General Materials

Six books feature in the general materials section. Three essays from a chronologically expansive, inclusively Victorian, collection on children’s poetry in English are succeeded by the second edition of one of Victorian poetry’s foundational critical texts. There are also four new monographs reviewed this year, with topics ranging from midcentury periodical poetry to Romantic and Victorian techniques of sublime suspension to nineteenth-century varieties of poetic Anglo-Saxonism to Victorian valedictory poetics.

This year’s review begins with Katherine Wakely-Mulroney and Louise Joy’s edited collection The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry: A Study of Children’s Verse in English (London: Routledge, 2018), which “seeks to probe the ways in which children’s poetry has aesthetic value or interest by showcasing some of the approaches we might adopt to attempt to appreciate and analyse it” (p. 11). Three of its constituent essays focus specifically on the contributions of Victorian poetry to England’s “first so-called ‘Golden Age’ of children’s literature” (p. 13). Wakely-Mulroney’s own “Poetry in Prose: Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Books” pays particular attention to two of the twenty poems included within Carroll’s larger text, “Little Birds” and “The Mad Gardener’s Song,” in order to assert “the hermeneutic significance of children’s verse to Lewis Carroll’s most challenging and underappreciated work” (p. 75). Wakely-Mulroney argues that Sylvie and Bruno (1889), in both its prose and its poetry, “participates in a long history of didactic verse designed to acquaint the very young with life’s most severe lessons,” including that mortality lurks even in moments of apparently childlike levity (p. 89). An equally serious message emerges from the Tractarian poetry ostensibly “aimed at pre-adolescent, or even pre-literate children” but also addressed “to adults as children” found in Cecil Frances Alexander’s Hymns for Little Children (1848) and Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872), both discussed by Kirstie Blair in “‘We may not know, we cannot tell’: Religion and Reserve in Victorian Children’s Poetics” (p. 127). Proposing an “unacknowledged relationship” between these two works, Blair argues that Alexander and Rossetti “use the voice of the faithful child as a literary device in the service of a particular theological and ecclesiastical movement grounded in obedience to authority, discipline, the acceptance of human limitations, and reserve” (pp. 133, 141). The titles of Alexander’s and Rossetti’s books point to the frequent imbrication of poetry and music in the Victorian period, a fact that Michael Heyman, in “‘That terrible bugaboo’: The Role of Music in Poetry for Children,” cites while asserting “the inadequacy of some literary criticism that ignores or distorts the musical element” and advocating the use of “music as a critical tool, to represent our experience of ‘musical’ text more meaningfully” (p. 163). Heyman’s representative case study for the interpretive payoffs of a more musical approach to Victorian children’s poetry is Edward Lear’s “The Courtship of Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,” originally published “as a song, with full score” in 1877 (p. 174). Those who are interested in the eighteenth-century antecedents and twentieth-century descendants of Victorian children’s poetry are advised to consult the volume’s remaining eleven essays.

Even if readers have never studied Sylvie and Bruno, Hymns for Little Children, Sing-Song, or “The Courtship of Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,” they will almost certainly have read Isobel Armstrong’s Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. When it first appeared in 1993, Armstrong’s magnum opus merited its own lengthy review essay, written by Herbert Tucker and published in the Spring 1995 special issue of Victorian Poetry dedicated to “Women Poets” (pp. 174–187). Describing it as “formidable, masterly, epochal,” Tucker both acknowledged the book as “a summation of [Armstrong’s] own and others’ labor during the past quarter century” and predicted that it would become “an indispensable guide . . . to the rising generation who will give the study of Victorian poetry its twenty-first century shape” (p. 174). How right he was. Armstrong’s historical dialectic between a conservative poetics of sensation and a liberal aesthetics of agonistic verse...