Victorian Poetry and the Culture of Evaluation, by Clara Dawson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Victorian Poetry and the Culture of Evaluation by Clara Dawson Naomi Levine (bio) Victorian Poetry and the Culture of Evaluation, by Clara Dawson; pp. x + 256. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, $77.00. Victorian poetry has had a special relationship to evaluation. As New Critical close reading took shape in the mid-twentieth century, its negative value judgments were often directed at the object of the Victorian poem. This history of devaluation still clings to Victorian poems and to Victorian poetry as a subfield of literary studies. "It has become almost customary to begin discussions of Victorian poetry with a lament," wrote Stephanie Kuduk Weiner in 2003 ("Victorian Poetry as Victorian Studies," Victorian Poetry 41.4, 513). And although the study of Victorian poetry has continued to flourish since then, especially in the context of new formalisms, that formative encounter with the discipline's aesthetic judgment has been hard to shake. But to characterize the twentieth century as the period when Victorian poetry first contended with the aesthetic judgment of the literary critic is to ignore the reviewing culture in which Victorian poems were made. Clara Dawson's enlightening new book, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of Evaluation, turns our attention to this earlier and, of course, more formative moment in the history of Victorian poetry and its evaluators. Dawson shows not only that Victorian poems were embedded in a culture of periodical reviewing (by now a well-known fact), but also that they register a response to that culture in their formal, rhetorical, and figural systems. She argues, in other words, that a sensitivity to critical evaluation is part of Victorian poetry itself, because Victorian poets engaged with their own conditions of reception poetically and in real time. Underpinning the book's argument for "the centrality of reviewing culture to Victorian poetic form" is a historical claim about the growing prominence of the periodical review over the nineteenth century (23). In the prose of William Hazlitt and Thomas Carlyle, Dawson finds the diagnosis of a new self-consciousness in literature brought about by the expanding power of the periodical press. In Carlyle's terms, reviewing culture made literature "listen to itself" (qtd. in Dawson 8). The result, according to Dawson, was a poetry more obviously directed toward the reading public and the reviewers who mediated between poet and reader and who adjudicated aesthetic value. Dawson develops two interlocking concepts to name this historical and aesthetic shift: "the culture of evaluation" and "the poetics of publicness" (1). "The culture of evaluation" refers to the dialogue between reviews and poems: the way the two genres spoke to each other about aesthetic value, popularity, audience, the role of the poet, and the status of poetry in the public sphere. "The poetics of publicness" describes the poetic effects poets used to engage in this dialogue. Dawson structures her book according to three such effects: chapter 1 treats poetic voice, chapter 2 treats poetic style, and chapters 3 and 4 treat poetic address. Along the way, she analyzes poems by Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Spasmodics, Matthew Arnold, and Arthur Hugh Clough. The standout chapter is the second one, "Poetic Style: Jewellery and Value in Victorian Poetry." This chapter is a fascinating study of the metaphor of the jewel in Victorian poetics, covering everything from the history of mass-market jewelry production and its parallels with developments in print culture; to the shared criteria for evaluating gemstones and literary work (clarity, craft, and so on); to the material, commercial, [End Page 168] and editorial aspects of gift annuals like The Gem (1829–32). Against that rich historical backdrop, Dawson makes a convincing argument for what she terms the "jewelled style," the convention of reviewers appraising poetry for the value and immediacy of its content and the transparency of its form (73). In readings of Barrett Browning's rhymes in A Drama of Exile (1844) and Browning's jewelry imagery in "Popularity" (1855) and The Ring and the Book (1868), Dawson shows how poets resisted reviewers' demand that poems resemble extracted pearls and buffed gemstones. The chapter, which nicely integrates formalist and historicist scholarship...