Five Million Poems, or the Local Press as Poetry Publisher, 1800–1900

Poetry is now accepted as a ubiquitous part of the Victorian periodical thanks to the work of Linda K. Hughes, Kathryn Ledbetter, Natalie Houston, and Alison Chapman.¹ My small research project, The Local Press as Poetry Publisher, 1800–1900, aims to join the debate by saying, as I often do, “Don’t forget about newspapers, especially the local paper.” Throughout the Victorian era, local newspapers were widely read publications, reaching a broader readership than London newspapers, magazines, and reviews, let alone part-works or books. Most issues of local newspapers regularly published one or two short poems, which were often located in sections specifically dedicated to poetry. It seems high time, therefore, to examine the local newspaper as a poetry publishing platform. My aim is to foreground the nineteenth-century local newspaper as a venue for poetry by estimating the number of poems published in local newspapers and by exploring case studies of particular newspaper titles and poets as well as local literary cultures and their links to national networks.

The British Library’s digitization of more than one hundred nineteenth-century local newspapers made such a project manageable. I was especially grateful for the help of a paid graduate intern, Claire Januszewski, who spent the summer finding, reading, and classifying more than 1,800 poems. Claire consulted 1,066 individual newspaper issues, finding an average of two poems per week in the five weeklies sampled, five poems per week in one morning paper sampled, and one poem every nine days in the evening paper sampled. About 70 percent of issues contained at least one poem, sometimes as many as ten.

Extrapolating from this research, I estimate that there were five million individual poems published in the English provincial press during the nineteenth century, give or take a million. This is how I did the sums. In 1801, there were ninety-nine provincial weekly papers publishing an average of two poems per week, multiplied by fifty-two weeks per year, making a total of about ten thousand poems published in that year’s provincial press alone. I added the estimated total for each year of the century, using the same total of newspaper titles as a multiplier for the following twenty years. (This greatly underestimates the total of newspapers for nineteen out of every twenty years, which was of course constantly increasing.) Similar calculations were made for daily papers in later sample years. A surprisingly small percentage of poems appeared in more than one paper. To make my research project manageable, I chose five titles:

• • The Blackburn Standard, a small-town Lancashire Tory weekly;

• • The Manchester Times, a big-city Radical weekly that became a magazine-style weekly miscellany of Liberal and then Tory politics;

• • The Hampshire Telegraph, a Radical then Liberal weekly covering an entire county from Portsmouth;

• • The Bristol Mercury, another big-city Radical weekly that produced a Liberal morning offshoot;

• • The Middlesbrough Evening Gazette, an advanced Liberal evening paper.

I realise that social science terms like “sampling” are an anathema to literary scholars, so it may be best to refer to them as case studies. The biggest weakness of the case study titles is their bias to Liberal/Radical politics, which seems to affect the political flavour of the verse but not the quantity.

Claire looked at every issue of the weekly papers and one in eight issues of the dailies (ensuring coverage of every publication day across the week) in the years 1800, 1820, 1840, 1860, 1880, and 1900. The poetry published in newspapers was a mixture of reprinted and original verse. The reprinted poetry includes canonical writers such as Tennyson, Shakespeare, and Keats, as well other writers who were hugely popular at the time, including Felicia Hemans, Georgiana Bennett, and radical poets like John Critchley Prince. The poems of more obscure writers, whose work often commented on contemporary events, were lifted from other newspapers and periodicals. Many American poems appeared towards the end of the century.

We know less about the original poetry, for obvious reasons. I hope to research a small sample of poets and...