Periodical Poetry Research Today
Getting Started in Periodical Poetry Research: Part 2
This is Part 2 of our three-part interview with Linda K. Hughes, in conversation with GRIPS representative Gillian Walters. Their conversation naturally coalesced around discussing the past, present, and future of periodical poetry research. We continue here with Linda’s thoughts on the “present” status of the field as it stands today in 2026. You can read more about her thoughts on “the past” in Part 1 of our interview.
Please note that this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Present: Current Periodical Poetry Research
Gillian Walters: How does reading poetry within a periodical format influence your response to it as a scholar?
Linda Hughes: Well, it has everything to do with the way I read a poem in a periodical. I mean, it’s all about context, context, context, context. It’s why I’m so opposed to data mining or just plucking something out and trying to make an argument. Where does it appear in the issue? When does it appear? What is it next to? How is it functioning on the page? All of that is simply crucial.
GW: What is your favourite discovery, either in physical or digital archives, which has altered your own understanding of periodical poetry and its place within the nineteenth-century literary landscape?
LH: Maybe the most surprising discovery I ever had was Thomas Hood’s “The Song of a Shirt” in Punch. I’d always just thought of that poem in a volume, this incredibly meaningful and emotionally powerful poem about the poverty, impoverishment and exploitation of female labour to produce the clothing that privileged Victorians wore. Well, you look at its original publication in December 1843 in Punch, and it’s part of the Christmas issue with all these festive visuals around it.
This was also a crucial finding for my article, “SIDEWAYS”, because I started thinking it’s December 1843; what else is happening? That idea again of context, context. Its release coincided with Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol. The way it was interacting in the periodical as a whole was mind-blowing; its visuality was so merry and playful and, right in the middle of it, is this poem that is so tragic and so filled with social consciousness of injustice.
But it’s there… and of course it was used in the larger issue to talk about why we need to care about the impoverished. It’s Christmas time and that’s a time to give and to care about other people. So, it had a real function in that particular issue, but then it gave a start to making connections even outside the page to other things going on. And that was a crucial insight for thinking about what I did in “SIDEWAYS.”
As part of the Graham R. Tomson [Rosamund Marriott Watson] project I discovered she first published “To My Cat” [1890, p. 96] in The National Observer (Edinburgh) [1890-1897]. And when I looked at the periodical page, instead of just saying, okay, there’s a citation, what do you know? Her poem, “To My Cat,” a lovely little sonnet on observing a cat, got reprinted occasionally even into the 1930s. In the periodical the poem was right above “Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Yeats.
And you suddenly start realizing what I know Natalie Houston is also working on right now, which is this relativity of the canonical. Watson was actually above “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” and they were on a level playing field. And that periodical changed how you might see reputation and canonicity by seeing them in the periodical, as opposed to just reading excerpts or the complete poems outside.
I looked at Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “A Musical Instrument” and then read it in The Cornhill Magazine [1860, 2.7, pp. 84-87]. I’d been reading the poem, very much influenced by Dorothy Mermin’s argument about that poem [in Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry (University of Chicago Press, 1989)], about how it’s playing so much with the myth of Syrinx, chased by Pan, and the kind of violence done to her. Then you look at it in Cornhill, and there is this huge image of Pan! There’s something erotic and fleshly about it.
It’s a Frederick Leighton illustration, that was featured — this was no minor production. I’ve never gotten rid of that picture of the goat-footed Pan when I think about that poem as well. So, on top of the feminist, major
foundation of my reading of that poem then suddenly to see that illustration, it almost intensifies the violence and the fleshiness of what she’s actually talking about.
GW: Has your research into poetry within periodicals ever led you to reinterpret a poem/poet or discover something new about nineteenth-century poetry which would be missed if poems were only considered in bound volumes?
LH: One was “In the Round Tower of Jhansi” by Christina Rossetti. Interestingly, she placed it next to “Goblin Market” in her 1862 volume. There it was, in Once a Week [June 8, 1857]; it’s misattributed as “Caroline.” That’s how obscure Christina Rossetti was at the time. Nobody would have done that after her volume of 1862 was published, but it was easy enough to get it wrong. So that was interesting.
A later example, that gets into global scholarship is Sarojini Naidu’s poem in The Savoy in 1896, edited by Arthur Symons. It was in there as the “Eastern Dancers,” which made it seem part of a general exoticism. But what did Sarojini Naidu do? To find this you have to go from the periodical to the volume: she published it on her own in 1905 and she changed it to “Indian Dancers,” which gave it a very different kind of meaning. It’s in her volume called The Golden Threshold, so that really marked a kind of change.
In the periodical, it was absorbed into The Savoy, which included poems like the editor had had written including “Javanese Dancers.” [Symons] was more specific, but it was about the spectator sitting back in the stands and gazing upon the dancers. It changed the whole national identity of the poem to have it in one place, versus in another. So that is a case where it very much changes. And she was constantly being orientalized when she was publishing in England. Then she took things unto her own guidance. And they had a very different political valence once she published on her own.
GW: How do you think the study of periodical poetry expands the fields of periodical studies by uncovering different kinds of contributors (such as women writers, amateur poets, and prominent canonical poets who published in periodicals)?
LH: A profound change, and one aided so much, I think, by digitization. Not entirely. I mean, if you’ve got a working-class periodical or a provincial periodical that has not yet been digitized, as Florence S. Boos, Andrew Hobbs, and Claire Januszewski have shown. There was so much done in provincial periodicals that wasn’t reprinted in the mainstream press.
Just think about who’s going to publish in the provincial press that can’t get into the London press. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people, as Kirstie Blair and Michael Sanders have shown. How would we ever know if somebody didn’t think to look across class? But then, also gender. Virginia Woolf was so right: “Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman” [A Room of One’s Own, Ch. 3, 1929].
“It’s just irrefutable: women poets are all over Victorian periodicals. And that’s how many of them got started.”
But the number of women poets who’ve been brought in, part of that is an offshoot, I think, of the 1995 revival or study of women’s poetry. I went to that 1995 conference at Birkbeck [Rethinking Women’s Poetry: 1730-1930, (Birkbeck College, University of London, 20-22 July 1995]. It was mind-blowing, and we all had this sense of,
“Oh my god, we’re all pioneers.” I had thought, “I’m just doing this marginal thing: I’m working on this Graham R. Tomson person, and she did some really interesting things so that I want to know her story.” We were all there looking at people like Adelaide Anne Procter, Alice Meynell, etc.
On Publishing Poetry as a Professional Strategy
If you can’t get a volume of poetry published right away, you have to look at it from the poet’s perspective. You can’t necessarily commission a volume first, but you might be able to place a poem. You might even be able to place one anonymously first, and if the editor hears some good responses, then maybe you get a byline. And once you get a byline and you get enough of those poems published, then you can try to get a book published, a volume of poetry, and enter the bibliographical record that way. It’s just irrefutable: women poets are all over Victorian periodicals. And that’s how many of them got started.
I think Graham Tomson herself was discovered by a poem [“Ballade of the Bourne”] she submitted to Harper’s Magazine, because Andrew Lang, the British editor of Harper’s, saw it, liked it, thought this young man was very promising. And he promoted this young man until she finally revealed herself as a woman to him. So, it is tremendously important, and yet we still don’t know them all, because of all the anonymous poems.
Part One of Amy Levy’s first poem “The Ballad of Ida Gray” was published in The Pelican [1874–1875]. To understand what was going on this time, I had to go to the British Library. That periodical title has not been digitized and probably never will be because it only lasted a year. I had to go through every page in the British Library, photographing as much as I could as I went with my iPhone.
The most prominent poet in The Pelican is Gwyneth Allwyn. I checked the Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry (DVPP) database but Gwyneth Allwyn is not there. She published, I don’t know how many, maybe 10, 15 poems in that periodical. No trace. Cannot find her. There are still
“That’s my question still. Why poetry? What’s it doing that an editorial can’t?”
discoveries to be made. Digitization is incomplete. One of the reasons we know Ellen Johnson’s work is that occasionally, patrons would take periodical or occasional poems and put them into a volume. Florence Boos has all those wonderful poets in her Blackwell volume of Working-Class Women Poets in Victorian Britain: An Anthology (2008). Sometimes there was a volume, but otherwise she had to sit in Scottish libraries with these dusty, very fragile periodicals, and do a lot of transcribing. She didn’t have a phone that could take photographs … they weren’t produced yet. Some of them are too fragile to be scanned or copied. So much remains to be discovered. That’s my question still. Why poetry? What’s it doing that an editorial can’t?
On Periodical Poetry as a Reflexive Response
I still remember when the Gulf War broke out in 1990, suddenly a lot of people started writing poetry and publishing it (in local papers, etc.). And it was like … wait, what’s going on here? There was something poetry was doing to respond to that war that people wanted and needed.
So, I go back to editors. What did editors need, and what did they want? That also produced political poetry in Victorian periodicals. And in a similar vein, and it’s kind of parallel, but not entirely, poetry is journalism. Natalie Houston has done some work on this. She had a very fine article looking at poetry in The Times, in “Newspaper Poems: Material Texts in the Public Sphere” [Victorian Studies 50 (2008): 234]. How often was poetry, in a sense, also serving the ends of journalism, e.g., reporting on experiences, making people aware of what they otherwise would not have been? How many poems are there about fires? I know I’ve read at least a couple. So, I think, this is something that might be enhanced by more theorization. When is a poem just a poem? When is a poem serving journalistic ends? And serving to communicate what is happening right now?
“When is a poem just a poem? When is a poem serving journalistic ends? And serving to communicate what is happening right now?”
Another thing is underway, but we need a whole lot more done. Colonial reprinting. I got my library to subscribe to the South Asian tranche of the World Newspaper Archive. I heard about this from Susan Bernstein, who had it at Wisconsin when she was there. But it’s so selective. There are some Indian
periodicals that are being digitized, but so few. Again, access is an issue. There’s the need to find these in India, and then are they in shape to be digitized? How much can they be handled? We need more. From the metropolitan perspective, how many Indian poems that started in India were then reprinted in England? Or the British Empire?
I was looking at another periodical poem, Tennyson’s “The Grandmother,” and next to it was the illustration of that poem in the magazine and, it would really be nice to be able to search for illustrated poems […] Alison Chapman’s DVPP website is working on this. [Interview’s note: DVPP has simple and complex searches for illustrated poems, and for components, placement, and type of illustration.] But finding a way to be able to search for illustrations of poetry, that’s really tough. They have all kinds of different titles, probably using different metadata and file sizes. It’s hard, from the design standpoint with computers, I understand.
GW: Based on your research involving Amy Levy, in what way is Levy’s periodical poetry an important and understudied part of Levy’s life story and professional identity?
LH: Amy Levy’s very first poem was in a periodical. The Pelican was feminist in a kind of guarded way, but I intend to write an article on this. It was complicated. “Reading Poet Amy Levy through Victorian Newspapers” in Alexis Easley’s edited collection [Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s–1900s: The Victorian Period (Edinburgh UP, 2019), pp. 456-469]
But when she gets to Cambridge, The Cambridge Review had just started. It took about three or four, maybe five issues, and then she’s in there. And she’s in there early. She starts with a translation, not a great one but it’s a start. She keeps publishing even after she has left Cambridge in The Cambridge Review, so is it a case of here’s an opportunity for me to publish my poetry and with an intelligent audience to read it.
Then, The Star, the weekly that had George Bernard Shaw’s music reviews, was barely started and Levy’s in The Star and publishing some of her lyrics in that. So, she’s very alert to what new periodicals are coming on the market and is often early with her foot in the door. And that is a dimension of Amy Levy that I don’t think anybody could have discerned if they weren’t looking at her through periodicals.
Continue to Part 3
Read Part 1 of this interview.
