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

This elegantly structured, persuasively argued, and copiously illustrated study of the Victorian illustrated gift book makes a valuable contribution to recent work on the relationship between poetry publication (both anthologies and single-author collections) and illustration. This is an area with which the name of Lorraine Janzen Kooistra has become particularly identified over the last few years, and her latest book is securely grounded in her earlier work on Christina Rossetti and fin-de-siècle illustrated books.

If the popular mythology that the Victorians invented Christmas as we know it contains a substantial kernel of truth, the place of illustrated gift books in this process is surely central. Eye-catching artifacts presented in private affective and domestic exchanges, they were also intended in considerable part for public drawing-room display, as markers of taste, literary fashionableness, and social status. As the temporal parameters of Kooistra’s subtitle suggest, the fashion for specifically poetic illustrated gift books was relatively short-lived: within a couple of decades advancing technology, with a firm nudge from changing taste, was effecting radical transformations in both the content and form of such seasonal offerings: ‘[t]he ornamental “quarto poets” began to look a little dated and uncultivated, if not downright “vulgar,” in the aesthetic drawing rooms of the 1870s.’ But while they lasted, they had a substantial effect on both the marketing of poetry and the creation or sustaining of poetic reputation.

Divided into five chapters, plus introduction and coda, Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing covers interconnected topics that cumulatively demonstrate the importance of this relatively ephemeral phenomenon in the evolution of nineteenth-century publishing. The first chapter explores the format and production modes that made the illustrated gift book ‘not the tangible outcome of an artist’s or author’s inspiration but instead … a commodity conceived in the office of a publisher or engraver.’ The communal nature of the enterprise and the division of labour it required across poets, artists, publishers, and engravers meant that ‘the gift-book’s author-function was a corporate entity,’ whatever hierarchies obtained among those involved in its production. This inevitably had implications for the relationship not only between author and artist but also between author and reader, contributing to the process by which ‘poetry became middlebrow – a commodity for mass consumption.’ The exemplary case of Tennyson provides the focus for chapters 2 and 5, the former concentrating on the evolution of the Moxon edition, the latter on Tennyson’s increasingly acrimonious relations with Moxon and subsequent publishers, as the economic imperatives of illustrated editions took marketing decisions out of Tennyson’s own control. Kooistra traces ‘the poet’s increasing distance from his own authorship as a result of the mechanization and professionalization of the publishing industry,’ a process in which the visual image comes to enjoy equality of status with the printed word and even, arguably, ultimate dominance over it.

Between the two bracketing chapters on Tennyson come two equally informative chapters, one on the mid–nineteenth century’s most accomplished and successful engraving firm, the Dalziel Brothers, the other on the three most popular poets granted illustrated editions designed for a mass readership – Eliza Cook, Adelaide Procter, and Jean Ingelow. This chapter’s title comes courtesy of the Saturday Review’s condescending judgment on a trio of once famous names: ‘second–rate poets for second–rate readers.’

The reputational extremes occupied (perhaps more to the modern than to the nineteenth–century mind) by Tennyson on the one hand and Cook, Procter, and Ingelow on the other make for an illuminating and wide–ranging exploration of the circumstances governing the publication of illustrated poetic gift books in the middle years of the nineteenth century. There are occasions when Kooistra’s hold on period detail slackens a little disconcertingly – as in her claim that a twenty–one–shilling gift book was priced at ‘roughly the equivalent of...