Matthew Bevis (ed.),The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry.

Abstract

IN the mid-1840s Eliza Acton offered a new collection of verse to the publisher Thomas Longman. He at once rejected the proposal, observing ‘nobody wants poetry now’, and instead advised Acton that he would be more amenable to a cookery book, for which, he assured her, there was a guaranteed market (quoted on 656). Yet, as Samantha Matthews notes in relating this anecdote in her contribution to The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry , commercial firms such as Longmans still published a considerable volume of verse, notwithstanding its small and diminishing readership. They were, Matthews explains, desirous of the cultural capital of having reputable poets on their books, and subsidized their loss-making efforts with more prosaic bestsellers such as the Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845) that Acton produced at Longman’s behest. With the prodigious sales of Scott’s and Byron’s verse romances now just a fading memory, poets were both on the margins of the industrial capitalism of the Victorian age, and yet symbolically central to the residual investment in moral and intellectual credibility that had yet to be sacrificed to the marketplace. This sense of ambivalent alienation and estranged engagement is central to Matthew Bevis’s excellent introductory essay, which, reacting to Philip Davis’s claim that in the Victorian period ‘poetry became self-consciously peripheral’, explores how concerns over poetry’s form and function related to that paradigmatic Victorian preoccupation with work (quoted on 3). Victorian verse, from ‘The Lady of Shalott’ to ‘The Song of the Shirt’, is replete with weary labourers in fields and factories, as well as a sense that the poet themself is a worker too, albeit, as Bevis puts it, ‘a figure who somehow does and doesn’t work’ (5).