From Langham Place to Lancashire: Poetry, Community, and the Victoria Press's Offering to Lancashire

Abstract

During closing months of 1862, Isa Craig and her colleagues at Victoria Press gathered poems from an assortment of Victorian writers-including Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Mary Howitt, R. Monckton Milnes, and Bessie Raynor Parkes-and published them in a slender volume titled Poems: An Offering to Lancashire, which they dedicated to the relief of distress in cotton districts, where trade embargo caused by American Civil War had led to widespread unemployment. While state maintained official neutrality in response to war, British also observed Northern blockades of Southern cotton, even though they starved Lancashire of raw materials needed to feed its mills and sustain its employees. These workers gained admiration (especially among liberals and radicals) for patiently waiting out blockade, recognizing moral imperative of abolition-or possibly status of American slaves as fellow workers in need of liberation, as Karl Marx had argued. (1) To British observers, war by then had become not a battle over state sovereignty but unquestionably a war about slavery. As a response to cotton famine, An Offering-alongside art exhibition that accompanied it--was consciously presented as a social and political document, encouraging continued British support for abolition, (2) but also urging a reconsideration of position working classes occupied in British society during years leading up to franchise reforms of 1867 and 1868. Hence its opening poem, a sonnet by Emily Taylor, declares that the work, duty of hour must be to mend social divisions, so that all classes might stand At one in spirit-One for evermore! (ll. 1, 8). Indeed, observers like William Gladstone pointed to fortitude displayed during cotton famine as evidence that these workers were capable of acting with politically responsible disinterest and therefore merited full political rights. admirable conduct of suffering workpeople ... must surely tend to increase confidence reposed in them by other classes of society, prime minister stated in a speech, expressing his hope that whenever again time arrives for considering question of franchise, that conduct will be favorably and liberally remembered (qtd. in Foner, p. 22). Yet as a gift book, An Offering also unmistakably identified itself with domestic intimacy. The genre had longstanding associations with feminine reading habits and familial exchange. Appearing just before Christmas, An Offering closely followed a pattern set by exemplars of genre, which reputable young women and families typically gave each other during holiday season. Craig and her fellow editors at Press thus made their call for democratic reform through a genre that emphasizes familial attachments; their social and political document was also an object of affective exchange. In choosing this genre for their response to cotton famine, Craig and her fellow editors troubled boundary between public and private spheres, suggesting that values associated with democratic reform might emerge from patterns of familial socialization. More remarkably yet, Taylor's sonnet suggests that engaging with a volume very much like An Offering might prove a way of rehearsing quality of thought and feeling necessary for sustaining democratic community. The poem concludes with a vision of a fresh page in Life's great book unrolled, / With eyes made clear to read it, a reading experience that shall repay / With tenfold good sorrow of to-day (ll. 12-14). Depicting a more perfect community as a scene of reading, these lines-and volume they introduce-picture liberal subject as a reader of a poetry collection like very one she is holding in her hands. I The popularity of gift books had peaked in 1830s and 1840s, falling out of fashion as century reached its mid-point; when Victoria Press published its three anthologies, Victoria Regia (1862), An Offering, and A Welcome (late 1863) genre was nearly obsolete. …