The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature

Dennis Denisoff, Talia Schaffer, Dennis Denisoff, Talia Schaffer, Dennis Denisoff, Talia Schaffer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429018176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature offers 45 chapters by leading international scholars working with the most dynamic and influential political, cultural, and theoretical issues addressing Victorian literature today. Scholars and students will find this collection both useful and inspiring.

Rigorously engaged with current scholarship that is both historically sensitive and theoretically informed, the Routledge Companion places the genres of the novel, poetry, and drama and issues of gender, social class, and race in conversation with subjects like ecology, colonialism, the Gothic, digital humanities, sexualities, disability, material culture, and animal studies.

This guide is aimed at scholars who want to know the most significant critical approaches in Victorian studies, often written by the very scholars who helped found those fields. It addresses major theoretical movements such as narrative theory, formalism, historicism, and economic theory, as well as Victorian models of subjects such as anthropology, cognitive science, and religion. With its lists of key works, rich cross-referencing, extensive bibliographies, and explications of scholarly trajectories, the book is a crucial resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, while offering invaluable support to more seasoned scholars.

Part I
Genres and Movements

1
Poetry

Alison Chapman

In February 1832, the second issue of a new magazine, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, published its first poem: the Scottish “farm servant” William Park’s “Ode to Poverty.” The headnote introduces Park’s piece as a marvel, exemplifying “the triumphs of inborn genius.” In the poem, Park acknowledges his poetic marginalization but also his successful legacy as an unknown “hireling bard” whose name nonetheless is “blazoned bright in realms on high,/Enroll’d in records in the sky.” And yet the poem also admits that, for all its spiritual rewards, poetry cannot capture poverty’s misery: “Even poesy would weave in vain/The laurel wreath for penury’s child.” Park’s poem makes bare the tension between expected literary codes and improper sentiment, within a tightly conventional stanzaic scheme (iambic tetrameter sestets rhyming ababcc). This obscure poem began a long tradition of prominently published poetry in one of the century’s most highly circulating weekly magazines, with over 2,500 poems featured from 1832 to 1883 (Chapman, Digital) and a peak circulation of 90,000 copies in 1840 (O’Connor). The poem also signals a long tradition of the interesting and sometimes fraught relationship between poetic form and content, a relationship that distinguishes the development of Victorian poetry as poets reached for reworked, hybrid, and innovative genres to represent and also escape from the century’s modernity. Park’s poem, for example, entitles itself an “ode,” a genre with a long history that originated as lyrics on public occasions, often with a complex stanzaic scheme and argument. The romantic ode became more interiorized as a lyric expression that often addressed the status of poetry and the poet, and which retained a complex stanzaic scheme (such as Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”). Parks’s working-class ode, however, is addressed to poverty within a simple repetitive stanzaic scheme. The poem’s claim to literary posterity is powerfully based on restraint, adversity, and even silence.

The year of Park’s poem, 1832, is often taken by literary historians as the beginning of Victorian poetry. Although the accession of Queen Victoria occurred in 1837, scholars generally date the reforming energy of Victorian poetry back to the 1832 Reform Act, which enfranchised male middle-class voters and created new parliamentary constituencies that represented burgeoning industrial cities (Bristow). Chambers’s was indeed established in response to public agitation, leading up to the Reform Act, to educate and acculturate a working-class readership in preparation for the franchise; its opening editorial statement underlines the weekly’s power as “an engine endowed with the most tremendous possibilities” (Chambers 1). Poetry was no less than the fuel for this engine of progress, and in its first years Chambers’s published both working-class poems (especially by Scottish poets such as James Beattie and Dugald Moore) and established poets like Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Walter Scott, and William Wordsworth. Like other popular serial print, the periodical sought to establish its own readership based on the editors’ sense of the proper poetry canon. Poetry, then, had the power to create and sustain lucrative consumers for the new serial print media and to create and shape a class consciousness as well [on periodical culture, see Hughes’s chapter].

Poetry represented acculturation, community, and aspiration across the wide variety of Victorian print; in fact, the poetry in Chambers’s for 1832 represented the start of an explosion of diverse print cultures for poetry. This year was also the publication date of a volume of poems by a poet who came to define the era as its eventual laureate, Alfred Tennyson. Poems was actually date-stamped 1833, but it was issued in December 1832. Matthew Rowlinson even identifies one of the most well-known poems from that volume and of the era, “The Lady of Shalott,” as a response to the 1832 Reform Act. First, as Rowlinson argues, the poem figures the silencing of an aristocratic female weaver’s song as the end of traditional values and the start of a printed, as opposed to active, lyric voice. The poem, after all, ends with the lady’s swan song, as she chants her “carol” (l. 145) as she dies on a boat whose prow ironically inscribes her name (ll. 161–2). Second, the poem represents a shift in poetics whereby the lyric voice of the Lady is overheard yet irrecoverable, marking a change from early Romantic mediated yet still legible lyric voice (64–5). Not only do the reapers hear her song and ascribe it to the supernatural “‘fairy/Lady of Shalott’” (ll. 35–6), but the aristocratic Camelot audience for her dramatic death is mystified by her final song and her very identity (“Who is this? And what is here?” [l. 163]). Lancelot’s final appraisal about her “lovely face” (l. 169), after he “mused a little space” (l. 168), is crushingly facetious. One of the most influential critical models, Isobel Armstrong’s concept of the “double poem”, similarly posits a radical uncertainty within Victorian poetry, whereby the poem’s claim to expressive truth is layered with skepticism, an epistemological uncertainty that decenters poetic form and politicizes poetic language so that, in a dramatization of lyric, the poem’s “expressive utterance … becomes the opposite of itself, not only the subject’s utterance but also the object of analysis and critique” (12). And, in this critical paradigm, the Lady of Shalott’s very expressive lyric song is mediated and ultimately undermined by the ballad narrative that frames and contains it. In other words, Victorian poetry uneasily mediates and questions its own claims to truth, a reading that works powerfully for canonical poets such as Tennyson (from a conservative tradition) and Robert Browning (from a radical democratic tradition), as well as women poets who struggle with a claim to subjectivity. It is less certain, however, how well the model works for the majority of poetry outside the conventional canon. For example, rather than a simultaneously expressive and skeptical double poem, “Ode to Poverty” lays its representational limits bare while extolling the conventional Christian manliness of poverty. Any skeptical doubleness is mediated by the poem’s print ecology, a weekly meant to raise the working class but which seems to have had mostly a middle-class readership. The double poem in this instance, then, hinges on the poem within its print context, represented as an authentic rural voice and yet also depoliticized as an antiquarian wonder.

The “digital turn” is making visible both the materiality and scale of Victorian poetry, while complicating conventional literary histories. The vast majority of poems read by Victorians remain critically undiscovered, and are, by virtue of their very profusion, doubtless individually undiscoverable. A British Library catalog search for book titles in English with the word “poems” alone returns 1,952 items. And, to give a flavor of the genre’s biblio-diversity, alongside the Chambers’s and Tennyson’s Poems I place the 1832 Keepsake, a lavish and successful literary annual that foregrounded its aristocratic connections. In 1832, for example, the annual published 28 poems: alongside poems by Landon, William Jerdan, and Agnes Strickland, 19 are signed by poets with an aristocratic title. The year 1832 thus represents Victorian poetry’s profusion and heterogeneousness. This chapter explores emerging trends in Victorian studies by emphasizing poetry’s abundance, approaching poems through their vibrant materiality and multimedia print ecologies, and uncovering the potential for a “bigger Victorianism”—one that expands and decolonizes the canon—through poetry’s mediations, locations, and disruptions.

1. The Culture of Victorian Poetry

Critics have traditionally presented Victorian poetry as displaced by the rise of fiction, a print-market development that caused a shift in poetics intended to address the poets’ perceived absence of readers. Lee Erickson argues that the rise of the dramatic monologue, a hybrid form of narrative and lyric whereby the addressee is silent, originates with anxieties about the collapse of poetry book readership in the 1820s. Yet Victorians encountered poetry everywhere. Books of poetry by single authors were viewed in the nineteenth century as culturally valuable and prestigious, and they dominated reviews of poetry (which quoted poems extensively). The highest circulating poems are typically defined by literary historians through volume sales (Altick 386–7), especially poetry books by single authors—such as John Keble’s The Christian Year (1827), Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850)—and anthologies such as Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (1861). Poet’s careers were shaped by breakout volumes, which were not always their first books; such works include Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Poems (1844), Robert Browning’s Men and Women (1855), Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems (1870), and Alice Meynell’s Preludes (1875). Some poetry volumes garnered no or minimal attention at all on their publication, including the Brontë sisters’ 1846 Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Meanwhile, other important volumes were published in very small print runs, especially at the century’s end; for example, Mary Elizabeth Coleridge’s 1896 Fancy’s Following, published by the Daniel Press, had a print run of 450 copies (Vilain et al. 28). Other prominent poets had important works published posthumously, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins’s 1918 Poems. The poetry canon has generally been defined by this bounty of volumes.

But books were only a part of the publication and dissemination of poetry. Works by prominent as well as little known and unknown poets were mass circulated in serial print culture, including newspapers, magazines, and periodicals that represented the main poetry publishers and distributors in the era (Hobbs). A single comparison will make the importance of periodical poetry evident: whereas Tennyson’s 1864 Enoch Arden sold 60,000 copies in its first edition and 40,000 “in a few weeks” (Altick 387), an extraordinary number for a poetry book, his poem published five years earlier in the newly launched magazine Once a Week, “The Grandmother’s Apology,” reached far in excess of 570,000 readers (Waterloo Directory). Many prominent Victorian poets published in ephemeral print to cultivate readership and income but also complained about writing “potboilers.” Most of the poets who published in periodicals did not become best-selling authors of poetry books and remain either little known or entirely obscure (partly because of the widespread practice of unsigned and pseudonymous poems), but their contributions nevertheless shaped the poetry culture of the time. Victorian periodicals published poetry for a number of reasons, including acculturation, prestige, advertisement for forthcoming books, the shaping of a periodical’s politics and aesthetics, conveying news in a different discourse (Houston), and forging an affective and contemplative space for reading (Ehnes); they also did so for the education of readers, including incitement to action, as with poetry published in Chartist newspapers like the Northern Star and Chartist Circular (Sanders) [on Chartist publications, see Haywood’s chapter]. The quantity of poetry in periodicals is staggering, especially for long-running titles like Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (over 3,400 poems from 1819 to 1901), All the Year Round (over 1,000 poems from 1859 to 1895), and Good Words (over 1,200 poems from 1860 to 1899) (Chapman, Digital). Pieces circulating and recirculating in popular and highbrow serial print helped make poems ubiquitous for the reading public but offered an astonishingly wide variety of items that often fall outside the typically anthologized modern canon (such as translations into English, verse dramas, serial poems, Anglophone colonial poetry, and dialect poetry).

Recent research approaches the richness and diversity of Victorian poetry’s material forms as a poetry culture: both a print ecology of poems that offers a reader-centric and historically nuanced approach, and a more networked sense of poetry within and beyond Anglo-centrism that embraces colonial and global poetry in English (e.g., Gibson, Rudy). The print ecology is usually understood in terms of poetry volumes, anthologies, and serial print, but poetry also widely circulated in other print forms such as advertisements, greeting cards, almanacs, hymnals, broadsides, chapbooks, and travel guides. Some poets took ready advantage of multiple formats for poetry. Tennyson, for example, first published “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in The Examiner (December 9, 1854) as a response to the news from the Crimean War, and it was widely reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic. It was subsequently revised and published in his 1855 Maud and Other Poems, and then 1,000 copies were privately printed as a broadside in August 1855 to send to the soldiers in the Crimea. Later, in 1890, Tennyson recorded this poem on an Edison wax cylinder. It is important to note, however, that poets did not have control over the widespread practice of reprinting poems. For example, a stanza from In Memoriam was illustrated in the New Girl magazine Atalanta for its 1889 Christmas issue as a tipped-in plate, a short extract conferring added seasonal and cultural value to ephemeral print, as Tennyson’s long narrative poem is translated into a separate lyric fragment. Unauthorized reprinting in Britain and America meant that British poets could not control their poetry’s tran...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Our Victorian Companions
• PART I Genres and Movements
• PART II Media Histories
• PART III Victorian Discourses
• PART IV Formulations of Identity
• PART V Science and Spirit
• PART VI Spatiality and Environment
• Notes on Contributors
• Index