British Victorian Women’s Periodicals: Beauty, Civilization, and Poetry (review)

Kathryn Ledbetter’s new study promises to add a valuable perspective to the growing scholarship dedicated to the interpretation of Victorian women’s periodicals by focusing on the place and function of poetry. Poetry, Ledbetter asserts, is a “necessity” in Victorian women’s periodicals (1). This necessity is manifold—poetry is necessary to the composition and production of the publications, necessary to the lives of readers, and necessary to scholars who would comprehend the inner life of the Victorian domestic woman. Ledbetter organizes her study around themes—power and work, the civilizing influence of religion, the encoding of beauty, the role of the editor—rather than chronology. This strategy facilitates her aim of reading the poetry that appears in women’s periodicals “within its own values and context” (50), but it limits opportunities to analyze the interrelations of the treatments of the topics subsumed by these themes and the evolution of the interrelations over time—for example, the parallels and contradictions between the treatment of power and work and the treatment of religion. Ledbetter does gesture toward these kinds of connections, suggesting for instance that “poetry that sets out women’s roles in the religious civilizing mission prescribed for them by domestic ideology . . . articulates yet another form of power” (16), but it is disappointing that she does so little with the interpretative entrées that such connections present.

The analysis of any body of works in periodical literature must take into account the context of the publications in which those works appear. Ledbetter is meticulous in presenting this contextual data and indeed defines her approach as one that assumes “that poems [in women’s periodicals] are engaged in a Bakhtinian dialogue with an infinitely expansive textual web of influence that may include illustrations, editors, publishers, other periodicals, current events, and ideology, all creating additional meaning for the words printed on the page” (14). The textual web of influence recreated in pages of this book, however, often expands without generating much additional meaning. Ledbetter presents the dialogue in considerable detail—background about a periodical and its editor, summaries of articles with brief biographies of their authors, descriptions and reproductions of illustrations, and brief biographies of the authors of the poems. There is indeed a welcome wealth of information on offer, gleaned and helpfully distilled from obscure sources, but there is a dearth of incisive commentary and analysis. There is little attempt to address the significance of the eclecticism of the material that appears in the pages of most women’s periodicals. And while Ledbetter claims that poetry in periodicals is “integrated with prose to elaborate on a point or express a thought more meaningfully” (27), she does not explain how poetry works in ways different from or complementary to prose to produce meaning.

There is still much of value in British Victorian Women’s Periodicals. Ledbetter’s close readings of the poems can be sensitive, and the poems themselves are often fascinating, one example being an eerie narrative about two children finding the body of a dead mer-baby. The rationale, however, for this poem’s inclusion in the chapter entitled “Encoding Beauty”—that the poem is “an object of beauty in aesthetic terms” (141)—is curious at best, and indicative of the kind of unsatisfactory and imperceptive commentary that Ledbetter provides. The most engaging chapter in the book is the last one, “Editors and Magazine Poets.” Here Ledbetter identifies plausible historical influences for the kind of poetry that appears in early Victorian women’s publications, noting the legacy of “trends set by eighteenth-century women’s periodicals” and the “sentimental style adapted from eighteenth-century novels and poetry” (162, 163). She also outlines the sometimes bizarre interactions between contributors and editors. Of particular interest is the correspondence between would-be poets and the first editor of the New Monthly Belle Assemblée, Mrs. Cornwell-Baron Wilson, correspondence that was reproduced for all to see in the pages...