This book examines how Tennyson’s career was mediated, organised and directed by the publishing industry. Founded on neglected archival material, it examines the scale and distribution of Tennyson’s book sales in Britain and America, the commercial logic of publishing poetry, and how illustrated gift books and visual culture both promoted and interrogated the Poet Laureate and his life. Major publishers had become disillusioned with poetry by the time that Edward Moxon founded his business in 1830 but by the mid-1860s, his firm presided over a resurgence in poetry based on Tennyson’s work. Moxon not only orchestrated Tennyson’s rise to fame but was a major influence on how the Victorian public experienced the poetry of the Romantic period. This study reevaluates his crucial role, and examines how he repackaged poetry for the Victorian public.

Drawing on research into the book-production records of twelve publishers-including George Bell & Son, Richard Bentley, William Blackwood, Chatto & Windus, Oliver & Boyd, Macmillan, and the book printers William Clowes and T&A Constable - taken at ten-year intervals from 1836 to 1916, this book interprets broad trends in the growth and diversity of book publishing in Victorian Britain. Chapters explore the significance of the export trade to the colonies and the rising importance of towns outside London as centres of publishing; the influence of technological change in increasing the variety and quantity of books; and how the business practice of literary publishing developed to expand the market for British and American authors. The book takes examples from the purchase and sale of popular fiction by Ouida, Mrs. Wood, Mrs. Ewing, and canonical authors such as George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Mark Twain. Consideration of the unique demands of the educational market complements the focus on fiction, as readers, arithmetic books, music, geography, science textbooks, and Greek and Latin classics became a staple for an increasing number of publishing houses wishing to spread the risk of novel publication.

Considers Tennyson's poems, from the elegiac In Memoriam to the Arthurian Idylls of the King, in the context of Victorian interest in philology. How do words come to mean what they mean, and how can we hope to use them precisely when they are constantly changing? The urge to find a word's meaning through its etymology is an old and enduring one, gaining new momentum in the nineteenth century as advocates of the so-called "new philology" argued that major revelations were to be found within the biographies of everyday expressions. Developing hand in hand with a growing national interest in all things "Anglo-Saxon", language study simultaneously seemed to offer a pathway to the roots of English culture and to illuminate human history on a grand scale. Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) came of age in the midst of this exploding popularity of both Anglo-Saxonism and philology, and he did so among men who were to be responsible for advancing both fields. This study places this preeminent Victorian poet in the context of the period's preoccupation with the history of language. It shows that the intellectual milieu that surrounded him encouraged him to revive archaic words and to reveal the literal metaphors lurking within his words. Moreover, his familiarity with past forms of English enabled him to arrange the connotations of his vocabulary for precise effect. Surveying his techniques at every scale, from individual vowels to narratives, this book argues that Tennyson held a more optimistic view of language than scholars have generally supposed, and shows the sophistication of his philological techniques.

Alfred Tennyson was a poet all his life, writing more than a thousand works in virtually every poetic genre. Considered by his Victorian contemporaries the pre-eminent poet of the age, he has become a canonical figure who is widely read and studied today. Consequently, his poems appear on the syllabi of both survey courses in Victorian literature as well as upper-division and graduate-level topics courses that cover Victorian studies or address subjects such as environmental studies, religion, elegiac poetry, and Arthurian literature. This companion makes Tennyson's poetry accessible to contemporary readers by identifying some of the formal elements of the poems, highlighting their relevance to Tennyson's Victorian contemporaries, and explaining their enduring appeal and value. Entries in the companion, organized alphabetically, provide essential details about Tennyson's most anthologized poems, offer suggestions for reading and interpretation, and elucidate unfamiliar historical and literary allusions. Additional entries, a biography of Tennyson, and a selected bibliography of recent criticism offer information about the people, places, events, and issues that influenced Tennyson or were important to him and his contemporaries.

A new perspective on a book that transformed Victorian illustration into a stand-alone art. Edward Moxon’s 1857 edition of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Poems dramatically redefined the relationship between images and words in print. Cooke’s study, the first book to address the subject in over 120 years, presents a sweeping analysis of the illustrators and the complex and challenging ways in which they interpreted Tennyson’s poetry. This book considers the volume’s historical context, examining in detail the roles of publisher, engravers, and binding designer, as well as the material difficulties of printing its fine illustrations, which recreate the effects of painting. Arranged thematically and reproducing all the original images, the chapters present a detailed reappraisal of the original volume and the distinctive culture that produced it.

Originally published in 1979. Carl Dawson looks at the year 1850, which was an extraordinary year in English literary history, to study both the great and forgotten writers, to survey journals and novels, poems and magazines, and to ask questions about dominant influences and ideas. His primary aim is descriptive: How was Wordsworth's Prelude received by his contemporaries on its publication in 1850? How did reviewers respond to new tendencies in poetry and fiction/ Who were the prominent literary models? But Dawson's descriptions also lead to broader, theoretical questions about such issues as the status of the imagination in an age obsessed by mechanical invention, about the public role of the writer, the appeal to nature, and the use of myth and memory. To express the Victorians' estimation of poetry, for example, Dawson presents the contrasting views help by two eminent Victorians, Macaulay and Carlyle. In Macaulay's opinion, the advance of civilization led to the decline of poetry; Carlyle, on the other hand, saw the poet as a spiritual liberator in a world of materialists. The fusion of the poet's personal and public roles is witnessed in a discussion of the two mid-Victorian Poet Laureates, Wordsworth and his successor, Tennyson. In analyzing the relationship between the two writers' works, Dawson also highlights the extent of the Victorians' admiration for Dante. To give a wider perspective of the status of literature during this time, Dawson examines reviews, prefaces, and other remarks. Critics, he shows, made a clear distinction between poetry and fiction. Thus, in 1850, a comparison between, say, Wordsworth and Dickens would not have been made. Dawson, however, does compare the two, by focusing on their uses of autobiography. Dickens surfaces again, in a discussion of Victorian periodical publishing. Here, Dawson compares the Pre-Raphaelites' short-lived journal The Germ with Dickens' enormously popular Household Words and a radical paper, The Red Republican, which printed the first English version of "The Communist Manifesto" in 1850. In bringing together materials that have often been seen as disparate and unrelated and by suggesting new literary and ideological relationships, Carl Dawson has written a book to inform almost any reader, whether scholar of Victorian literature or lover of Dicken's novels.

The Victorians and English Dialect tells the story of the Victorians' discovery of English dialect, and of the revaluation of local language that was brought about by the new, historical philology of the nineteenth century. Regional dialects came to be seen not as corrupt or pernicious, but rather as venerable and precious. The book examines the work of the ground-breaking collectors of the 1840s and 1850s, who first alerted their contemporaries to the importance of local dialect - and also to the perils that threatened it with extinction. Tracing the connection between dialect and literature, in the flourishing of dialect poetry and the foregrounding of regional voices in Victorian fiction. It goes on to explain how the antiquity of regional dialects cast light on the national past - the Celts, Anglo-Saxons, and Vikings - and how dialect study was also at the heart of the discovery of local folklore and oral culture: old words, old customs, old beliefs. And it tells the story of the three great monuments of Victorian dialect study that marked the apogee of regional philology: the 80 publications of the English Dialect Society (1873-96), an organization run by a committee of journalists and local historians in Manchester; the nationwide survey of The Existing Phonology of English Dialects (1889), which listened in on local speech in market squares and third-class railway carriages; and the multi-volume English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905), which collected all the previous labours together, and made an enduring record of Victorian dialect.