Abstract
Poetry published in women’s periodicals comes to the reader embraced by the feminine text encoding the material product as a public space for private feelings and domestic interests. Believing the claim that poetry lives within the heart of every human soul, many readers of women’s periodicals took on the hopeful possibility that they might be able to participate in the communal public sharing of feelings that becomes poetry. Just as need for contributions to all the new periodical titles appearing monthly outstretched the supply of professional poets, opportunities arose for amateur poets to try their hand at professional authorship. Regardless of his or her experience, education, or knowledge of writing and business standards, a reader could become a contributor to the textual fabric of the periodical. An editor then became either a mentor or a gatekeeper of the poetic flame, with varying degrees of concern for the reader/contributor’s feelings as a novice poet, as the correspondence column in women’s periodicals reveals. In my exploration of editors, I heed Laurel Brake’s warning about “top down (from the position of the editor)” literature-based approaches that “obscure the periodical format, such as the collective nature of periodical publication, the shape of individual numbers, the grouping and order of text(s), the role of the readership, the element of time in serial publication, and the multiplicity of discourses” (Subjugated Knowledges 128).
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Notes
For more information on literary annuals, see Kathryn Ledbetter, “Domesticity Betrayed: The Keepsake Literary Annual,” The Victorian Newsletter 99 (Spring 2001): 16–24; “White Vellum and Gilt Edges: Imaging The Keepsake,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 30:1 (Spring 1997): 35–49; “‘BeGemmed and BeAmuletted’: Tennyson and Those ‘Vapid’ Gift Books,” Victorian Poetry 34:2 (Summer 1996): 235–45; “Lucrative Requests: British Authors and Gift Book Editors,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 88:2 (June 1994): 207–16; and “L.E.L.’s ‘Verses’ and The Keepsake of 1829,” a Romantic Circles hypertext edition of three Keepsake poems (and commentary) by Kathryn Ledbetter and Terence Hoagwood with Martin Matthew Jacobsen (http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/lel/keepcov.htm).
Also: Bradford Allen Booth, ed., A Cabinet of Gems (Berkeley: U of California P, 1938);
Eleanor Jamieson, “The Binding Styles of the Gift Books and Annuals,” Literary Annuals and Gift Books: A Bibliography 1823–1903, ed. Frederick W. Faxon (1912; rpt. Middlesex: Private Libraries Association, 1973); “The Annuals of Former Days,” The Bookseller 1 (29 November 1858): 493–99;
A. Bose, “The Verse of the English ‘Annuals,’” The Review of English Studies 4:13 (January 1953): 38–51;
John Ford, Ackermann, 1783–1983: The Business of Art (London: Ackermann, 1983);
John Heath, The Heath Family Engravers 1779–1878, 2 vols. (Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1993);
Alaric Alfred Watts, Alaric Watts, A Narrative of His Life, 2 vols. (London: Bentley, 1884);
Peter Manning, “Wordsworth in The Keepsake, 1829,” Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, ed. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995).
The poetess tradition is well documented by feminist scholars whose groundbreaking studies clear a path for closer understanding of poetry found in the NMBA, including that of Wilson. For more on the poetess tradition, see Dorothy Mermin, Godiva’s Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830–1880 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993);
Tricia Lootens, Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1996);
Isobel Armstrong, ed., Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830–1900 (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999);
Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing against the Heart (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1992);
Tricia Lootens, “Receiving the Legend, Rethinking the Writer: Letitia Landon and the Poetess Tradition,” Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception, ed. Harriet Kramer Linkin and Stephen C. Behrendt (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1999);
and Glennis Stephenson, “Poet Construction: Mrs. Hemans, L.E.L., and the Image of the Nineteenth-Century Woman Poet,” ReImagining Women: Representations of Women in Culture, ed. Shirley Neuman and Glennis Stephenson (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993), 61–73.
Leitch Ritchie (1800–1865) was a novelist and editor who also contributed to many literary annuals, including the Keepsake (1833, 34 and 37); the Literary Souvenir (1830, 31, 32, and 33); the Book of Beauty, 1835); and the Juvenile Keepsake (1829, 30). He edited Friendship’s Offering (1833–1844); Heath’s Picturesque Annual (1832–1845); Turner’s Annual Tours (1833–1835); and the Library of Romance, 15 vols. (1833–1835). Ritchie started The Englishman’s Magazine, a periodical that ran from April to October 1831. The magazine printed an early poem from Tennyson on 13 August 1831. For more information on Tennyson’s publications in Victorian periodicals, see Kathryn Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Ritchie also edited The Era weekly paper and the Indian News and Chronicle of Eastern Affairs in 1840, a paper thaThe owned.
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© 2009 Kathryn Ledbetter
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Ledbetter, K. (2009). Editors and Magazine Poets. In: British Victorian Women’s Periodicals. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230620186_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230620186_5
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