Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical by Caley Ehnes

Abstract

Reviewed by: Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical by Caley Ehnes Natalie M. Houston (bio) Caley Ehnes, Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. xiv + 238, £75/$110 cloth. An important feature of Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical is its organization, which usefully departs from the scholarly convention of structuring monographs around a set of particular authors. Instead, after the introduction, Caley Ehnes offers four chapters that examine the poetry published in different kinds of 1860s periodicals aimed at the middle class: weeklies (Household Words, All the Year Round, and Once a Week), shilling monthlies (Cornhill and Macmillan’s Magazine), religious periodicals (Good Words and the Quiver), and the sensation magazine (Argosy). This structure allows her to examine how poetry functions within the framework of a given periodical’s purpose and audience. Along the way, Ehnes provides astute close readings of a diverse range of poems, some of them likely to be familiar to her readers (Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “A Musical Instrument” and Christina Rossetti’s “If”) and some of them not (“Love,” signed by “M.” in Good Words, and Sarah Williams’s “The Doom of the Prynnes”). Responding to Pierre Bourdieu’s view that cultural production occurs within a complex network of social forces and institutions, Ehnes focuses on poetry rather than poets, and periodicals rather than editors, “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” (13). Even the book’s index supports this view of poetry, including lists of poets and poems in the entries for the periodicals as well as under separate headings. Her compelling study encourages readers to think comparatively across different periodicals and careers and to see periodical poetry as central to our conceptualization of Victorian poetry more generally. In her first chapter, Ehnes demonstrates the important role poetry played in communicating the cultural aspirations of Charles Dickens’s weeklies by focusing on what she terms “inaugural poetry,” which “establishes the audience, literary value, tone, and brand of a publication” (24). In many cases, inaugural poems open the periodical’s first issue and may explicitly signal their role, as in Shirley Brooks’s “Once a Week” and “Good Words” by L. C. C. (Lucy Cummings Smith, not identified by Ehnes). But Ehnes also suggests that any poem published in the first issue of a periodical can be understood as containing encoded messages about the periodical’s vision. Thus she reads Leigh Hunt’s “Abraham and the Fire-Worshipper: A Dramatic Parable” as the inaugural poem of Household Words, even though it follows Dickens’s editorial introduction and the first serial installment of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Lizzie Leigh. Hunt’s parable connects [End Page 809] with the political vision Dickens put forward in his periodical by encouraging charitable action. After Dickens left Bradbury and Evans, their new periodical Once a Week established itself as a different kind of weekly by taking “a light-hearted tone focused on middle-class entertainment” and by featuring poetry, much of it illustrated, like Brooks’s eponymous inaugural poem (40). Ehnes suggests that illustrated poetry was central to creating the “textual, visual, and thematic rhythms” of Once a Week and, by extension, other Victorian periodicals (49). Her second chapter on Macmillan’s and Cornhill continues her examination of page design and illustration, looking at how the covers of the inaugural issues frame each title’s cultural value. Reading these monthlies as invested in shaping literary culture, Ehnes argues that their poetry helped affirm dominant middle-class ideology, and indeed this chapter examines works by many canonical figures. She reads poems by Dinah Mulock Craik as an example of how poets negotiated formal complexity and the commercial demands of the periodical, comparing them to Rossetti’s “A Birthday” and Alfred Tennyson’s “Sea Dreams” (also published in Macmillan’s). She also traces thematic connections among poems by Matthew Arnold, Adelaide Anne Procter, Owen Meredith, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and relates them to William Makepeace Thackeray’s editorial and literary vision for the Cornhill. Ehnes’s third chapter takes up...