Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–1875 by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (review)

Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing is the third and perhaps the best in a series of monographs in which Lorraine Janzen Kooistra has explored the ways in which the material forms of Victorian illustrated books produced meanings and audiences. In The Artist as Critic (1995), Janzen Kooistra—who is a co-editor of The Yellow Nineties Online—explored the complex dialogic relations between illustration and text in a range of 1890s publications. In Christina Rossetti and Illustration (2002), she showed how the poetry of Christina Rossetti has, virtually from the moment Rossetti composed it, been realized and frequently renewed in the act of illustration. In Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing Janzen Kooistra turns her attention to the illustrated gift book of the 1850s and 1860s, in which work by the very best visual artists and engravers was yoked (usually at the behest of the publisher, and not always seamlessly) to poetry by both established and lesser known figures. For while the illustrated gift book—for which Janzen Kooistra makes a compelling case as the dominant poetic form of the 1860s—finds its apogee in the consummate editions of Alfred Tennyson illustrated by the Pre-Raphaelites, by Daniel Maclise, and by Eleanor Vere Boyle, it more commonly finds expression in the many finely wrought illustrated anthologies produced for the Victorian drawing room, ancestors of the modern coffee table book, in which poetry sometimes played a subordinate role. Though women poets of the period typically relied on such anthologies to widen their reach, here poetry was often employed to highlight the work of illustrators or engravers whose names—once household words, proudly blazoned across book covers and title pages—are now widely forgotten. As Janzen Kooistra suggests, the mid-Victorian gift book’s Table of Illustrations, listing artists, engravers, and illustration titles, was in some cases at least as important as the Table of Contents.

One of Janzen Kooistra’s great strengths lies in the attention she gives to figures whose work has been largely invisible to all but specialists—to the illustrators Miles Birkett Foster, John Gilbert, and Arthur Boyd Houghton, for instance, or to the poets Eliza Cook and Jean Ingelow—as well as the great sensitivity with which she reads poetry in relation to the work of the illustrator and the printer. There is currently no finer reader of Victorian illustration than Janzen Kooistra, and her recovery of the work of the “illuminating women” who illustrated Tennyson’s poetry in this period, though it occupies just ten pages here, is especially to be welcomed, not least for reminding us that “if illustration remained a largely masculine preserve in the professional world of the 1860s, there were nevertheless many women who used their pencils to illuminate their private reading” (192).

But the importance of Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing lies not merely in Janzen Kooistra’s sensitivity to the bibliographical codes of Victorian books or the attention she gives to figures and forms that have gone largely unregistered of late. Janzen Kooistra is a cultural historian of Victorian publishing as much as a reader of illustrated poetry, and she is interested in the ways gift books of the period operated within Victorian culture at large as much as she is in narrower questions of exegesis and visual-verbal relations. Thorstein Veblen, Pierre Bourdieu, D. F. Mackenzie, Jerome McGann, and Simon Eliot inform her work no less than historians of printing and illustration. The gift book’s “hybrid, multimedia form” spoke loudest to lower-middle-class and female readers, Janzen Kooistra shows, at a time when literacy was the preserve of masculine elites (the gift book was rendered obsolete in part by the Reform Act of 1867 and the Education Act of 1870, Janzen Kooistra suggests, as well as by the Married Women’s Property Acts and the growing movements for female enfranchisement and women...