Periodical Poetry Research Articles

Interpreters of the Real: Poems about Photographs in the Periodical Press, 1840–1860

ABSTRACT Short, anonymous poems were a common feature in the popular magazines and literary journals of photography’s first two decades, the 1840s and 1850s. Yet despite its wide readership, periodical poetry has been largely neglected in histories of photography. Through close readings of periodical poems, this essay addresses this gap and adds a fresh perspective to the complex history of photography’s reception. It argues that whereas Victorian journalism often concentrated on photographic realism and focal clarity, periodical poets were more interested in photography’s ability (or inability) to convey the emotional and psychological qualities of visual experience. By drawing on the technical process and language of photography but concentrating instead on affective qualities, the poems discussed here repositioned familiar debates about photography’s status and made their own claims for the values of both arts as interpreters of the real.

The Periodical Poetry Index, Version 2.0

Abstract This article describes the latest iteration of the Periodical Poetry Index, an open-access database that reveals the variety and complexity of nineteenth-century periodical poetry and its material presentation on the printed page. The project design, data ontology, and indexing methodology follow a sociohistorical model of the literary text and represent the distinctive features of each periodical printing of a given poem. The database foregrounds this publication context by indexing information about the arrangement of poems within and across periodical issues, variations in contributor signature, and the appearance of different languages, paratextual elements, typography, and page design. This article situates the project in the heritage of periodical studies and demonstrates the importance of new digital tools for research.

The Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project

Abstract This article introduces the Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry project and explores its indexing and encoding principles as well as edge cases that help to redefine the era’s most read poetry.

Female Authorship, Incomplete Archives, and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Montreal: The Case of Rosanna Mullins Leprohon

This article revolves around a case study of Montreal-based, Irish-Canadian author Rosanna Mullins Leprohon (1829-1879) who left behind little to no material archive after her death in 1879. Leprohon’s example serves to highlight the scholarly challenges that inhere in defining Canadian women’s authorship in the nineteenth century. The article is divided into two parts: focussing on the Journal of Education for Lower Canada (Montreal, 1857-1879), the first half argues that Leprohon’s periodical poetry played a greater role than previously understood in defining the terms of her authorship in Confederation-period Montreal. Examining archival documents belonging to her late husband and held in the Fonds Jean-Lukin Leprohon, the second half demonstrates the challenges that inhere in reconstructing women’s authorship through the archives of men-of-letters. Although they may never make up for the absence of private correspondence written in her own voice, Rosanna Leprohon’s periodical poems represent valuable resources for reconstructing the terms of her authorship and visibility in Montreal in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

Evolution and Political Revolution in Blackwood's Periodical Poetry

Abstract: In May 1861, the middlebrow British monthly Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine published a comic poem titled "The Origin of Species." While foregrounding Charles Darwin, the poem portrays evolution as teleological, progressive, and driven by the agency and desires of individual organisms—a misrepresentation of Darwin's theory. I argue that the poem undertakes this misrepresentation deliberately: the version of evolution it attributes to Darwin was associated with radical politics and threats to the social order. The Blackwood's poems call up these political associations to reduce the novelty of Darwin's theory and to hint at its dangerous social tendencies.

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

Reviewed by: Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical by Caley Ehnes April Patrick (bio) Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical, by Caley Ehnes; pp. vi + 238. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, $105.00, $24.95 paper, $27.95 ebook. In Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical, Caley Ehnes focuses on the intersection of two areas of study: Victorian periodicals and Victorian poetry. The monograph responds to calls from scholars in both fields to consider the importance of the poems published in the pages of Victorian periodicals. The most direct of these calls comes from Linda K. Hughes's seminal essay "What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies" (2007), which disputes the dismissal of poetry in periodicals as filler between pieces of prose. Where Hughes primarily addresses scholars working on Victorian periodicals, Ehnes speaks to poetry specialists, claiming: "the poetry of the periodical press is the poetry of the Victorian period" and thus "periodical poems should matter to all those interested in Victorian poetry whether they care for periodicals or not" (191). The book divides the four chapters by periodical title, grouping three weeklies related to Charles Dickens into the first chapter, pairing two of the most influential shilling monthly magazines into the second, and then separating two important but less-studied magazines into the third and fourth chapters. This structure creates consistency in the periodical contexts within each chapter, allowing Ehnes to present history and scholarship on each periodical and focus analysis on the features of the poetry and trends observed. Chapter 1 defines the inaugural poem as one that appears in the first issue—though not necessarily as the first item—and works to set the tone for a new periodical. In comparing inaugural poems in Household Words (1850–9) and All the Year Round (1859–95), Ehnes finds similarities in the poems' positions within each title's opening issue and theme of "advocat[ing] for greater sympathy between the classes," a mission suggested by Dickens in his own "Preliminary Word" at the outset of Household Words (26). The chapter also demonstrates how Once a Week (1859–80) used its inaugural poem to establish the periodical's treatment of poetry, use of illustration, and "construction of a middle-class identity defined by domesticity" (53). Throughout the chapter, Ehnes balances the introduction of larger claims that set the foundation for the remaining case studies, comparing features of the periodical context and themes of the poems, and performing adept close analyses of the individual poems. In chapter 2, Ehnes considers the first five years of Macmillan's Magazine (1859–1907) and The Cornhill Magazine (1860–1975), shilling monthlies that defined the style of such periodicals in the lives of middle-class families and the literary world. The chapter contrasts the emphasis on poetry in Macmillan's against The Cornhill's focus on literary labor and the role of the professional author. The section on Macmillan's discusses the ways periodical poetry fit into the careers of Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, and Dinah Mulock Craik, distinguishing between the style of poets who wrote primarily for the periodical press and those for whom such poems were more economically driven. From The Cornhill, Ehnes analyzes poems by Matthew Arnold, Adelaide Anne Proctor, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Owen Meredith, and W. M. W. Call that grapple with "the cost, legacy and responsibility of literary labor" (93). The chapter includes detailed analyses of the formal features of specific poems by each of these contributors along with valuable insights about the larger periodical press, the role of shilling monthlies in establishing middle-class literary tastes, and the poetics of the mid-nineteenth century. [End Page 489] Chapter 3 explores the role of poetry in religious literary periodicals through Good Words (1860–1910)—described as "a conventional literary periodical with a devotional twist"—which follows models established in previous discussions of Once a Week and The Cornhill (112). Here, the inaugural poem builds upon the suggestion in Once a Week that the periodical is central to bringing the family together for communal reading on Sundays. Ehnes argues that periodical poetry in Good Words brings readers...

Locating Scottish Cosmopolitanism in the Digital Archive

A reassessment of late nineteenth century Scottish cosmopolitan poets as represented in Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry (https://dvpp.uvic.ca/ ), focussing on the poems of John Davidson, William Sharp, Francis Annesley Brodie-Innes, and Violet Tweedale, and on the Scottish periodicals Good Words and Chambers’s (Edinburgh) Journal.

Getting Along with Relational Databases

Both relational databases (RDBs) and XML have strengths and weaknesses as data storage and modeling systems. Most researchers working with historical and literary data in the humanities would argue for the superiority of XML, since it allows unlimited nesting, linking, and complexity. Relational database proponents claim superior querying and processing speed, although recent advances in XML languages and tools have eroded that advantage. Nevertheless, RDBs remain popular and are widely used, particularly in the early stages of projects where resources and metadata are being collected, and projects may end up with both an RDB and an XML document collection. Programmers must then integrate these distinct forms of data when building project outputs. This article discusses the Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry (DVPP) project, where metadata on about 15,000 poems from nineteenth-century periodicals is captured in a MySQL database, and periodically exported to create a TEI file for each poem. Many of the poems are then transcribed and encoded. The canonical source of metadata is the RDB, while the canonical source of textual data is the TEI file. Metadata in the TEI files must be periodically updated from the RDB, without disturbing the textual encoding. Changes to the RDB data may result in changes to the id and filename of the related TEI file, so any existing TEI data is migrated to a new file, and the Subversion repository must be appropriately updated. All of this is done with XSLT and Ant.

Illustrated Poetry in Belgravia: An Exploration in Pedagogy and Collaborative Research

Using our own partnership as a case study, this essay suggests new opportunities for collaborative research with students in periodical studies. We discuss the history of collaboration in periodicals pedagogy before turning to two self-reflective pieces (one from the faculty-instructor perspective and one from the student view) on introducing undergraduate students to indexing nineteenth-century poetry for the Periodical Poetry Index. Demonstrating the value of collaborative research experiences between faculty and students, we end with a discussion of our findings from indexing illustrated verse in Belgravia: A London Magazine (1866–99).

Models and Methods for Collaboration in Periodical Studies, 1990–2020

This essay explores the recent history of collaborative work in the field of Victorian periodicals through a series of interviews with researchers, identifying approaches used by scholarly teams and situating them within larger models for collaboration. The projects discussed include two co-written books, The Victorian Serial and The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier; two co-edited volumes, the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism and Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s–1900s; and three digital humanities projects, the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition, Anglophone Chile, and the Periodical Poetry Index.

Teaching Digital Literacy Through Indexing Poetry in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals for the Periodical Poetry Index

Teaching Digital Literacy Through Indexing Poetry in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals for the Periodical Poetry Index

Indexing Periodical Poetry: First Steps in Building a Digital Bibliographic Project

Indexing Periodical Poetry:First Steps in Building a Digital Bibliographic Project Lindsy Lawrence (bio) Indices, bibliographies, catalogues, and codices are standard scholarly tools that enable researchers to locate text and information. As James Mussell suggests, there have been many attempts "to address the … bibliographic complexity" of the field of periodical studies through these tools.1 Grand collaborative endeavors such as The Wellesley Index, the Waterloo Directory of Victorian Periodicals, and Poole's Index have tried to make sense of the enormous amount of material published in nineteenth-century periodicals, but until recently only modest attempts have been made to index poetry. In 1990 George J. Worth published in Victorian Periodicals Review a "mini-index" of twelve poets whose verse appeared in Macmillan's Monthly Magazine.2 In a 1999 article, Eileen Curran indexed poetry in the first thirty-six volumes of Bentley's Miscellany, which was later updated for the static web and PDF versions of The Curran Index in 2015 with additions by Richard Ford and Gary Simons.3 In 2007 Linda K. Hughes called attention to the need for more study of periodical poetry in terms of author-publisher relationships, cultural history, and bibliography, and since then there has been a surge of work on periodical poetry, including a special issue of Victorian Poetry in 2014 devoted to essays on poetry in nineteenth-century periodicals.4 The Periodical Poetry Index emerged out of this climate to provide a bibliographic guide to the wealth of poetry published in nineteenth-century periodicals. In this essay, I define how a digital bibliographic project differs from a static index in both conception and design. In so doing, I examine how the periodical page influences our indexing methodologies and how the bibliographic codes on the page shape our iterative indexing process. When we began the Periodical Poetry Index in 2010, we considered several different project names. All of these titles included the word "index," as we envisioned the project in the tradition of scholarly periodical studies [End Page 608] enterprises attempting to make sense of the wealth of text produced by nineteenth-century print culture. Yet this is perhaps a misnomer given that the digital tools available make our work different from a static index meant to be published in a volume (as was the initial design of The Wellesley Index) or a web page merely providing a list of bibliographic citations. According to Nan Badgett, professional indices such as those commonly found in monographs or finding aids are designed "to indicate topics or features of documents in order to facilitate retrieval of documents or parts of documents."5 In this regard, Periodical Poetry functions as a finding aid much like The Wellesley Index, directing users to locate a poem in a specific issue and volume of a nineteenth-century periodical. But Houghton specifically designed The Wellesley Index as two static bibliographic indices: one that lists articles and attributions and one that lists the works of individual authors across periodical titles.6 In contrast, the breadth of bibliographic information we collect about each poem makes our project less an index and more a catalogue. According to the definitions laid out by Andrea Crestadoro in his 1856 work The Art of Making Catalogues of Libraries, catalogues and indices are lists with different functions: "The first [the catalogue] is a list of the goods; its direct object is to make an inventory of the property by recording a full and exact description of each and every article. The second [the index] is but a table of the contents of the first, a hand to show the way how readily to find any of the articles as actually entered in the inventory."7 In the Periodical Poetry Index, the item detail view for each poem provides a catalogue description of the poem's material context and bibliographic codes including poem length, page design features, illustration, poem type, epigraph, and notes on musical cues and explanatory headnotes. Designed as a digital relational database rather than a static list published online, the Periodical Poetry Index is best described as a digital bibliographic project because its digital format changes the function of a scholarly index. Locating the poem in...

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

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...

Indexing, Checking, and Encoding in the Periodical Poetry Index

Indexing, Checking, and Encoding in the Periodical Poetry Index

Zooming In and Out: Theories of Poetry from Checking the Periodical Poetry Index

Zooming In and Out: Theories of Poetry from Checking the Periodical Poetry Index

“Making Poetry” in Good Words : Why Illustration Matters to Periodical Poetry Studies

“Making Poetry” in Good Words:Why Illustration Matters to Periodical Poetry Studies Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (bio) In April 1867, a fifteen-stanza poem by Frances R. Havergal entitled “Making Poetry” appeared in Good Words, accompanied by a full-page illustration by Arthur Boyd Houghton (fig. 1).1 Houghton’s picture gave readers access to an intimate domestic scene inside a comfortable middle-class home. Resting her head against the back of an upholstered armchair, a young woman gazes into space, her hands resting on the book open on her lap. The room is lit by a large window overlooking a treed expanse, but all the views in this carefully staged scene are directed inward. Positioned behind the foregrounded woman with the book, a young boy kneels on the window seat, absorbed in writing on a sheet of paper. Bringing the domestic activities of reading, writing, and contemplation into a single frame, Houghton’s picture not only visualizes Havergal’s accompanying verses, but also highlights some overarching themes about “making poetry” in Good Words. Turning to the poem that shares the picture’s title is instructive, not least because the continuous reading experience is disrupted by the facing full-page image and subsequent page turn. Printed in double columns, the first three stanzas of Havergal’s poem appear at the bottom of the printed page, below an essay “On Some New Forms of Industrial Co-operation.”2 Directly facing Houghton’s illustration, these stanzas initiate an exchange between mother and child: Little one, what are you doing, Sitting on the window-seat?Laughing to yourself, and writing,Some right merry thought inditing, Balancing with swinging feet. In response the child confesses, “’Tis some poetry I’m making,” and formulates a life goal: “I should like to be a poet, [End Page 111] Writing verses every day;Then to you I’d always bring them,You should make a tune and sing them; ’Twould be pleasanter than play.” The twelve remaining stanzas are printed in double columns on the next page, immediately above an essay on “one of the most strange and unexpected phenomena that science has yet disclosed to the human mind,” the discovery of a star on fire.3 Spoken entirely in the voice of the mother, the verses teach son and reader together that poetic expression is as much a part of modern life as knowledge of economic cooperatives and stellar conflagrations. “Poetry is not a trifle, / Lightly thought and lightly made,” she explains, but rather “the essence of existence,” wrought from the common human experiences of “Joy or Sorrow.” Both deeply personal and intensely social, poetry is also, the verses insist, something manufactured and reproduced: its material form constitutes a “copy” or “transcript” of what is “Carved in letters deep and burning / On a heart that long endures.” Taken together, poem, picture, and layout make an argument about the nature and purpose of poetry in Victorian periodicals. First, poetry is a made thing. Expressed in the physical relationships of letterpress, white space, and wood-engraved scene, its material form belongs to the age of mechanical reproduction, when human experience of all kinds is shared through the dissemination of inscribed letters and images impressed into multiple copies. Second, poetry is an essential part of everyday life. Neither a frivolous “trifle” in the capitalist world of getting and spending nor an elite form of high art remote from domestic experience, poetic expression is integral to what it means to be human in the modern world. The verses published in illustrated periodicals have much to tell us about Victorian poetry’s intimate relationship with visual culture and the image, and its place in both domestic space and the public sphere. Popular rather than canonical, with many authors appearing anonymously or pseudonymously, these poems require us to shift our scholarly attention from authors to readers, and from aesthetic/poetic intentions to material effects. Taking Alexander Strahan’s Good Words (1860–1911) as its case study, and arguing that the age of the image is inevitably the age of the reader, this paper examines a selection of pictured poems from the 1860s to show why illustration matters to periodical poetry studies. As one...

“A Very Poetical Town”: Newspaper Poetry and the Working-Class Poet in Victorian Dundee

In the assessment of Victorian periodical poetry, newspaper verse has received comparatively little attention. As Natalie M. Houston comments her important article on newspaper poems, this is partly due to the privileging of individual authorship literary criticism, meaning that anonymous poems tend to be devalued, and due to the fact that newspaper poems often function as topical commentary and are thus difficult to assess once extracted from their original contexts. (1) The sheer volume of newspaper verse is daunting: recent work the field, by Andrew Hobbs, estimates that around five million individual poems were published the nineteenth-century provincial press. (2) Spatially, as Houston notes, poetry is easily identifiable because its layout stands out on the page; but terms of content and form, the title of newspaper poems alone often gives little clue about their theme, and terms of authorship, pseudonyms acquire full significance only when situated within the content of the newspaper's readerly community. James Mussell's observation that without the shared cultural resources which contemporary readers took for granted, we struggle to realize the meanings and effects such texts had for their readers ... the familiarity or novelty of what was under discussion is as true for the poetry column of the newspaper as it is for reports on contemporary events. (3) This article approaches newspaper poetry via the local and (relatively) small-scale, by analyzing the presence of poetry three newspapers published Victorian Scotland--the Dundee Courier, the Dundee Advertiser, and the Dundee, Perth and Forfar People's Journal--in brief but vital period for their development, 1858-60. (4) These were not the only papers published from Dundee. While space precludes detailed consideration of more than three papers, I also reference their closest competitors, The Telegraph and the Weekly News, published by Park, Sinclair and Co., Dundee. All five newspapers had benefited from the repeal of the Stamp Duty 1855 (and would do so further from the repeal of the Paper Duties 1861), and were part of the massive expansion of the Scottish newspaper press after that period; these two years, the Courier, facing decreased circulation and competition from rivals, merged with the Daily Argus and moved from weekly to Mon-Wed-Fri publication, the Advertiser to daily publication, and the short-lived Telegraph began, failed, and merged with the Weekly News. The two major weekend papers Dundee, the older Weekly News and the new People's Journal, which began its run 1858 and still survives today, were the success stories of this period. Such expansion and development was mirrored by the general growth of the provincial newspaper industry across Britain. As Aled Jones comments, between 1855 and 1861 137 newspapers were established 123 towns England where there had previously been no local newspaper. (5) By studying publications from the same town and the same years, I argue that one of the most important directions for the study of newspaper poetry is an examination of its relations to the provincial press, which enabled remarkably strong kinship to develop between newspapers, the working-class poet, and local readership. The significance of the provincial press creating a sense of local identity and attachment, for working-class readers particular, has been recognized by recent scholars, notably Hobbs his work on the Lancashire press. (6) The role of poetry and the poetry column, however, still remains relatively unexplored. In publishing poetry, Victorian newspapers frequently relied upon what Meredith McGill, considering North American context, describes as the of reprinting, designed to redistribute elite culture in variety of mass-cultural formats. (7) Tennyson and Longfellow, who both had an international reputation by 1860, are the most cited poets the newspapers that I consider, and Tennyson s 1859 Riflemen, Form! …

“Between Politics and Deer-Stalking”: Browning’s Periodical Poetry

Robert Browning's best-known comment about publishing poetry in periodicals registers his contempt for it. Contemplating how present the completed Ring and the Book Victorian audiences, he consulted William Allingham: And now! can you advise me? I'm puzzled about how publish it. I want people not turn the end, but read through in proper order. Magazine, you'll say: but no, I don't like the notion of being Politics and Deer-Stalking, say. Given Browning's prodigious memory and ambivalence toward Allingham's twelve-part Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland ('Not so poetical as some of your things--but O so clever), this may have been a direct hit at the Anglo-Irish poet. When the second of twelve monthly installments of Allingham's narrative poem in pentameter couplets appeared in Fraser s Magazine in December 1862, it was sandwiched between a politically tinged article on Present Position of the Church of England and Autumn Days by John Skelton, a personal essay on the joys that the season offered up the angler and sportsman. Browning's remarks Allingham on politics and deer-stalking were prefaced by the revelation that 'I began [Tire Ring and the Book] in rhymed couplets, like Laurence Bloomfield, but thought by and by I might as well have my fling, and so turned blank verse.' (1) Highly conscious of the serial periodical publication of Allingham's long poem, Browning raises a similar possibility for The Ring and the Book only quash it. (2) Most commentators have followed suit ever since. William DeVane notes Browning's prejudice against publication in and account for some of Browning's poems in Hood's Magazine Mrs. Sutherland Orr comments, fact deserves remembering in connection with his subsequent unbroken rule never write for magazines.' (3) Numerous handbooks and bibliographies nonetheless document that twenty-seven of Browning's poems first appeared in periodicals, at least one in every decade of Browning's poetic career (see appendix). To be sure, he published far fewer periodical poems than Tennyson, but hardly so few as make his resort the medium exceptional. (4) In what follows I consider what kind of audience and context he both encountered and envisioned when he published in periodicals and explore the impact of his involvement on his imaginative work. Though the personal and cultural circumstances framing each periodical poem shifted, his periodical poems prior marriage are more often linked politics or the news cycle, those after more likely register his union with Elizabeth Barrett either through participation in her networks or her own practices as a writer of periodical poetry. In Browning's final periodical poem the two strands converge: he fiercely pays tribute his late wife while deliberately exploiting the periodical's enmeshment in the news cycle attack Edward FitzGerald. Most characteristically, Browning conceptualized periodical publication as an expression of friendship networks within a gift economy. Browning's reasons for doing so are complex, a matter I return at this essay's conclusion. Conceptualizing periodical poems as gifts is likewise complex. Though Browning never objected negotiating copyrights for his books, he could have looked Byron, who gave away the copyrights of Childe Harold and The Corsair, as a precedent for giving away individual poems. In at least one instance, as we shall see, Browning's gift of a poem a periodical was an act of outright philanthropy on behalf of a disadvantaged group. The sociological model of the gift advanced by David Cheal consorts with Browning's contributions both the Monthly Repository and Hood's Magazine early in his career. Noting the inherent tension market relationships and personal relationships ... distinctive ... in capitalist societies, Cheal conceptualizes a modern gift economy as serving to construct certain kinds of voluntary relationships. …

The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry, 1830-1870 by Gregory Tate (review)

Reviewed by: The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry, 1830-1870 by Gregory Tate Lindsy Lawrence (bio) Gregory Tate , The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry, 1830-1870, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. xi + 201, $110/£60 cloth. Gregory Tate's investigation of the ways Victorian poets explored the embodied mind is a finely constructed analysis of the intersection of psychology and poetics. Moving chronologically from the late 1820s through the end of the 1870s, Tate traces the various ways Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Arthur Clough, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and the spasmodic poets fashioned the embodied mind. This study contributes to the field by more fully exploring the ways in which Victorian poets contemplated the mind's processes, physical sensations, and emotive effects. Drawing from the work of Philip Davis on intellectual culture and Isobel Armstrong on poetic theory, Tate argues for the influence of associationist psychology on Victorian poetics—in terms of both content and form. His methodology includes close reading of selected works by the poets in question as well as consideration of the work of nineteenth-century thinkers and writers on associationist psychology, physiology, evolution, and poetics. Of particular interest to readers of VPR will be Tate's use of periodical poetry reviews from a range of journals, including the Athenaeum, Edinburgh Review, Examiner, London Quarterly Review, North British Review, Monthly Repository, and Westminster Review. While this is not a work devoted to periodical study, Tate does more than merely mine the periodical record. The first chapter analyzing Tennyson's and Browning's early works, in particular, uses contemporary periodical reviews to establish how both poets and reviewers drew from Romantic discourse on poetic feeling and early associationist psychology. [End Page 572] Tate also demonstrates how these poets were influenced by the emerging science of psychology through careful attention to print history. In his later chapters on Tennyson, Browning, and Eliot, Tate uses the contents of these writers' libraries to support his claims about their use of psychological theory. This evidence is most compelling in the chapter on Browning's epic psychology in The Ring and the Book. Tate notes two physiological psychology books in the Brownings' collection—Julius Althaus's The Functions of the Brain (1884) and James John Garth Wilkinson's The Human Body and Its Connexion with Man (1851)—arguing that Browning "was aware of the tenets of physiological psychology" (167). While it is an argument of correlation, his later suggestion—that Browning also would have been familiar with James Hinton's two articles on psychology and the physical processes of the brain, published in the Cornhill in 1862, and later George Henry Lewes's "The Heart and the Brain," published in the Fortnightly Review in 1865—is supported by convincing biographical evidence. Browning was asked in March 1862 to edit the Cornhill, and he wrote to Isabella Blagden in August 1865 praising the first installment of Anthony Trollope's The Belton Estate, which appeared in the same issue as Lewes's article. The strength of this evidence adds weight to Tate's close reading of Browning's poem. Overall, this work elegantly explores the intersection of nineteenth-century poetics and psychology. Lindsy Lawrence University of Arkansas, Fort Smith Lindsy Lawrence Lindsy Lawrence is Assistant Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. She teaches a variety of courses on nineteenth-century British literature, with special attention to publication history, gender roles, and the conventions of serial fiction. She is currently working on a book manuscript examining how domestic serials functioned as part of the editorial voice of the nineteenth-century family literary magazine. She is co-director of the Periodical Poetry Index. Copyright © 2013 The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

Bibliographic Databases and “The Golden Stream”: Constructing the Periodical Poetry Index

Bibliographic Databases and “The Golden Stream”: Constructing the Periodical Poetry Index