Between Treasuries and the Web: Compendious Victorian Poetry Anthologies in Transition

The following books are under consideration in this review:

The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Valentine Cunningham; Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. $97.95, $41.95 paper.

The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, edited by Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle, assisted by Wai Ying Lee and Kirsten Munro; Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999. $59.95 Canadian paper, $49.95 paper, £24.99 paper.

Never before, surely, have so many students had such easy access to a vast range of Victorian texts—not even during the Victorian period. In the past ten years or so, access to Victorian writing on the Web has grown at an impressive, even explosive rate; and simultaneously, counter to many predictions, we have seen a boom in Victorian literature textbook production, especially with respect to poetry.¹ In terms of disciplinary history, such developments seem perfectly timed. E. C. Stedman's Victorian Poetry, Mountstuart E. Grant Duff's An Anthology of Victorian Poetry, A. H. Miles's Poets and Poetry of the Century: as these works and others first appeared around a century ago, they effected a more or less official transformation of sheafs, treasuries, and other collections of literary "pearls," "nosegays," "specimens," or "relics," into resources for formal literary study.² Now, with the development of the internet, we seem to be facing an equally momentous shift. Might we flip through all these printed pages to hear the last, noisy gasp of a dying genre? Or might the current plenitude of paper texts continue to develop, as both counterpart and counterpoint to that of hypertexts? For the moment, many of our best students seem to use anthologies much as they do syllabi: that is, as introductory maps for further exploration. Still, how long will that last? Whatever happens, the current textbook boom would seem to present a useful occasion for more public reflection on the roles of anthologies within Victorian studies teaching—and with this, the role of Victorian studies teaching within the field as a whole.

Such reflection, too, may be on the rise. Recent teaching panels seem particularly packed and lively, for example, while conversation, disputes, and chats on, say, the VICTORIA listserv, continue to gravitate toward questions of classroom practice.³ Nonetheless, we presently seem to be moving only slowly toward the creation of more formal, public modes for addressing classroom practice. So far, for example, the World Wide Web offers Victorianists no equivalent of the Romantic Circles Pedagogies section, for instance,⁴ while current volumes in the MLA Approaches to Teaching series—which cover each of Romanticism's Big Six as well as women poets, to speak of poetry alone—include only three volumes devoted to Victorian texts, all novels. Indeed, even now, a certain strangeness attaches to the project of writing about textbooks. To be sure, as we would feel comfortable noting with respect to, say, Miles or Stedman, teaching anthologies are crucial artefacts, material instantiations of both the traditions and the current values of a given field. "Come buy! Come buy!": order an anthology, and in theory, you "buy," in the sense of acceding to, a highly specific set of relations between your students and the field as a whole. Each table of contents incorporates, rejects, and transforms pedagogical history—in our case, a history reaching through our own student lives, back to the Victorians and beyond.⁵ That we do not review our own period's textbooks at length, treating each new production as a catalyst for controversy, may reveal our own lack of contentiousness; but it may also reveal the dilemmas we continue to face within a field the Victorians helped shape.

To begin with, though teaching anthologies present the public (formal, official, neutral) face of Victorian literature, they are also the grounding for many of our most oddly private, idiosyncratic experiences within—or manipulations of—the field. Aside...