that reproduce such content be it newspapers or pages from the literary periodical (Mussell 2012: 1). As Leary notes, while the ‘extraordinary power, speed, and ubiquity of online searching has . . . becom[e] increasingly central to the progress of Victorian research, and to our working lives as students of the nineteenth century’ (Leary 2005: 74), successful digital scholarship still depends on the scholar’s ability to follow a set of best practices for online research and teaching.4 The

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continuing interrogation of the digital archive and the searches performed within must consider what the archive replicates, the kind of data it produces, and how that data is mediated. Such questions have the potential to contribute to a richer understanding of the canon and periodical poetry as a genre. Each entry in the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry, for example, raises new questions about the presentation of the digitised page, the information included in the index, and what information, if any, can be left out. As James Mussell suggests, ‘[b]y transforming periodicals into something else, something digital, we create new ways that they can be interrogated, which in turn, help us to understand both the surviving print periodicals and the culture that produced them’ (2016: 17). In the study of periodical poetry, access to a digitised version of a periodical issue or volume (such as the material available through the HathiTrust) allows researchers to ‘flip through’ the periodical and read the poem intertextually, considering its placement and the texts that surround it. Other projects invite a different form of interrogation and understanding. The previously mentioned Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry features scanned page images in its index (when available), removing the periodical poem from its deeply embedded historical context.5 In doing so, the database creates a stable, open access resource that prompts a new series of questions, ones that are inherently different than the questions asked while reading a periodical in the archives. Such projects are not meant to replace the periodical and its material copies; rather, they provide alternative ways to access and interrogate the dataset of periodical poetry in a way that was impossible before the digital turn. The discoverability of periodical poems and their authors through the database’s search features allows researchers to uncover new connections, networks and even a new canon of Victorian poetry.6 The connections, patterns and networks uncovered through the kind of digital searches the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry facilitates complicate the current history of Victorian poetry and poetics by re-centring the periodical poet as an active participant in nineteenth-century literary culture. Thus, to adapt Mussell’s analysis of digitisation for the field of periodical poetry, while searching databases of nineteenth-century periodicals and poetry for particular themes, authors or even genres will ‘never be exhaustive’ or replace the practice of reading the original periodical, the results that such searches produce fruitfully juxtapose canonical and non-canonical poets, ‘complicating dominant historical narratives’ of Victorian poetry (2016: 26). These moments of juxtaposition, whether they

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are found using digital tools, traditional archival research, or – most likely – a combination of both, are at the core of research on poetry and the periodical press. Studying periodical poetry in all its various permutations and forms requires, to quote Levine, ‘a willingness to observe and follow the impact of different kinds of forms on one another’ (2015: 132).

‘One Word More’ on Periodical Poetry The recognition by scholars such as Florence Boos, Andrew Hobbs, Linda K. Hughes, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra and Kathryn Ledbetter that popular periodical poetry plays an important part in the history of Victorian poetry has irrevocably altered the field of Victorian studies. This project represents a direct response to their work and, more specifically, to Hughes’s call for the study of periodical poetry over a decade ago in ‘What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies’ (Hughes 2007). While several articles have been written on the topic since that time, at the time of writing this conclusion, a book-length study of periodical poetry and mid-Victorian literary culture has yet to be written. Indeed, essays concerning periodical poetry published in venues other than working-class or specialised journals are only now being included in literary companions to the period, despite the overwhelming evidence that middle-class periodicals printed poetry that overlaps with the traditional canon of Victorian literature. Poetry remains the ‘least studied’ of periodical genres with ‘poets’ motives for periodical publication . . . being the least understood’ (Peterson 2016: 85). While this book begins to address this gap, there is much more work to be done.

Notes 1. A cursory search of the Waterloo Database of Victorian Periodicals indicates that over 9,000 periodicals of every genre from newspapers and quarterlies to literary monthlies circulated in the 1860s. In this list, there are numerous literary periodicals, some lasting for decades such as the Cornhill and Good Words, and some lasting no more than a year. The Shilling Magazine, for example, only published a total of thirteen numbers between May 1865 and 1866 (North 2009). 2. Stauffer makes a similar comment five years later, noting that increasingly ‘our textual encounters’ in Victorian studies ‘are mediated by digital technologies’ (2011b: 64).

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3. While the possibilities of the digital processing discussed by Stauffer are important and ever-expanding, the digital turn has another, more prosaic implication for the future of Victorian studies and, in particular, research on the periodical press. Speaking as someone who works on periodicals and lives over four hours away from the nearest archives, to me digital archives are an important supplemental and primary resource. Because of limited resources within institutions, open access archives are needed now more than ever. Smaller institutions simply cannot afford the large subscription databases. It is here that projects such as the HathiTrust, the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry, and Dickens Journals Online will play a crucial role in future research. This will require periodical studies as a discipline to review our relationship with and valuation of the archival object as the original and best version of any given text. We need to think critically about the relationship between digital resources, periodicals shelved in the archive, and periodical studies as we move forward. 4. Stauffer (2011a) and Latham and Scholes (2006) make similar arguments though their articles focus more on the best practices required for scholarly digital archives. 5. Moreover, the decision to scan and locate page images within the database creates a stable archive not subject to the accessibility of online resources, which makes it a valuable teaching resource. 6. I should disclose that I was a research assistant for this project while completing my doctoral work at the University of Victoria.

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Appendix: Biographies of Significant Contributors, Illustrators and Publishers

Biographical notes are based on a synthesis of the information available in reference works such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, supplemented by my own observations about the periodical contributions of each figure. Arnold, Matthew (1822–88) Arnold wrote most of his poetry by the age of thirty. His first success as a poet occurred while he was still a student at Rugby: he won the prize for English verse in 1840. Nine years later, Arnold published his first volume of poetry, The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, under the pseudonym A. ‘Empedocles in Etna’ (considered by scholars to be his most accomplished long poem) followed in 1852. Best known for his periodical pieces on culture, Arnold rarely appeared in the periodical press as a poet. Arnold only appears once in the periodicals considered in this book, and he rarely appears in the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry, which covers a slightly different set of periodicals. Source: Miles 1892–7, vol. 5: 85–102; Collini 2008. Barrett Browning, Elizabeth (1806–61) Barrett Browning published in the periodical press throughout her career beginning with the New Monthly Magazine in 1821 and ending with the Cornhill in 1860s. For a discussion of Barrett Browning’s contributions to the Cornhill, see Chapter 2 in this volume. Other periodical poems by Barrett Browning include ‘The Cry of the Children’ (published in the August 1843 issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine) and ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ (published in the Liberty Bell, an American abolitionist gift book, for 1848). Source: Stone 2004; Brown et al. 2006. Blackie, John Stuart (1809–95) Born in Scotland, Blackie was well-known as a scholar of German and Greek. He held several positions within the Scottish university system throughout the 1850s, including Greek chair at the University of Edinburgh. He was an advocate for education, participating in the movement to abolish the Test Act, which prevented those outside the Church of Scotland from holding chairs in Scottish

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universities, and he supported women’s higher education. Walter Whyte argues that Blackie’s popularity comes from his taste for ‘short lyrics [and] light, rollicking lays’ (in Miles 1892–7, vol. 4: 215). These lays are the type of poetry that Blackie published in Good Words. He also published a volume of religious poetry in 1876 titled Songs of Religion and Life. Source: Miles 1892–7, vol. 4: 213–16; Borthwick 2004. Bradbury and Evans (fl. 1830–1900) By the 1840s, Bradbury and Evans were known as the foremost publishers of Victorian fiction, counting Dickens and Thackeray among the authors they worked with. During this period, the publishing firm also took control of Punch, one of the most well-known periodicals of the nineteenth century. As Punch’s publishers, Bradbury and Evans established a tradition of weekly dinners, drawing many of the major authors and illustrators of the day into the periodical’s circle. This literary and visual network would influence the material published in subsequent projects, including Once a Week, which rose from the ashes of Household Words in 1859. By the 1870s, the firm ended their involvement with Once a Week, leaving the periodical market and publishing behind. Except for Punch and a few other titles, the firm of Bradbury and Evans returned to its roots as a printer. For a detailed history of Bradbury and Evans’s role in the production of Household Words and Once a Week, see Chapter 1 in this volume. Source: Dixon 1991; North 2009. Brooks, Shirley (1816–74) Brooks was a successful dramatist, novelist and periodical contributor. During his life, he was professionally associated with the Morning Chronicle, the Illustrated London News, the Literary Gazette and the Home News, among numerous other periodicals. However, he is perhaps best known for his association with Punch and his comic writing. He began contributing to the comic periodical in 1851, becoming the periodical’s editor in 1870 after the death of Mark Lemon. Through Punch, Brooks strengthened his relationship with Bradbury and Evans (the publisher of both Punch and Once a Week), and he was part of the team that Bradbury and Evans brought over to Once a Week for the initial launch of the periodical. Source: Miles 1892–7, vol. 9: 375–8; Boase 2004. Browne, Hablôt K. (1815–82) Browne is best known for his professional relationship with Charles Dickens, which began in 1836 when Browne took over the illustrations for Pickwick Papers. It was during this period that he adopted the pseudonym Phiz. Over the course of his career, Browne would produce 740 original illustrations for Dickens, working with the author for ten of Dickens’s novels. Although Browne is often referenced in relation to Dickens’s fiction, he also contributed illustrations to periodicals, including Ainsworth’s Magazine, the Illuminated Magazine, Life, Once a Week, the Illustrated Gazette, St James’s Magazine, Judy and Punch. With the rise of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic in

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the late 1850s and 1860s, Browne’s illustrations, which he modelled on the verbal and visual satire of the Hogarthian tradition, fell out of style. Source: Cohen 1980; Patten and Lester 2004. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward Robert (1831–91) Lytton was the only son of the early Victorian novelist Bulwer-Lytton. He published his first volume of poetry under the pseudonym Owen Meredith in 1855. Contemporary reviewers commented that his verse seemed influenced by that of Robert Browning. In 1860, Lytton published the first of several experimental poetic works, a verse novel titled Lucille. He continued writing poetry until his death. Source: Washbrook 2004. Call, Wathen Mark Wilks (1817–90) Call began a career in the Church after receiving degrees from Cambridge. He resigned in 1856 on conscientious grounds. The following decades of his life were devoted to philosophy and literature. He published his literary work in several periodicals, including the Leader (under G. H. Lewes), the Westminster, the Theological Review and the Fortnightly. He also published two poetry volumes. Alex Japp suggests that Call’s lack of popularity was due to the religious and political treatises included in these volumes (Miles 1892–7, vol. 4: 525). Japp notes that ‘the beautiful poem of “Manoli”’ (525), which Call published in the Cornhill, depicts the social and political conditions against which Call advocated. Source: Miles 1892–7, vol. 4: 523–6. Craig, Isa (1831–1903) Craig began her publishing career in Scotland in periodicals such as the Scotsman, which established her public identity as the poet Isa, and the Waverley, which introduced her to Bessie Rayner Parkes. By 1857, Craig’s popular, poetic reputation was well established through her periodical contributions and her first poetry volume, Poems by Isa. In 1859, Craig’s reputation grew when her poem for the centenary of Robert Burns won a poetry competition. Her biographers (both now and in the nineteenth century) consider this her greatest accolade, and it informed her popular reputation into the 1860s. Craig was also a central figure in several important literary and social networks from the established periodical culture of Scotland to the Langham Place Group to Alexander Strahan’s stable of authors, editors and periodicals. She relied on her evolving network of literary friends, including figures like Christina Rossetti, Mary Howitt, R. Monckton Milnes, Bessie Rayner Parkes and Emily Davies, to both publish her poetry and contribute to her editorial endeavours. Between 1858 and 1868, Craig published twenty-three poems in the English Woman’s Journal, Good Words and the Argosy, averaging about 2.5 periodical poems per year. Note that this total does not include her numerous contributions to the Scotsman, where she was regularly employed from 1853 to 1857, and the Waverley. Source: Wilson 1877; Bayne 2004; Chapman 2010.

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Craik, Dinah Mulock (1826–87) Craik is best known for her novel John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), which was one of the period’s best sellers. The novel became closely associated with Craik’s literary identity, a fact emphasised by the frequent appearance of the signature ‘By the author of John Halifax, Gentleman’ before her periodical poems. Craik’s writing is defined by her commitment to Victorian middle-class Christian values such as self-sacrifice. These values were informed by her Baptist background (Craik’s father was a fundamentalist Baptist preacher). During the early stages of her career, she published poems in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, and pieces of short fiction in publications such as Bentley’s Miscellany and Fraser’s Magazine. In the 1860s, Craik was a frequent contributor to Good Words, publishing twenty-nine poems in the periodical between 1860 and 1875. She also published three serial novels in the periodical: Mistress and Maid (1862), The Woman’s Kingdom (1868) and Young Mrs. Jardine (1879). Though Craik’s work largely supported middle-class values, her last three novels take up women’s issues, including the Married Women’s Property Act and a woman’s right to marital separation. Source: Mitchell 2004; Brown et al. 2006; Chapman 2010. Greenwell, Dora [Dorothy] (1821–82) A deeply spiritual person, Greenwell was raised as a Protestant though she later converted to Catholicism. Her biographers all note her interest in the mystical elements of religion. In many ways, her biography is that of the poetess: her aptitude for languages, philosophy and poetry developed at an early age; she was largely self-taught, though she had a Scottish governess; and she was an invalid. Moreover, according to her biographers, her poetry contains ‘a passionate throb or thrill of devotion, of spiritual elevation and expectancy’ (Miles 1892–7, vol. 7: 344). Greenwell’s writings tend to address religious themes, but she also wrote in favour of women’s issues, including women’s employment and education. In the 1850s, Greenwell developed close relationships with Jean Ingelow and Christina Rossetti. As a periodical poet, Greenwell was prolific, publishing sixty poems in the periodicals indexed by the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry between 1850 and 1880. Source: Miles 1892–7, vol. 7: 341–58; Mullin 2004; Brown et al. 2006; Chapman 2010. Harper, Mr (unidentified). Mr Harper contributed twenty-nine poems to Dickens’s Household Words: the most of any poet aside from Adelaide Anne Procter and Edmund Ollier (Lohrli 1973: 294). Despite his constant presence in the periodical, there is ‘no clue in the Office Book as to his identity’, and he cannot be the poet William Harper (1806–57), who published his periodical-length poems in the Manchester Courier (Lohrli 1973: 294). Whoever he was, Harper’s poems are particularly well suited for Household Words. They tend to address social issues, aligning his poetry with the consciousness-raising mandate of the periodical. Source: Lohrli 1973; Chapman 2010.

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Herschel, John Frederick William (1792–1871) Herschel was one of the chief scientific thinkers of the early nineteenth century. In 1813, he was elected as a member of the Royal Society based on his work in mathematics. Several years later, Herschel helped to found the Astronomical Society (later known as the Royal Astronomical Society), and, from 1833 to 1838, he set up an observatory five miles from Cape Town where he studied the patterns of southern nebulae and the location of stars in the southern hemisphere. Upon his return to England, Herschel was named a baronet. In the later years of his life, Herschel produced a number of written treatises on his scientific views, including a compilation of essays originally published in periodical publications such as the Cornhill and Good Words. He published his full translation of Homer’s Iliad in 1866. Source: Crowe 2004. Hopkins, Manley (1818–97) Manley Hopkins was the father of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Little else is known about him. He was an ‘average adjuster in marine insurance’ and acted as ‘the consulgeneral in London for Hawaii’ (White 2009). The only record of his poetry career comes from the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry (Chapman 2010). According to the database’s records, he published nine poems under the pseudonym Berni in Once Week between December 1859 and October 1863. Hunt, Leigh (1784–1859) Hunt began publishing poems at a young age to great success. While his initial forays into publishing focused on singlevolume collections sold through subscription, he soon turned to the periodical press, publishing his poems in periodicals that range from the political (the Morning Chronicle) to the literary (the Monthly Mirror and the Poetical Registrar). The majority of Hunt’s early career, however, was defined by his editorship of the Examiner, a leading liberal journal with ‘reformist opinions’ (North 2009; Roe 2009). Hunt was editor from 1808 to 1829. During this period, his political writings for the Examiner got him in trouble when he was convicted of libel in late 1812 and imprisoned for two years. Upon his release, Hunt gradually transformed the Examiner, keeping its liberal focus while building up its literary content. For the next several decades, Hunt remained at the centre of literary culture, cultivating friendships with some of the era’s greatest poets, including John Keats and Percy Shelley. By the time Hunt met Dickens, he was nearing the end of his career. Hunt contributed four poems to Household Words between 1850 and 1852. He also contributed several prose pieces. Source: Lohrli 1973; Roe 2009. Ingelow, Jean (1820–97) Though rarely found in modern anthologies of Victorian poetry, Ingelow was popular among mid-Victorian readers who considered her on a par with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti. In the 1850s, Ingelow published two anonymous works: her first volume of poems, A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings

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(1850) and her first novel, Allerton and Dreux (1851). She also published a series of didactic children’s stories under the pseudonym Orris in the Youth Magazine, an Evangelical monthly periodical that she also briefly edited. However, Ingelow’s second poetry volume, Poems (1863), is the one that defined her poetic career. It drew attention to her as a poet and established her reputation, going through thirty editions over the course of her lifetime. Ingelow contributed to the periodical press on a fairly regular basis. Aside from the Argosy, she contributed sixteen poems to Good Words between 1863 and 1870, and one poem to Atalanta in 1890. Source: Miles 1892–7, vol. 7: 385–416; Hickok 2004; Brown et al. 2006; Chapman 2010. Leech, John (1817–64) Leech was a humourist artist and illustrator of the same school as Hablôt K. Browne. The most important moment in Leech’s career occurred in 1840 when he became associated with the comic periodical Punch. Leech contributed regularly to Punch for the next twenty years, becoming an important member of Bradbury and Evans’s stable of illustrators. This relationship led to Leech’s contributions to Once a Week. He also composed illustrations for the Illustrated London News. Leech, like many other Victorian illustrators, worked with Dickens, illustrating all of Dickens’s Christmas books. Source: Houfe 2004. Leighton, Frederic (1830–96) Leighton contributed illustrations to only one periodical: the Cornhill. His work for the Cornhill is considered his most important as an illustrator, and it includes his illustrations for George Eliot’s Romola and his rendering of the great god Pan for Barrett Browning’s ‘A Musical Instrument’. As a painter, Leighton had success in the 1850s. His painting Cimabue’s Madonna Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence (displayed at the Royal Academy’s exhibition for 1855) was purchased by Queen Victoria. Despite this early success, he remained an outsider in the British art world, rejecting the academy’s interest in narrative paintings. Instead, his art drew on the principles of early aestheticism, privileging ambiguity and indeterminate subjects. He later became interested in exploring ‘the classical impulse in British painting’ (Newall 2004). Leighton finally became a member of the Royal Academy of Art in 1868. Source: Goldman 2004; Newall 2004. Lucas, Samuel (1818–68) Prior to his appointment as editor for Once a Week, Lucas edited a Tory weekly backed by Disraeli and other leading conservatives called The Press. In 1855, he began writing reviews for The Times. Over the course of several reviews – ‘Illustrated Books’ (The Times, 24 December 1858: 10), ‘Mr. Tenniel’s Lallah Rookh’ (The Times, 31 October 1860: 9), ‘Modern English Caricature’ (The Times, 2 January 1863: 8), and ‘More Gift Books’ (The Times, 2 January 1865: 12) – Lucas outlined his theories of illustration, establishing him as an authority on the subject. He brought this reputation with him to Once a Week. When

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his editorship at Once a Week ended in 1865, Lucas founded and edited The Shilling Magazine, which is remembered today for publishing an illustrated version of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Amor Mundi’ (1865). Source: Buckler 1952; Savory 1983; Coohill 2004; North 2009. MacIntosh, Mrs (unidentified) Mrs MacIntosh published nine poems in Household Words between October 1853 and May 1859. Her final contribution to Household Words appears to act as a bridge between Dickens’s old periodical and his new venture All the Year Round. She was even invited to contribute to the latter periodical’s first Christmas issue (Lohrli 1973: 350), suggesting that Dickens saw her work as part of his periodical’s brand. Source: Lorhli 1973; Chapman 2010. MacWhirter [McWhirter], J. W. (1837–1911) MacWhirter was a Scottish landscape painter born in Edinburgh. In 1851, he became a student at the Trustees’ Academy in Edinburgh. His classmates included William McTaggart, W. Q. Orchardson and John Pettie. All four would later contribute illustrations to Good Words. Source: McWhirter 2004. Macleod, Norman (1812–72) Macleod studied divinity in Edinburgh, becoming a minister of the Church of Scotland in 1838. Twenty years later, the University of Glasgow awarded Macleod a doctorate of divinity (D.D.). By this time, Macleod was known ‘as one of the most eloquent preachers in Scotland’ (Hamilton 2004). Macleod balanced his ministerial life with his writing and editing career. It was through his ministerial role that he met Alexander Strahan, initiating the relationship that would lead to Macleod’s editorship of Good Words from 1860 to his death in 1872. Prior to his editorship of Good Words, Macleod was the editor of the Edinburgh Christian Review (1849–60). For further information on Macleod and his relationship with the publisher Alexander Strahan, see Chapter 3 in this volume. Source: Hamilton 2004; North 2009. Mahony, Francis Sylvester (1804–66) Mahony was both a satirist and a journalist. In his youth, he spent two years as a noviciate in a seminary in Paris and then went on to study philosophy at the Jesuits’ College in Rome (Lee 2004). By 1830, Mahony was working as the prefect for studies at the Jesuits’ College. However, after a night of drinking, Mahony’s employment with the college and his association with the Jesuit order came to an end. He turned his attention to literary pursuits and sent his first article written by ‘Father Prout’ to Fraser’s Magazine in April 1834. He based this pseudonym on a clergyman from his childhood, and over time, Father Prout became a fully realised character developed in the pages of the periodical press. From Fraser’s Magazine, Mahony went on to write for Bentley’s Miscellany in the 1840s. He contributed to The Globe, the Cornhill and the Athenaeum in the 1860s. Source: Lee 2004.

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Munby, Arthur (1828–1910) Like most of the periodical poets mentioned in this study, Munby’s poetry (he published six poetry volumes) was celebrated during the Victorian period and then faded into obscurity. In the 1850s, he participated in the Working Men’s College, and he taught there until the 1880s. It was through the college that he met several important literary figures from the period, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley. Today, Munby is mainly considered important for his diary, which covers the period from 1859 to 1898 and documents the social changes that define the Victorian period. Munby published twenty poems in Once a Week between 31 March 1860 and 28 October 1865 and three poems in Macmillan’s Magazine between January 1862 and August 1865. Source: Stanley 2004; Chapman 2010. Ollier, Edmund (1826–86) Ollier grew up in a family connected with the literary elite of the early nineteenth century. His father, Charles Ollier, published the works of Percy Shelley, John Keats, Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb (among others). Of all the poets included in this book, Ollier is, perhaps, the truest periodical poet, publishing the vast majority of his work in the periodical press with only one poetry volume to his name despite his literary connections. His work appeared in periodicals such as Ainsworth’s Magazine, Chambers Edinburgh Journal, Household Words (where he published 34 poems) and All the Year Round – to name but a few. Source: Lohrli 1973; Robinson 2004. Procter, Adelaide Anne (1825–64) Procter grew up in a literary household that entertained William Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Tennyson, the Rossettis, the Thackerays and the Dickenses. One family friend, Fanny Kemble, states that Procter looked like a poet seated among all these famous writers (Brown et al. 2006). Procter published her first poem at the age of eighteen in Heath’s Book of Beauty. Procter’s biography, like that of Greenwell’s, fits the narrative of the poetess: the gifted young poet, who naturally and spontaneously produces verse and demonstrates her genius – poetic and otherwise – at an early age. However, Procter truly began her publishing career in Household Words, sending her poems to Dickens (a family friend) under the pseudonym Mary Berwick. She would eventually publish seventy-four poems in Household Words and another seven in the periodical’s successor All the Year Round, making her the most published poet in Dickens’s periodicals. She also published poems in the Cornhill, Good Words, and the English Woman’s Journal. Source: Miles 1892–7, vol. 7: 358–77; Lohrli 1973; Gregory 2004; Brown et al. 2006; Mason 2006; Chapman 2010. Procter, Bryan Waller (1781–1874) Procter was a poet, lawyer and the father of Adelaide Anne Procter. He earned a reputation as a song writer under the pseudonym Barry Cornwall, and his biographer suggests that if any of Procter’s poems are ‘to hold their own for a long time yet’, it

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is ‘partly on their own account, and partly because they have had the good fortune to secure singularly effective setting at the hands of able musicians’ (Miles 1892–7, vol. 2: 352). Procter published his poetry in a series of five poetry volumes as well as in the periodical press. Throughout his life, Procter befriended London’s literary elite, including Leigh Hunt, Charles Dickens and Robert Browning. His friendship with Dickens was such that Procter submitted his poetry to Household Words without asking for payment – Dickens paid him anyway. He contributed a total of five poems to Household Words between April 1850 and May 1854. He figured much more prominently in All the Year Round where he published sixteen poems (often two per issue) between April 1859 and June 1859. All but one of these poems was part of the lyric cycle ‘Trade Songs’. Source: Miles 1892–7, vol. 2: 351–62; Lohrli 1973; Sambrook 2007; Chapman 2010. Rossetti, Christina G. (1830–94) Rossetti had a successful career as a poet in the nineteenth century though she was less popular than her contemporaries Dora Greenwell, Jean Ingelow and Adelaide Anne Procter. Rossetti became involved in the periodical market early in her career, contributing poems under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyn to the short-lived Pre-Raphaelite journal the Germ in the early 1850s. She also published her poetry in the Athenaeum, Macmillan’s Magazine, Once a Week, and later, in response to a request from Isa Craig, the Argosy. Rossetti came to know Craig through her involvement with the Portfolio Society, which was organised by the Langham Place Group. Source: Duguid 2004 and Brown et al. 2006. Sandys, Frederick (1829–1904) Sandys only produced thirty black-andwhite illustrations over the course of his career, a relatively small number when considered against the output of his contemporaries. His best work appeared in the periodicals of the era with the greatest number of illustrations appearing in Once a Week. Like many of his contemporaries, Sandys was a painter, and he exhibited his paintings every two years at the Royal Academy from 1851 to 1886. Sandys’s art was influenced by German artists, especially that of Alfred Rethel (1816–59), and he also adopted Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetic-erotic mode of representing women, which is perhaps best seen in his illustration for Christina Rossetti’s ‘If’. Source: Elzea 2004; Goldman 2004. Smith, George (1824–1901) Smith’s father established the publishing firm Smith and Elder in 1816. As an apprentice publisher in the 1830s, Smith formed a dining club that included G. H. Lewes and Father Prout (Francis Mahony). These relationships would later influence the contents of the Cornhill. By the time Smith took over the firm in 1846, the publishing house had cultivated a reputation for finely produced books. One of the first books published under Smith’s leadership was William Thackeray’s Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846),

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anticipating their later collaboration. See Chapter 2 in this volume for details about Smith and Thackeray’s work on the Cornhill. Source: Schmidt 1983, 1995. Sykes, Godfrey (1824–66) Sykes was a student of the Sheffield School of Design (a provincial school designed by the government to teach craftsmen their trade). Sykes received training in metalworking, and his designs were often influenced by trends in neo-classical art. He is best known for designing the cover of the Cornhill. Source: Graves 2004. Teulon, Harriet Mary (1825–55) Teulon contributed poetry to Good Words under the pseudonym H.M.T. The Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry suggests that the Harriet Mary Teulon who published in Good Words was the sister of Samuel Sanders Teulon, who, somewhat confusingly, married a woman named Harriet Mary (née Sanders) who was also a poet. See the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry (Chapman 2010) for further information about H.M.T. and other littleknown periodical poets. Trevelyan, G. O. (1838–1928) The G. O. Trevelyan who published in Macmillan’s Magazine is most likely Sir George Otto Trevelyan, second baronet. There are several pieces of evidence to support this identification. First, the signature to the poem ‘The Cambridge University Boat of 1860’ identifies the author as belonging to Trinity College, Cambridge; George Otto Trevelyan attended that college. In addition, there is evidence that the baronet had a publishing relationship with Macmillan’s Magazine, contributing The Competition Wallah (a serial work of fictional letters written from the perspective of an Indian civil servant) to the periodical in 1864. He was also known to write poetry. Source: Jackson 2004. Watson, J. D. (1832–92) Watson is primarily known as a narrative figure painter. In 1860, he illustrated a Dalziel brothers’ edition of Pilgrim’s Progress, which made his reputation as an illustrator. He contributed illustrations to a variety of periodicals, including middle-class ventures like Good Words (to which he was a regular contributor), The Graphic, London Society and working-class periodicals such as the British Workman and the Servants’ Magazine. Source: Goldman 2004; Reynolds 2004. Williams, Sarah (1837/8–68) Williams was born in London to Welsh parents. Though Williams lived and received her education in London, attending Queen’s College, Harley Street, she attributed her poetic abilities to her Welsh roots. Her introduction to the prominent publisher Alexander Strahan secured her a place in several of his popular literary periodicals, including Good Words, Sunday Magazine and the

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Argosy. All of Williams’s periodical poetry appeared under the pseudonym Sadie. Shortly after the death of her father in January 1868, Williams underwent a surgical procedure intended to treat her cancer. The surgery was not successful, and Williams died that April. Strahan facilitated the posthumous publication of Williams’s only poetry volume, Twilight Hours: A Legacy of Verse, later that year. Williams published five poems in Good Words and four poems in the Argosy. Source: Brennan 2003; Jay 2004.

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Works Cited

Periodical Poems A. F. (1859) ‘Black Monday’, John Leech (illus.), Once a Week, 1 (29 October), p. 360. A. M. (1860) ‘The Return of the Fire-Fly’, C. Keene (illus.), Once a Week, 2 (14 January), p. 54. Arnold, Matthew (1860) ‘Men of Genius’, Cornhill, 2 (July), p. 33. B. (1860) ‘Prayer’, Good Words, 1 (February), p. 80. Barrett Browning, Elizabeth (1836) ‘L.E.L.’s Last Question’, Ladies’ Pocket Magazine, pp. 89–91. Barrett Browning, Elizabeth (1850) ‘Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave’, Household Words, 2 (26 October), p. 99. Barrett Browning, Elizabeth (1860) ‘A Musical Instrument’, Fredric Leighton (illus.), Cornhill, 2 (July), pp. 84–5. Berni [Gerard Manley Hopkins] (1860) ‘The “Poste Restante”. – A Reverie’, Once a Week, 2 (23 June), p. 622. Benson, Ralph A. (1859a) ‘Young Nimrod’s First Love’, John Leech (illus.), Once a Week, 1 (19 November), pp. 437–8. Benson, Ralph A. (1859b) ‘Bought and Sold’, Hablôt K. Browne (illus.), Once a Week, 1 (10 December), pp. 492–3. Blackie, John S. (1862), ‘How Wondrous Are Thy Works, O God!’, W. P. Burton (illus.), Good Words, 3 (September), pp. 521–2. Bolton, Sarah T. (1860) ‘The Betrayed’, M. J. Lawless (illus.), Once a Week, 3 (August), pp. 154–5. Brontë, Emily (1860) ‘The Outcast Mother’, Cornhill, 1 (May), p. 616. Brooks, Shirley (1859) ‘Once a Week’, John Leech (illus.), Once a Week, 1 (2 July), pp. 1–2. Buchanan, William (1861) ‘An Artisan’s Story’, John Dawson Watson (illus.), Good Words, 2 (April), pp. 208–10. Call, W. M. W (1862) ‘Manoli’, Frederick Sandys (illus.), Cornhill, 6 (September), pp. 346–50. Craig, Isa (1862) ‘The Christmas Child’, Thomas Morten (illus.), Good Words, 3 (3 January), pp. 55–6.

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Craig, Isa (1865) ‘On Board the Argosy’, Argosy, 1 (January), pp. 37–8. [Craik, Dinah Mulock] (1860a) ‘Our Father’s Business: Holman Hunt’s Picture of “Christ in the Temple”’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 2 (May), pp. 40–1. [Craik, Dinah Mulock] (1860b) ‘At the Sea-Side’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 2 (September), pp. 393–4. Craik, Dinah Mulock (1861a) ‘The Coming of Spring’, J. W. McWhirter (illus.), Good Words, 2 (April), p. 224. [Craik, Dinah Mulock] (1861b) ‘Year after Year: A Love Song’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 4 (June), p. 138. Craik, Dinah Mulock (1862) ‘Until Her Death’, Frederick Sandys (illus.), Good Words, 3 (May), p. 312. F.R.H. [Frances Ridley Havergal] (1860) ‘Faith’s Question’, Good Words, 1 (March), pp. 174–5. Greenwell, Dora (1851) ‘Likeness in Difference’, Household Words, 2 (22 February), p. 524. Greenwell, Dora (1860a) ‘Pencil Marks in a Book of Devotion’, Good Words, 1 (March), p. 143. Greenwell, Dora (1860b) ‘When Night and Morning Meet’, Good Words, 1 (March), p. 188. Greenwell, Dora (1860c) ‘Gone’, Good Words, 1 (May), p. 327. Greenwell, Dora (1860d) ‘The Railway Station’, Good Words, 1 (July), p. 431. Greenwell, Dora (1860e) ‘Sabbath Peace’, Good Words, 1 (October), p. 632. Greenwell, Dora (1861a) ‘A Song Which None But the Redeemed Can Sing’, Henry Hugh Armstead (illus.), Good Words, 2 (July), pp. 410–11. Greenwell, Dora (1861b) ‘The Blind School’, Frederick Walker (illus.), Good Words, 2 (September), p. 505. Greenwell, Dora (1861c) ‘Hugo. – 1845’, W. Linney (illus.), Good Words, 2 (December), pp. 689–90. Greenwell, Dora (1862a) ‘Go and Come’, William Holman Hunt (illus.), Good Words, 3 (January), pp. 31–2. Greenwell, Dora (1862b) ‘Love in Death’, Frederick Walker (illus.), Good Words, 3 (March), pp. 184–5. H. (1859) ‘Scarborough – 1859’, John Leech (illus.), Once a Week, 1 (17 September), pp. 229–30. Harper, Mr (1851) ‘The Claims of Labour’, Household Words, 3 (5 July), p. 356. Havergal, Francis Ridley (1867), ‘Making Poetry’, Arthur Houghton Boyd (illus.), Good Words, 8 (April), pp. 248–9. Herschel, J. F. W. (1862) ‘Iliad. – Book I’, Cornhill, 5 (May), pp. 594–609. H.M.T. [Harriet Mary Teulon] (1860) ‘Autumn’, J. W. McWhirter (illus.), Good Words, 1 (September), p. 593.

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H.M.T. [Harriet Mary Teulon] (1861) ‘A Song in the Night’, Good Words, 2 (March), p. 167. Hole, S. Reynolds (1860) ‘God Help Our Men at Sea’, F. Walker (illus.), Once a Week, 2 (25 February), p. 198. Hollingshead, John (1862) ‘Summer Evening’, W. P. Burton (illus.), Good Words, 3 (June), p. 376. Hunt, Leigh (1850) ‘Abraham and the Fire-Worshipper: A Dramatic Parable’, Household Words, 1 (30 March), pp. 12–13. Ingelow, Jean (1865) ‘Sand-Martins’, Argosy, 1 (December), pp. 20–1. Ingelow, Jean (1866) ‘The Coming in of the “Mermaiden”’, Argosy, 2 (June), p. 52. J. A. (1860) ‘The Boy and the Captive Bird’, Good Words, 1 (August), p. 207. J. E. (1860) ‘He’s Risen’, Good Words, 1 (March), p. 136. Langford, J. A. (1860) ‘The Gloves’, Halbôt K. Browne (illus.), Once a Week, 2 (28 April), p. 402. L.C.C. (1861a) ‘Good Words’, Good Words, 2 (January), pp. 1–2. L.C.C. (1861b) ‘The Toad’, J. D. Watson (illus.), Good Words, 2 (January), pp. 33–4. L.C.C. (1861c) ‘Two Streams’, H. Boyd (illus.), Good Words, 2 (December), pp. 656–67. M. (1860a) ‘Love’, Good Words, 1 (March), p. 168. M. (1860b) ‘Idle Words’, Good Words, 1 (May), pp. 277–8. MacIntosh, Mrs (1859) ‘All the Year Round’, Household Words, 19 (7 May), p. 541. [Mahony, Francis] (1860) ‘Father Prout’s Inaugurative Ode’, Cornhill, 1 (January), pp. 75–6. Memor (1859) ‘On the Water’, John Everett Millais (illus.), Once a Week, 1 (22 July), p. 70. Meredith, Owen (1860) ‘Last Words’, John Everett Millais (illus.), Cornhill, 2 (November), pp. 513–17. Meredith, Owen (1861) ‘Elisabetta Sirani’, Cornhill, 3 (April), pp. 500–3. Milnes, R. Monckton (1860) ‘Requiescat in Pace’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 1 (April), p. 429–31. Montbard, G. (1882), ‘August. An Autumn Picture’, Good Words, 23, p. 528. Norton, Mrs [Caroline] (1862) ‘Gone’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 5 (February), pp. 343–8. Ollier, Edmund (1850) ‘A Lay of London Streets’, Household Words, 2 (5 October), p. 36. Ollier, Edmund (1859) ‘The City of Earthly Eden’, All the Year Round, 1 (30 April), pp. 11–13. Procter, Adelaide Anne (1855) ‘Cradle Song of the Poor’, Household Words, 10 (27 January), pp. 560–1.

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Procter, Adelaide Anne (1860) ‘The Carver’s Lesson’, Cornhill, 1 (May), p. 560. Procter, Bryan Waller (1859a) ‘Trade Songs: The Workhouse Nurse’, All the Year Round, 1 (30 April), p. 20. Procter, Bryan Waller (1859b) ‘Trade Songs: The Blacksmith’, All the Year Round, 1 (30 April), p. 20. Procter, Bryan Waller (1859c) ‘Trade Songs: The Street Sweeper’, All the Year Round, 1 (7 May), p. 36. Procter, Bryan Waller (1859d) ‘Trade Songs: The Sexton’, All the Year Round, 1 (14 May), p. 61. Procter, Bryan Waller (1859e) ‘Trade Songs: The Schoolmaster’, All the Year Round, 1 (28 May), p. 109. Richardson, Paul (1860) ‘Jeannie’, Once a Week, 3 (13 October), p. 68. R.K.A.E. (1861) ‘Hæc olim meminisse juviabit’, Cornhill, 3 (February), pp. 190–1. Robertson, William (1862) ‘The Veiled Bride’, Simeon Solomon (illus.), Good Words, 3 (October), pp. 592–3. Rossetti, Caroline [Christina] G. (1859) ‘Round Tower at Jhansi. – June 8, 1857’, Once a Week, 1 (13 August), p. 140. Rossetti, Christina (1861a) ‘Up-Hill’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 3 (February), p. 325. Rossetti, Christina (1861b) ‘A Birthday’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 3 (April), p. 498. Rossetti, Christina (1866a) ‘Who Shall Deliver Me?’, Argosy, 1 (March), p. 288. Rossetti, Christina (1866b) ‘If’, Frederick Sandys (illus.), Argosy, 1 (March), p. 336. Rossetti, Christina (1868) ‘Twilight Night’, Argosy, 5 (January), p. 103. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1871) ‘Down Stream’, Ford Madox Brown (illus.), The Dark Blue, 2 (October), pp. 211–12. S.B. (1859) ‘La Fille Bien Gardée (An Intercepted Letter)’, John Everett Millais (illus.), Once a Week, 1 (8 October), pp. 305–6. Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1862) ‘Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 6 (July), pp. 122–3. Sketchley, R. F. (1860) ‘First Love’, F. Walker (illus.), Once a Week, 3 (15 September), pp. 322–3. Smith, W. Frank (1863) ‘The Cilician Pirates’, George Du Maurier (illus.), Cornhill, 7 (April), pp. 530–1. S.R.H. (1860) ‘Mabel’, Cornhill, 1 (March), p. 282. Taylor, Tom (1859) ‘Magenta’, John Everett Millais (illus.), Once a Week, 1 (2 July), p. 10. Tennyson, Alfred (1854) ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, The Examiner, 9 December, p. 780. Tennyson, Alfred (1859) ‘The Grandmother’s Apology’, John Everett Millais (illus.), Once a Week, 1 (16 July), pp. 41–3.

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Tennyson, Alfred (1860a) ‘Sea Dreams: An Idyll’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 1 (January), pp. 191–8. Tennyson, Alfred (1860b) ‘Tithonus’, Cornhill, 1 (February), pp. 175–6. Tennyson, Alfred (1863a) ‘Attempts at Classic Meters in Quantity’, Cornhill, 8 (December), pp. 707–9. Tennyson, Alfred (1863b) ‘On Translations of Homer: Hexameters and Pentameters’, Cornhill, 8 (December), p. 707. Tennyson, Alfred (1863c) ‘Hendecasyllabics’, Cornhill, 8 (December), p. 708. Tennyson, Alfred (1864) Enoch Arden, London: Edward Moxon & Co. Thackeray, William (1860a) ‘Vanitas Vanitatum’, Cornhill, 2 (July), pp. 59–60. [Unsigned] (1860a) ‘Little Things’, Good Words, 1 (January), p. 15. [Unsigned] (1860b) ‘The Last Conflict’, Good Words, 1 (January), p. 46. [Unsigned] (1860c) ‘A Pouring Wet Day, June 17th 1860’, Once a Week, 3 (30 June), p. 7. [Unsigned] (1860d) ‘Dante’, Cornhill, 1 (April), p. 483. [Unsigned] (1862) ‘Some Verses Written by a Working Man’, Good Words, 3 (July), pp. 433–4. Venables, George Stovin and Henry Lushington (1859) ‘Cobbett; Or, a Rural Ride’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 1 (November), pp. 40–6. Walker, W. Sidney (1863) ‘Two Unpublished Poems’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 7 (April), p. 460. Williams, C. P. (1859) ‘A Retrospective’, John Leech (illus.), Once a Week, 1 (13 August), pp. 129–30. Williams, C. P. (1860) ‘She and I’, Once a Week, 3 (7 July), p. 56. Williams, Sarah (1867a) ‘A Poet’s Moods – Part I’, Argosy, 4 (September), pp. 261–3. Williams, Sarah (1867b) ‘A Poet’s Moods – Part II’, Argosy, 4 (October), pp. 361–3. Williams, Sarah (1867c) ‘The Doom of the Prynnes – Part I’, Argosy, 3 (March), pp. 295–9. Williams, Sarah (1867d) ‘The Doom of the Prynnes – Part II’, Argosy, 3 (April), pp. 339–42. Williams, Sarah (1867e) ‘The Doom of the Prynnes – Part III’, Argosy, 3 (May), pp. 435–8. W.L.W. (1860) ‘A Score of Years Ago’, John Leech (illus.), Once a Week, 3 (6 October), p. 416.

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Strahan, Alexander (1872) ‘Norman Macleod’, Contemporary Review, 20, pp. 291–306. Surridge, Lisa and Mary Elizabeth Leighton (2008) ‘The Plot Thickens: Toward a Narratological Analysis of Illustrated Serial Fiction in the 1860s’, Victorian Studies, 51.1, pp. 65–101. Sutherland, John (1986) ‘“Cornhill’s” Sales and Payments: The First Decade’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 19.3, pp. 106–8. Sutherland, John (1988) Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, Harlow: Longman. Sutherland, John (1998) ‘The Broadway (1868–73)’ in Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, Harlow: Longman, p. 84. Tennyson, Alfred (1857) Poems, London: Edward Moxon. Tennyson, Alfred (1969) The Princess, in Christopher Ricks (ed.) The Poems of Tennyson, London: Longman, pp. 743–844. Tennyson, Alfred (2002) The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, electronic edition, Charlottesville: InteLex Corporation. Tennyson, G. B. (1977) ‘The Sacramental Imagination’, in U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (eds) Nature and the Victorian Imagination, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 370–90. Tennyson, G. B. (1981) Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tennyson, G. B. (2006) ‘Afterword’, Victorian Poetry, 44.1, pp. 113–19. Thackeray, William (1860b) ‘Roundabout Papers – No. I’, Cornhill, 1 (January), pp. 124–8. Timney, Meagan B. (2009) ‘Of Factory Girls and Serving Maids: The Literary Labours of Working-Class Women in Victorian Britain’, PhD dissertation, Halifax, NS: Dalhousie University. Tosh, John (1991) ‘Domesticity and Manliness in the Victorian Middle Class: The Family of Edward White Benson’, in Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds) Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800, London: Routledge, pp. 44–73. Trevelyan, G. O. (1860) ‘The Cambridge University Boat of 1860’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 2 (May), pp. 19–21. Tucker, Herbert (2006) ‘Tactical Formalism: A Response to Caroline Levine’, Victorian Studies, 49.1, pp. 85–93. Turner, Mark (2002) ‘Periodical Time in the Nineteenth Century’, Media History, 8.2, pp. 183–96. [Unsigned] (n.d) ‘From Harper’s New Monthly Magazine’, Isa Craig. Gerald Massey.org. [Unsigned] (1843) ‘The Puff-Poets’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 582 (25 March), pp. 73–4. [Unsigned] (1862) ‘Literary Notices’, The Sheffield & Rotherham Independent Supplement, 2266 (14 January), p. 7. [Unsigned] (1863a) ‘The Free Presbytery of Strathbogie and “Good Words”’, Daily News (13 November), p. 7.

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[Unsigned] (1863b) ‘The Free Presbytery of Strathbogie and Good Words’, Dundee Courier and Argus (11 November). [Unsigned] (1863c) ‘Are “Good Words” Good Words?’, Caledonian Mercury (11 November). [Unsigned] (1863d) ‘Strathbogie Testifying Against Good Words’, Glasgow Herald (18 November), p. 3. Vanarsdel, Rosemary T. (2000) ‘Macmillan’s Magazine and the Fair Sex: 1859–1874 (Part I)’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 33.4, pp. 374–96. Van Hagen, Steve (2007) ‘Literary Technique, the Aestheticization of Laboring Experience, and Generic Experimentation in Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour’, Criticism, 47, pp. 421–50. Van Remoortel, Marianne (2013) ‘Christina Rossetti and the Economics of Publication: Macmillan’s Magazine, “A Birthday,” and Beyond’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 41, pp. 711–26. Vincent, Patrick (2004) The Romantic Poetess: European Culture, Politics, and Gender 1820–1840, Durham: University of New Hampshire Press. Washbrook, David (2004) ‘Lytton, Edward Robert Bulwer-, first earl of Lytton (1831–1891)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online edition, http://www.oxforddnb.com Watson, J. R. (1997) The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Watson, J. R. (2007) ‘Hymn’, in Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman and Anthony H. Harrison (eds) A Companion to Victorian Poetry, 2002, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 134–54. Whearty, B. (2012) ‘Lullaby’, in Roald Greene et al. (eds) The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 825–6. Whewell, William (1862a) ‘English Hexameters: Mr. Dart’s Translation of the Iliad’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 5 (April), pp. 487–96. Whewell, William (1862b) ‘New Hexameter Translations of the Iliad’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 6 (August), pp. 297–304. White, Cynthia (1970) Women’s Magazines 1693–1968, London: Michael Joseph Ltd. White, Norman (2009) ‘Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844–1889)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online edition, http://www.oxforddnb .com Williams, Sarah (1868) ‘O Fy Hen Gymraeg’, in Williams, Twilight Hours: A Legacy in Verse, ed. E. H. Plumptre, London: Strahan & Co., Publishers, p. 31. Willmott, Robert (1857) The Poets of the Nineteenth Century, New York: Harper Bros & Co. Wilson, James Grant (1877) The Poets and Poetry of Scotland: From the Earliest to the Present Time, Comprising Characteristic Selections from the Works of the More Noteworthy Scottish Poets, vol. 1, London: Blackie & Son.

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Wilson, John (1838) ‘Christopher in His Cave’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 44.274 (August), pp. 268–84. Wolfson, S. J. (2012) ‘Form’, in Roald Greene et al. (eds) The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 497–9. Worth, George T. (1990) ‘Poetry in Macmillan’s Magazine: A Preliminary Report’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 23.2, pp. 56–60. Worth, George T. (2003) Macmillan’s Magazine, 1859–1907; “No Flippancy or Abuse Allowed”, Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Wynne, Deborah (2001) The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine, New York: Palgrave.

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Index

Aaron, Jane, 172, 174, 189n A.F., ‘Black Monday’, 51, 52 All the Year Round, 13–14, 15, 20n, 22, 23, 25, 39, 40, 49, 50, 53, 106, 112 inaugural issue of, 34–6, 38 number of poems in, 40, 150n prospectus, 32–3 see also Household Words: All the Year Round, transition to; MacIntosh, Mrs.; Ollier, Edmund: ‘The City of Earthly Eden’; Procter, Bryan Waller Altholz, Josef, 105, 113 Altick, Richard, 19n Anderson, Benedict, 113 Argosy, the, 15–16, 16–17, 18n, 70, 146, 154–7, 158, 160, 185–6, 186n illustration, 187n: placement of, 165–6, 188n; rate of, 152n inaugural issue of, 161–2; see also Craig, Isa: ‘On Board the Argosy’; Ingelow, Jean: ‘Sand Martins’ poetry of, 150n, 156–7, 160, 188n, 189n see also Craig, Isa: editor of the Argosy; Ingelow,

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Jean; Rossetti, Christina: ‘If’; Rossetti, Christina: ‘Twilight Night’; Rossetti, Christina: ‘Who Shall Deliver Me?’; Strahan, Alexander; Williams, Sarah: ‘A Poet’s Moods’; Williams, Sarah: ‘The Doom of the Prynnes’ Armstrong, Isobel, 69, 158, 159, 160, 169, 179–80, 187n Arnold, Matthew, 72, 197 ‘Men of Genius’, 80, 81, 82–3, 84, 85, 88, 90, 91, 93 On Translating Homer, 63, 96, 97, 101n, 103n authorship, 81, 93, 99, 100; see also Arnold, Matthew: ‘Men of Genius’; Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, ‘A Musical Instrument’; Barrett Browning, Elizabeth: ‘L.E.L.’s Last Question’; Cornhill: labour, representation of; Meredith, Owen, ‘Elisabetta Sirani’; Meredith, Owen: ‘Last Words’; Williams, Sarah: ‘A Poet’s Moods’; Williams, Sarah: ‘The Doom of the Prynnes’ Avery, Simon, 101n

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230

Victorian Poetry and the Literary Periodical

Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 15, 17, 73, 103n, 180, 187n, 197 Aurora Leigh, 7, 68, 174–5, 177 ‘Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave’, 30, 54n ‘L.E.L.’s Last Question’, 4–7, 9–10, 19n, 21n, 163, 190n, 192 ‘A Musical Instrument’, 80, 81, 84–8, 91, 93: illustration of, 87–8 The Seraphim and Other Poems, 19n Bennett, Paula, 8, 9 Benson, Ralph A. ‘Bought and Sold’, 49 ‘Young Nimrod’, 51, 56n Berni pseud. (Manley Hopkins), 201 ‘The “Poste Restante”.–A Reverie’, 51, 52, 56n Blackie, John S., 197–8 ‘How Wondrous Are Thy Works, O God!’, 131–3 Blair, Kirstie, 2, 9, 115, 116, 122, 149n, 168–9 Boos, Florence, 3, 195 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8, 11, 16, 20n, 21n, 155, 186n; see also middlebrow culture Boyce, Charlotte, 20n Bradbury and Evans, 25, 31–2, 38–9, 41, 43, 45, 49, 50, 198; see also Once a Week Bradley, Ian, 128 Brennan, Catherine, 171, 172, 189n Brooks, Shirley, 198 ‘Once a Week’, 40–3, 44–5, 49, 52, 53

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Browne, Hablôt K., 198–9 Once a Week, 23, 49–50 Buckler, William, 55n Call, W. M. W., 199 ‘Manoli’, 80, 91–3, 94, 99 Campbell, Matthew, 172, 188–9n Chapman, Alison, 25 and Ehnes, 3, 192 see also Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry Colón, Susan, 28, 35–6 Cornhill, 4, 14–15, 18n, 21n, 53, 59, 60–1, 64, 73, 100, 101–2n, 102n, 106, 107, 110, 111, 112, 120, 155–6 cover, 58, 59, 76, 78–9, 87, 93; see inaugural issue of [below] cultural capital of, 74, 80, 102n founding of, 73–5 illustration, rate of, 152n inaugural issue of, 75–8, 79, 93–4; see also Mahony, Francis Sylvester: ‘Father Prout’s Inaugurative Ode’ labour, representation of, 75–6, 80–1, 83, 84, 91, 93, 102–3n, 103n, 104n poetry in, 90–1, 150n, 157 Thackeray, resignation from, 94–5, 99, 103n; see also Herschel, John: Translation of the Iliad see also Arnold, Matthew; Barrett Browning, Elizabeth: ‘A Musical Instrument’; Call, W. M. W.; georgic; Meredith, Owen; Procter, Adelaide Anne: ‘The Carver’s Lesson’;

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Index

Smith, George; Tennyson, Alfred: ‘On Translations of Homer: Hexameters and Pentameters’; Tennyson, Alfred: ‘Tithonus’; Thackeray, William Coté, Amy, 36 Craig, Isa, 17, 72, 117, 154, 158, 159–60, 171, 187n, 199 ‘The Christmas Child’, 126; see also Morten, Thomas editor of the Argosy, 154, 156–7, 163, 167, 188n; see also Craig, Isa: ‘On Board the Argosy’ ‘On Board the Argosy’, 157, 161–3, 169–70, 187n Craik, Dinah Mulock, 70, 71–2, 100, 101n, 117, 200 ‘At the Sea-Side’, 72 ‘The Coming of Spring’, 131, 133, 142–44 ‘Our Father’s Business: Holman Hunt’s Picture of “Christ in the Temple”’, 64 ‘Until her Death’, 112 ‘Year after Year: A Love Song’, 70–1, 72 Daly, Nicholas, 179 Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry, 2, 18n, 101n, 150n, 189n, 193, 194, 196n Davidoff, Lenore and Catherine Hall, 51, 56n Davis, Patricia Elizabeth, 67 de Staël, Germaine, 190n devotional poetry and poetics, 112, 115–17, 149n, 150n Good Words, in, 120, 124, 128, 130

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231

see also devotional reading practices: imagined spiritual communities; hymns; Rossetti, Christina: devotional poetry devotional reading practices, 117–18, 136, 140 Good Words, 107, 146; see also Craik, Dinah Mulock: ‘The Coming of Spring’; inaugural poem: Good Words: ‘Little Things’; Greenwell, Dora: ‘Pencil Marks in a Book of Devotion’; Macleod, Norman imagined spiritual communities, 113–14, 118, 122, 125–6, 126, 128, 149n; see also King, Joshua Sunday reading and the Sabbath question, 108, 110–11, 128, 146, 148n, 149n see also devotional poetry and poetics Dickens, Charles, 49–50, 75 ‘A Walk in a Workhouse’, 36 editor of All the Year Round, 35; see also All the Year Round editor of Household Words, 27, 28, 29, 30–1, 54n; see also Household Words see also literary weekly: Dickens’s influence on Dickens Journals Online, 192, 196n Digital archive, 193–5, 196n Digitisation, 192, 194 Durling, Dwight, 102n

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232

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Easley, Alexis, 158 Ehnes, Caley, 24 Elwin, Malcolm, 186n Fabb, Nigel and Morris Halle, 69, 101n Felluga, Dino, 189n Gaskell, Elizabeth, 54n, 79 Lizzie Leigh, 27 georgic, 76, 77, 79, 83–4, 85, 87; see also Siskin, Clifford Gilmour, Robin, 80 Good Words, 15–16, 18n, 106, 107–12, 114–15, 116–18, 120–1, 130, 133, 144, 146, 153n essay on Sarah Williams, 171–2 illustration in, 12, 133, 136–7, 140, 188n inaugural issue of, 118–20; see also inaugural poem: Good Words poetry in, 117, 120, 122, 125–6, 128, 140, 150n, 152n serial rhythms of, 110, 114–15, 126 see also Blackie, John S.; Craik, Dinah Mulock: ‘The Coming of Spring’; Craik, Dinah Mulock: ‘Until her Death’; Greenwell, Dora; Havergal, Francis Ridley; H.M.T.; hymn; L.C.C.; M; Macleod, Norman; Strahan, Alexander Gothic, the, 178–9 Gray, F. Elizabeth, 115, 149n, 166, 187n

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Greenwell, Dora, 112, 117–18, 128, 150n, 152n, 187n, 200 ‘The Blind School’, 131 ‘Go and Come’, 124–6 ‘Hugo.–1845’, 146, 147 ‘Likeness in Difference’, 29 ‘Love in Death’, 137–40 ‘Pencil Marks in a Book of Devotion’, 111–12, 121–2, 140 ‘The Railway Station’, 130–1 ‘When Night and Morning Meet’, 129–30, 152n Groth, Helen, 21n H., ‘Scarborough–1859’, 45, 46, 49, 50–1, 52 Hallam, Arthur Henry, 186n Harper, 200 ‘The Claims of Labour’, 30–1 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 58, 101n HathiTrust Digital Library, 192, 194, 196n Havergal, Francis Ridley, 117, 128, 152n ‘Making Poetry’, 16–17 Herschel, John, 95, 201 Translation of the Iliad, 95–7, 98, 99 H.M.T. pseudo. (Harriet Mary Teulon), 206 ‘Autumn’, 131, 133, 140–2, 144, 153n Hobbs, Andrew, 195 and Claire Januszewski, 2, 18n Hollingshead, John, 153n

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Index

Household Words, 13–14, 22–3, 25–7, 30, 36, 38, 39–40, 49–50, 53 All the Year Round, transition to, 31–4 poetry in, 40, 150n ‘A Preliminary Word’, 26–7, 29 see also Dickens, Charles: editor of Household Words; Greenwell, Dora: ‘Likeness in Difference’; Harper; inaugural poem: Household Words; literary weekly: Dickens’s influence on; Ollier, Edmund: ‘A Lay of London Streets’; Prince, John Critchley; Procter, Adelaide Anne, ‘Cradle Song of the Poor’ Houston, Natalie, 5, 9, 16, 20n, 193 Huett, Lorna, 13, 19n, 26 Hughes, Linda, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19n, 20n, 24, 40–1, 53–4, 56n, 61, 94, 152n, 191, 195 Hunt, Leigh, 201 ‘Abraham and the FireWorshipper’, 27–9, 34, 35, 54n Huxley, Leonard, 99, 101–2n hymn, 112, 128–30, 131, 151n, 152n; see also inaugural poem: Good Words: ‘Little Things’; Williams, Sarah: ‘A Poet’s Moods’ illustrated gift books, 12–13, 18n, 133

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233

inaugural poem, 14, 16, 24–5, 53–4 All the Year Round, 38; see also Ollier, Edmund: ‘The City of Earthly Eden’ Argosy, the see Craig, Isa, ‘On Board the Argosy’; Ingelow, Jean: ‘Sand-Martins’ Cornhill, 118; see also Mahony, Francis Sylvester: ‘Father Prout’s Inaugurative Ode’ Good Words, 54n: ‘Little Things’, 118-20, 151n; see also L.C.C.: ‘Good Words’ Household Words see Hunt, Leigh: ‘Abraham and the Fire-Worshipper’ Macmillan’s Magazine, 63, 65 Once a Week, 51, 111, 118; see also Brooks, Shirley: ‘Once a Week’ Ingelow, Jean, 17, 117, 128, 152n, 154, 156, 158, 160, 163, 187n, 188n, 201–2 ‘The Coming in of the “Mermaiden”’, 166 ‘Sand-Martins’, 161–2 Janowitz, Anne, 104n Japp, Alex, 170, 189n Jay, Elisabeth, 171 Keble, John, 107, 113, 114, 115, 126, 142, 149n, 150n, 151n King, Andrew, 83 and Marysa Demoor, 81 King, Joshua, 112–13, 114, 116, 122, 149n

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234

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Knight, Mark, 105 and Emma Mason, 116 Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen, 9, 11–12, 12–13, 56n, 112, 119, 136–7, 195 Ladies’ Pocket Magazine, 4–7, 9–10, 17, 19n, 192 Langham Place Group, 156–7 Latham, Sean and Robert Scholes, 192, 196n Law, Graham, 15 Layard, George Soames, 40 L.C.C. ‘Good Words’, 24, 120 ‘The Toad’, 122–4 ‘The Two Streams’, 144–5, 146 Leary, Patrick, 192, 193 Ledbetter, Kathryn, 3, 9, 12, 74, 101n, 158, 195 Leech, John, 49, 202 illustration for ‘A Score of Years Ago’, 48; see also W.L.W.: ‘A Score of Years Ago’ illustration for ‘Once a Week’, 42, 44; see also Brooks, Shirley: ‘Once a Week’ illustration for ‘Scarborough– 1859’, 46; see also H.: ‘Scarborough—1859’ Leighton, Angela, 19n Leighton, Frederic, 202 illustration for ‘A Musical Instrument’, 86; see also Barrett Browning, Elizabeth: ‘A Musical Instrument’: illustration of Levine, Caroline, 7, 9, 11, 99, 154, 158, 160, 187n, 195

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literary annual, 1, 5, 6, 18n, 113, 136, 157, 185, 186n literary periodical, 1, 3–4, 12, 13, 15, 18n, 34, 53–4, 133, 136, 149n, 157–8, 191 religious literary periodical, 105–6; see also Good Words see also Craig, Isa: ‘On Board the Argosy’; Harper’s New Monthly Magazine; literary weekly, the; shilling monthly; Williams, Sarah: ‘A Poet’s Moods’ literary weekly, 22–3, 58 Dickens’s influence on, 13–14, 25–6, 39, 107 see also Household Words; All the Year Round; Once a Week Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 122, 151n Lohrli, Anne, 31 love poetry, 152n Lucas, Samuel, 20n, 39, 40, 45, 49, 56n, 74, 202–3 lullabies, 182–3 Lysack, Krista, 130–1 M., ‘Love’, 135, 136, 137 McGann, Jerome, 11, 187n MacIntosh, Mrs., 203 ‘All the Year Round’, 33–4 McKelvy, William, 82, 112, 113 Macleod, Norman, 203 relationship with Strahan, 108–9 editor of Good Words, 109–11, 122, 130, 136–7, 148n, 151n; see also Good Words editorials, 110, 111, 112, 114–15, 118, 120–1, 125–6, 128, 146

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Index

Macmillan, Alexander, 15, 58, 60, 61–2, 63, 64–6, 67, 75, 99–100, 101n Macmillan’s Magazine, 4, 14–15, 53, 58, 59–61, 61–3, 72–3, 95, 99–100, 101n, 106 poetry in, 62, 64–5, 66, 150n, 157 readership of, 59, 63, 65 see also Craik, Dinah Mulock: ‘Our Father’s Business’; Craik, Dinah Mulock: ‘Year after Year’; inaugural poem: Macmillan’s Magazine; Rossetti, Christina: ‘Up-Hill’; Tennyson, Alfred: ‘Sea Dreams’ McWhirter [MacWhirter], J. W., 203 illustration for ‘Autumn’, 141; see also H.M.T.: ‘Autumn’ illustration for ‘The Coming of Spring’, 143; see also Craik, Dinah Mulock: ‘The Coming of Spring’ Mahony, Francis Sylvester, 76–7, 203 ‘Father Prout’s Inaugurative Ode’, 76–8, 79, 93–4 Markley, A. A., 98–9 Mason, Emma, 117, 149n, 150n, 187n Maunder, Andrew, 52 Meredith, George Cornhill, opinion on, 73, 74 Once a Week, 20n, 39 Meredith, Owen pseud. (Edward Robert BulwerLytton), 81, 93, 103n, 199 ‘Elisabetta Sirani’, 90–1 ‘Last Words’, 79, 88–90, 91

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235

middlebrow culture, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20n, 59 middle-class readers, 10–11, 14, 49, 60, 73–4, 95, 126, 155; see also literary periodical; literary weekly; shilling monthly Miles, Alfred, 170, 171 Millais, John Everett, 49, 133 illustration for ‘Magenta’, 43 Miller, John MacNeil, 30 Milton, John, 89–90 Mitchell, Sally, 109 Morlier, Margret, 85 Morten, Thomas, illustration for ‘The Christmas Child’, 127; see also Craig, Isa: ‘The Christmas Child’ Munby, Arthur, 62, 204 Mussell, James, 194 Nelson, Claudia, 52 newspaper poetry, 2, 3, 18–19n culture of reprinting, 18n see also Houston, Natalie Nodelman, Perry, 187n Norton, Mrs., 62, 64, 72 Ollier, Edmund, 55n, 204 ‘The City of Earthly Eden’, 34–6 ‘A Lay of London Streets’, 29 Once a Week, 1, 13–14, 22, 23, 25, 38–40, 53, 73–4, 80, 106, 107, 111 illustration, 40–3, 45–9, 55–6n, 152n; see also Lucas, Samuel middle-class domesticity and marriage, representation of, 50–3, 56n

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236

Victorian Poetry and the Literary Periodical

Once a Week (cont.) poetry in, 18n, 40, 150n; see also Brooks, Shirley: ‘Once a Week’ serial structure of, 52, 57n see also Bradbury and Evans; Browne, Hablôt K.; Leech, John; Lucas, Samuel; Millais, John Everett; Rossetti, Christina: ‘The Round Tower at Jhansi’ Parable, 27–9, 34, 35–6, 54n, 122, 124 Parry, Ann, 63 Pascoe, Charles E., 59, 60 Patmore, Coventry, Victories in Love, 62, 63 Patten, Robert L. and David Finkelstein, 20n periodical poet, 13, 16, 173, 194 representation of, 174–5 see also ‘Barrett Browning, Elizabeth: Aurora Leigh’; poetess periodical poetry, 1–4, 7–11, 12, 13, 16–17, 20n, 21n, 23, 38, 43, 52, 53–4, 70, 94, 105, 117, 170, 185–6, 191 devotional, 115, 129 see also digital archive; inaugural poem; poetess; sentimental literature; women’s poetry Periodical Poetry Index, the, 18n, 193 Peterson, Linda, 9, 81 Phegley, Jennifer, 3, 12, 18n, 52, 80, 91, 102n, 103n, 110, 186n Plumptre, E. H., 170–1

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Poe, Edgar Allen, 178–9 poetess, 8, 17, 154, 157, 158–9, 163, 166, 170–1, 175, 178, 180, 183, 185, 189n, 190n; see also Barrett Browning, Elizabeth: ‘L.E.L.’s Last Question’; sentimental literature; women’s poetry Prickett, Stephen, 116 Prince, John Critchley, ‘A Voice from the Factory’, 30 Prins, Yopi, 96, 98 Procter, Adelaide Anne, 73, 156, 187n, 204 ‘The Carver’s Lesson’, 81, 83–4, 90, 91, 93 ‘The Cradle Song of the Poor’, 29–30 Procter, Bryan Waller, 36, 55n, 204–5 ‘The Blacksmith’, 37 ‘The Schoolmaster’, 55n ‘The Sexton’, 55n ‘The Street Sweeper’, 37–8 ‘The Workhouse Nurse’, 36–7, 55n Proverbs, 37, 124–5, 158n Pulham, Patricia, 19n, 157 Quiver, The, 106, 108 Reader, W. J., 80 religious periodicals, 2, 16, 105–6, 107, 113–14, 115, 148n; see also Good Words; Quiver, The Richards, Eliza, 158, 160, 179, 185 Richardson, Paul, 43 Ritchie, Anne Thackeray, 76, 78–9

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Index

Rollinson, P., 128 Rossetti, Christina, 17, 73, 101n, 154, 156, 158, 160, 163, 169–70, 187n, 188n, 205 ‘A Birthday’, 70–1, 101n devotional poetry, 168–9; see also Rossetti, Christina: ‘Up-Hill’ ‘If’, 164–6, 167, 168 relationship with Macmillan & Co., 61–2, 68, 100 ‘The Round Tower at Jhansi’, 20n, 43, 55n Tractarian poetics, 188n; see also devotional poetry; Rossetti, Christina: ‘Twilight Night’ ‘Twilight Night’, 166, 167–9, 181, 188n ‘Up-Hill’, 68–70, 101n, 187n ‘Who Shall Deliver Me?’, 163–4 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 164, 188n Sanders, Mike, 151–2n, 152n Sandys, Frederick, 205 illustration for ‘If’, 165–6 illustration for ‘Manoli’, 92; see also Call, W. M. W.: ‘Manoli’ Schmidt, Barbara, 94 Scott, Rosemary, 97 sentimental literature, 11, 12, 17, 74, 154–5, 187n, 188n; see also Craig, Isa: ‘On Board the Argosy’; Ingelow, Jean: ‘The Coming in of the “Mermaiden”’; literary annual; Rossetti, Christina: ‘If’; Rossetti, Christina:

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237

‘Twilight Night’; poetess; Williams, Sarah: ‘A Poet’s Moods’; women’s poetry serial form see Cornhill: cover; Cornhill: inaugural issue of; Good Words: serial rhythms of; Once a Week: serial structure of; Williams, Sarah: ‘A Poet’s Moods’: serial structure; Williams, Sarah: ‘The Doom of the Prynnes’: serial structure shilling monthly, 14–15, 18n, 22, 23, 26, 58–62, 64–5, 72–3, 76, 95, 99–100, 150n, 155–6; see also Cornhill: founding of; Good Words; literary periodical Siskin, Clifford, 81, 84 Sketchley, R. F., ‘First Love’, 45, 47, 59, 50, 52 Saintsbury, George, 2 Smith, George, 58, 60, 74–5, 80, 94–5, 99, 101–2n, 102n, 103n, 205–6 Smith, Elder and Company, 58, 73, 78, 102n Srebrnik, Patricia, 109 Stauffer, Andrew, 192, 195n, 196n Strahan, Alexander, 15, 106, 108–9, 111, 133, 148n Argosy, the, 154, 155–6, 165, 186n, 187n Good Words, 24, 107–8, 120, 128, 130, 146 relationship with Sarah Williams, 170, 172, 188n strategic formalism, 21n; see also Levine, Caroline

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Surridge, Lisa and Mary Elizabeth Leighton, 21n Sutherland, John, 14 Sykes, Godfrey, 206; see also Cornhill: cover Taylor, Tom, ‘Magenta’, 18n, 43 Tennyson, Alfred, 62, 63, 65–6, 68, 73, 101n ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’, 82 ‘The Grandmother’s Apology’, 74 The Princess, 175–6, 177 ‘Sea Dreams: An Idyll’, 63, 66–8 ‘Tithonus’, 74, 79 ‘On Translations of Homer: Hexameters and Pentameters’, 67, 97–9 Tennyson, G. B., 115, 142 Thackeray, William editor of the Cornhill, 15, 59, 60, 73, 80, 81, 83, 84, 87, 90, 91, 93–4, 97, 102n, 103n see also Cornhill: founding of; Cornhill: inaugural issue of; Cornhill: Thackeray, resignation from Tosh, John, 51, 56n Tractarian movement and poetics, 116, 142, 150n, 188n; see also Keble, John; Rossetti, Christina: ‘Twilight Night’ Trevelyan, G. O., 206 ‘The Cambridge University Boat Race’, 63 Turner, Mark, 52, 19–20n, 77, 78, 79, 93

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Van Remoortel, Marianne, 68 Walpole, Horace see gothic, the Waterloo Database of Victorian Periodicals, 195n Watson, J. D., 206 illustration for ‘The Toad’, 123, 124 Watson, J. R., 129 Whearty, B. see lullabies White, Cynthia, 5 Williams, Sarah, 17, 154, 158, 160, 163, 170–1, 173, 180, 188n, 189n, 206–7 ‘The Doom of the Prynnes’, 172, 173–80, 189n: serial structure of, 177 ‘O Fy Hen Gymraeg’, 172 ‘A Poet’s Moods’, 173, 180–5, 188n: serial structure of, 180, 183 Twilight Hours: A Legacy in Verse, 170 Welsh heritage, influence of, 171–3, 189n see also Good Words: essay on Sarah Williams W.L.W., ‘A Score of Years Ago’, 45, 48, 49, 50–1, 52 Women’s poetry, 12, 16–17, 158–9, 160, 170, 180, 185–6, 188n devotional, 115, 149n see also Argosy, the: inaugural poem; Armstrong, Isobel; Barrett Browning, Elizabeth: ‘A Musical Instrument’; Meredith, Owen: ‘Elisabetta Sirani’; poetess; sentimental literature; Williams, Sarah: ‘A Poet’s Moods’ Worth, George, 66

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