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

Scholars with an interest in Victorian visual and material culture as well as the history of the book will want to examine Lorraine Janzen Kooistra’s latest illustrated monograph, which reconstructs the gift-book industry’s oft-neglected significance to both middlebrow consumer culture and the high Victorian literary scene. During the 1860s, at the height of the gift book’s popularity, the books themselves—gilded, ornate, and produced in limited quantities (particularly around Christmastime)—were materially designed to communicate their cultural worth to middle-class consumers eager for “cultivation.” They also provided a visually oriented multimedia vehicle which, Janzen Kooistra observes, hastened the modernist decoupling of author from text, as illustrators took increasing interpretive liberties with the images they produced to accompany a given set of verses. For instance, she suggests that Tennyson’s well-known ire with illustrated editions of his work was not produced solely by the illustrations themselves but rather by his reduced power over his words and public image due to corporate authorship and production under emerging mass-market conditions.

Indeed, Janzen Kooistra writes with formidable insight into the vast, intermingled range of other influences—artists, engravers, businessmen, and consumers—upon 1860s gift-book production. A good portion of chapter 2 is devoted to the aesthetic and discursive shifts wrought by Pre-Raphaelite illustrative techniques, and chapter 3 elucidates the scope of the Dalziel engraving firm’s sway over popular publishing.

She also scrutinizes the gendered dimensions of an artifact that was designed for interior domestic spaces rather than the “pocket of the moving man of the public sphere” (44). In fact, one of this study’s notable strengths is its careful attention to the tensions between the progressive ideological commitments of certain popular female poets (Eliza Cook, Jean Ingelow, and Adelaide Anne Procter), all of whom were featured in gift-book collections, and the traditionalist social messages implicitly attached to the spaces in which gift books were displayed. Certainly these women enjoyed a degree of national, even transnational, success that was buoyed by a marriage of modern marketing techniques to the popular appeal of “poetry at home” (128). Yet “whereas the prestige of a guinea gift book may have elevated the poetic stature of Cook, Procter, and Ingelow in their own day, it had the opposite effect” on Tennyson, Janzen Kooistra writes, a contrast which underscores the heavy gender-coding inherent to the dichotomy between popular consumer culture and “high art,” guineas and pounds aside (177). Toward the end of the book, in chapter 5, she notes Tennyson’s involvement in the release of a re-masculinized Cabinet Edition of his work (1874–75), which exchanged the gift-book aesthetics of the previous decade’s editions for a portable size and “workingman’s” feel— an attempt, perhaps, to disassociate from the feminized tabletop artifact and reclaim some of the poet’s perceived “lost” literary eminence (247).

In some cases, the reduced sizes of some graphic reproductions within the pages of Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing may be potentially frustrating to a visually oriented scholar. Nevertheless, the book’s many illustrations sustain and amplify its arguments, particularly during the second and fourth chapters. Overall, with its carefully executed analyses of nineteenth-century marketing strategies, publishing technologies, and the shifting nuances of public demand, Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing does much to recapture the dual importance of the gift book as commercial and cultural object. It stands as a well-suited companion to Janzen Kooistra’s previous book-length studies of Victorian poetry, visual culture, and publishing history.