The history of periodical poetry begins in the early nineteenth century, running parallel to and intersecting with the conventional history of Victorian poetry and poetics. Each decade of the nineteenth century saw the rise of a new kind of periodical, which created new and specific publishing opportunities for both professional and amateur poets. Bradbury and Evans's Once a Week (July 1859–April 1880), for example, published established poets such as Alfred Tennyson alongside unidentifiable amateurs or ‘outsiders’ as the periodical's second editor, Edward Walford, referred to them in an 1857 letter (Buckler 1953: 537). While this book focuses on the literary periodicals of the 1860s (periodicals that published high-quality texts, some of which entered the canon), the initial rise of the periodical as the dominant publisher of poetry occurred much earlier with the collapse of the market for books of poetry. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, consumers were no longer buying volumes of original poetry by a single author. As a consequence, publishers were no longer willing to risk publishing single-author poetry volumes (see Erickson 2007). Instead, both poets and publishers turned to the literary annual, a genre which built on the pre-existing audience for commonplace books (see St Clair 2004: 224–9). The production of the literary annual in the 1820s and 1830s irrevocably redefined the way Victorian readers consumed poetry, altering ‘the place of the poet in Victorian literary culture’ (Ledbetter 2007: 13). Essentially, the poet became part of the mass-produced literary culture defined by serial novels, periodical publications and decorated gift books. The rise of the literary annuals (and the illustrated shilling monthlies that followed) thus reaffirmed the divide between popular, mass-produced literature and the reified poetry of small-run poetry volumes. The critical discourse that evolved in response to this relocation of the poet and poetry into periodical culture reverberated throughout the nineteenth century, influencing the cultural and critical perception of periodical poetry as trite and sentimental well into the twentieth century.

Literary periodicals represent only one outlet for the Victorian poet, however. Local and national newspapers, working-class publications (stamped and unstamped), religious periodicals, and family-orientated magazines all published poetry alongside the literary periodicals run by the era's established publishing houses.

The history of nineteenth-century literature cannot be separated from the rise of new media and the expansion of the periodical market to encompass all facets of the era's mass readership from rural readers of the local press to urban working-class audiences and those reading in middle-class parlours. By the middle of the century, ‘[p]rint was proliferating in exponential numbers more cheaply and more rapidly than before … and there was a literate, eager readership’ looking for print material to fill their leisure time (Chapman and Ehnes 2014: 8). The literary periodical – be it a weekly like Household Words or a monthly like the Cornhill – represents one response to the rapid rise of and appetite for the periodical press as publishers adapted their catalogues in response to the evolving and overlapping social, cultural and literary forms of the period. The changing demands of Victorian readers and publishers determined the market available to poets. If poets wanted access to the mass readership (and related financial opportunities) of Dickens, Eliot and Trollope, they had to publish their poems in the periodical press alongside the era's popular serial fiction. Each chapter in this book has explored the implications of this shift for Victorian poetry and poetics, concluding that periodical poems do not sit apart from the canon of Victorian literature and poetry. Rather, the poetry of the periodical press is the poetry of the Victorian period. In other words, to paraphrase and slightly revise Hughes's seminal argument (2007: 91), periodical poems should matter to all those interested in Victorian poetry whether they care for periodicals or not. Indeed, with the rise of digital projects related to Victorian periodicals and poetry, we can no longer ignore the presence of poetry in the era's popular press. The new media of the twenty-first century has allowed scholars to access and claim space for periodical poetry in a way that was seemingly impossible prior to the digital turn.

Going Digital: Accessing Periodical Poetry

Over the past decade, the new media of the Victorian period, including its periodicals and illustrations, has gone digital. Victorian texts, including the era's periodicals, are now more accessible than ever.

Biographical notes are based on a synthesis of the information available in reference works such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, supplemented by my own observations about the periodical contributions of each figure.

Arnold, Matthew (1822–88) Arnold wrote most of his poetry by the age of thirty. His first success as a poet occurred while he was still a student at Rugby: he won the prize for English verse in 1840. Nine years later, Arnold published his first volume of poetry, The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, under the pseudonym A. ‘Empedocles in Etna’ (considered by scholars to be his most accomplished long poem) followed in 1852. Best known for his periodical pieces on culture, Arnold rarely appeared in the periodical press as a poet. Arnold only appears once in the periodicals considered in this book, and he rarely appears in the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry, which covers a slightly different set of periodicals. Source: Miles 1892–7, vol. 5: 85–102; Collini 2008.

Barrett Browning, Elizabeth (1806–61) Barrett Browning published in the periodical press throughout her career beginning with the New Monthly Magazine in 1821 and ending with the Cornhill in 1860s. For a discussion of Barrett Browning's contributions to the Cornhill, see Chapter 2 in this volume. Other periodical poems by Barrett Browning include ‘The Cry of the Children’ (published in the August 1843 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine) and ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point’ (published in the Liberty Bell, an American abolitionist gift book, for 1848). Source: Stone 2004; Brown et al. 2006.

Blackie, John Stuart (1809–95) Born in Scotland, Blackie was well-known as a scholar of German and Greek. He held several positions within the Scottish university system throughout the 1850s, including Greek chair at the University of Edinburgh. He was an advocate for education, participating in the movement to abolish the Test Act, which prevented those outside the Church of Scotland from holding chairs in Scottish universities, and he supported women's higher education. Walter Whyte argues that Blackie's popularity comes from his taste for ‘short lyrics [and] light, rollicking lays’ (in Miles 1892–7, vol. 4: 215).

The rise of periodical literature for a distinct, and previously underserved, middle-class audience defined literary production in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The weekly periodical format discussed in the previous chapter represents one way publishers met the needs of middle-class readers; the shilling monthly represents another. The shilling monthly of the 1860s came to life under the auspices of two publishing houses: Macmillan & Co. and Smith, Elder. Following in the footsteps of the popular American periodical Harper's Magazine (which was launched in the US in 1850 by the publisher Harper & Brothers), both Alexander Macmillan and George Smith (the heads of their respective publishing houses) planned to publish house journals featuring the authors of the day. Macmillan's decision to publish his new monthly for a shilling inaugurated a new trend in publishing, leading to the birth of the shilling monthly as a genre. While the middle-class weeklies of Dickens and Bradbury and Evans built on and refined the model offered by the popular penny dreadfuls, transforming the weekly into a respectable genre for the middle-class family, the monthlies drew inspiration from the venerable quarterlies of the early nineteenth century. Macmillan's Magazine (hereafter Macmillan's), for example, retained the book reviews, literary essays and political prose that were mainstays in publications like the Edinburgh Review, and the Cornhill's cover visually linked Smith's new endeavour to the quarterlies of an earlier generation. The appropriation of the cultural capital associated with the quarterlies identified the monthlies as a higher class of publication, a status the material construction of the shilling monthlies affirmed. Unlike the cheaper weeklies, the monthlies ‘were of a higher quality, often including lavish illustrations and full-page text layouts rather than the newspaper-style columns and lack of illustrations that characterized Dickens's magazines’ (Phegley 2004: 14). The upscale design of the shilling monthlies combined with their respectable contents positioned them as the perfect literary object for the middle-class family aspiring to demonstrate and hone their literary taste.

Despite their centrality to the periodical culture of the 1860s, the shilling monthlies were not without their critics.

Secular literary periodicals such as Household Words, Macmillan's Magazine and the Cornhill undoubtedly defined a significant portion of the literary market for middle-class readers interested in reading the era's latest novels and consuming poetry, illustrations and non-fiction essays in a curated and family-friendly setting. However, alongside the popular literary weeklies and the shilling monthlies helmed by famous authors, a secondary periodical market flourished, far exceeding that of secular publications: the religious press. Mark Knight suggests that ‘it is difficult to imagine the nineteenth century without the religious debates and influences that played such a crucial and extensive role. Periodicals’, he argues, ‘were crucial to this vitality’ (2016: 363). The numbers support Knight's assertion. In 1864, a table of circulation numbers for London publications suggests that the sale and circulation of monthly religious periodicals greatly exceeded the circulation numbers of ‘magazines and serials of a higher class’ (Altick 1998: 358). Several decades later, a late-nineteenth- century source identifies religious periodicals as the largest category of periodical publications, representing 43 per cent of the total periodical market (Knight 2016: 355). The index appended to Josef Altholz's The Religious Press in Britain, 1760–1900 (1989) alone lists 571 titles published during the nineteenth century. Given the number of religious periodicals circulating in the 1860s – around 228, according to Altholz's index – it is, to adapt Knight's phrasing, difficult to imagine nineteenth-century periodical poetry and poetics without considering the periodicals produced out of the religious discourse of the period.

Religious periodicals took a variety of forms during the nineteenth century: some were linked to a specific religious domination with the literature therein explicitly promoting a particular theology, some exclusively focused on doctrinal and philosophical issues, some were associated with religious publishers, some ‘included material that might be deemed “secular” … [but] continued to signal a theological orientation through various means’ (Knight 2016: 356), and some, like Good Words, published a mix of non-denominational secular and devotional literature aimed at a broadly Christian audience. For the purposes of this book, I have chosen to focus on Goods Words as a representative example of the religious literary periodical.

‘Victorian’ is a term at once indicative of a strongly determined concept and an often notoriously vague notion, emptied of all meaningful content by the many journalistic misconceptions that persist about the inhabitants and cultures of the British Isles and Victoria's Empire in the nineteenth century. As such, it has become a byword for the assumption of various, often contradictory habits of thought, belief, behaviour and perceptions. Victorian studies and studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture have, from their institutional inception, questioned narrowness of presumption, pushed at the limits of the nominal definition, and have sought to question the very grounds on which the unreflective perception of the socalled Victorian has been built; and so they continue to do. Victorian and nineteenth-century studies of literature and culture maintain a breadth and diversity of interest, of focus and inquiry, in an interrogative and intellectually open-minded and challenging manner, which are equal to the exploration and inquisitiveness of its subjects. Many of the questions asked by scholars and researchers of the innumerable productions of nineteenth-century society actively put into suspension the clichés and stereotypes of ‘Victorianism’, whether the approach has been sustained by historical, scientific, philosophical, empirical, ideological or theoretical concerns; indeed, it would be incorrect to assume that each of these approaches to the idea of the Victorian has been, or has remained, in the main exclusive, sealed off from the interests and engagements of other approaches. A vital interdisciplinarity has been pursued and embraced, for the most part, even as there has been contest and debate among Victorianists, pursued with as much fervour as the affirmative exploration between different disciplines and differing epistemologies put to work in the service of reading the nineteenth century.

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture aims to take up both the debates and the inventive approaches and departures from convention that studies in the nineteenth century have witnessed for the last half century at least. Aiming to maintain a ‘Victorian’ (in the most positive sense of that motif) spirit of inquiry, the series’ purpose is to continue and augment the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary approaches, and to offer, in addition, a number of timely and untimely revisions of Victorian literature, culture, history and identity.

While shilling monthlies such as the Cornhill receive significant attention for their role in altering the shape of the mid-Victorian literary and periodical markets, the literary weeklies were some of the first publications to court and consolidate the period's middle-class readers into a distinct readership. Over time, the weeklies became a significant presence in the periodical market, eventually putting pressure on the shilling monthlies (Law 2000: 25). The more modest price of periodicals such as Household Words, All the Year Round and Once a Week attracted a broad swath of middle-class and aspiring middleclass readers from those who could afford only the most modest luxuries to those who had greater economic freedom. The way Dickens and his publishers marketed and sold Household Words and All the Year Round shows their keen awareness of the different economic and class realities of the weekly's potential readers. The weekly format of Household Words, for example, ‘required less outlay of cash and fit well with the social and economic rhythms of weekly wages and Sunday leisure’ (Brake 2016: 242). Consequently, the periodical's twopenny price allowed it to attract two different audiences: the price of the publication made it ‘accessible to the working classes’ (Phegley 2016: 291), giving them access to the literature and cultural values embedded in publications aimed at a middle-class readership, while the weekly's association with Dickens meant that the periodical remained ‘attractive to middle-class readers, who would have been particularly pleased with [this] link’ to the well-respected novelist (Phegley 2016: 291). Many weeklies, including Dickens's, ‘also issued monthly editions with specially created advertising wrappers’ (Brake 2016: 243), targeting wealthier middle-class readers by invoking the cultural capital of the monthly publication, which felt and looked more like a book. Regardless of the format purchased by readers, the content of the mid-Victorian weekly – at least, as it was reimagined by Dickens – supported the social mandate of the rising and increasingly dominant Victorian middle class.

Of all the periodicals considered in this book, Dickens's Household Words is perhaps the most obviously political. Under Dickens's editorship, Household Words published serial fiction, mostly social problem novels, and contemporary poetry alongside ‘politically orientated pieces on education and industrialism’ (Phegley 2016: 292). The periodical's focus on social issues transformed the weekly into an organ for promoting Dickens's social agenda. However, by the 1860s, there was a notable shift in Dickens's approach to periodical publication.

In the previous chapters, I examined the ways in which poetry defines the brand of a periodical. It can stand in for the editor, introducing the periodical to its readers (Once a Week); it can implicitly support the editorial mandate and dominant ideologies of a periodical through its content (Household Words, All the Year Round, the Cornhill, Good Words); and it can signal both implicitly and explicitly the cultural pretentions of a publication (Macmillan's Magazine and the Cornhill). This chapter moves away from questions of branding and periodical forms for a more sustained discussion about the poetics of periodical poetry. Focusing on the Argosy, a mid-1860s shilling monthly published by Alexander Strahan and edited by Isa Craig – the first and only female editor included in this study – this chapter argues that a careful reading of the periodical's sentimental poetry challenges the critical dismissal of such light, entertaining verse as simplistic, marginal, and trite. Though Craig occupied the role of editor for a relatively short period of time (December 1865 to 1867), her personal and professional networks as well as her own experience as a female poet defined the Argosy's approach to poetry and contributed to the periodical's reformulation of feminine poetics. Under her editorship, the Argosy brought together a number of female poets whose work explores and expands the boundaries of poetic form. The periodical poems of Christina Rossetti, Isa Craig, Jean Ingelow and Sarah Williams all test, challenge and champion the conventions of the sentimental lyric form to produce a new poetics, one defined both through and against conventional representations of the Victorian poetess and her gushing, heart-inspired poetry.

My analysis of the Argosy unpacks what Caroline Levine calls ‘the relations between culture and power’ (2006b: 104), arguing that the formal features of the periodical's poetry, specifically its sentimental subject matter and imagery, lay bare and challenge the cultural binaries that came to define popular poetry from the era. As briefly alluded to in the introduction, one way to understand the power behind these cultural binaries is through Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital, which sees the market for literature and art as divided according to a product's accessibility.