The Future: Where Next for Periodical Poetry Scholarship?
Gillian Walters: Is there an aspect of periodical poetry you hope researchers might look to in the future? Is this something which is currently understudied? Why do you hope future scholars will consider it?
Linda Hughes: There’s one I know needs to be done, and I haven’t seen anything yet and it is a kind of systematic study of political poetry in Victorian periodicals. There were actually quite a few. I started seeing this in the Scots Observer, which becomes the National Observer. It’s very much a political organ edited by W.E. Henley. And sometimes there are fixed form poems being written to express a kind of politics.
Of course, there’s Chartist poetry. The Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition that James Mussell, Laurel Brake and the team created a number of years ago made Chartist poetry accessible to scholars. When I co-taught a course with a historian, a graduate seminar on Victorian radicalism, we were reading poems from the Northern Star and we had to go through that database of these radical outlets.
There could be much more research on political poems in mainstream quarterlies and monthlies. Why poetry?
Open Access Tools for Periodical Poetry Research
GW: If you could give one key piece of advice to a person who is starting their journey into researching periodical poetry what would it be and why? What are two resources you would recommend to a periodical poetry scholar?
LH: Well, certainly, you’ve got to look at two resources. Firstly, The Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project that Alison Chapman and her team are putting together with that wonderful Canadian series of grants. You learn so much about the poets. I did find one poet’s identity in The Pelican using that database.
The other is the team doing the Periodical Poetry Index led by Natalie Houston [University of Massachusetts Lowell], Lindsey Lawrence [University of Arkansas, Fort Smith], and April Patrick [Rowan University]. It fills out the Wellesley Index and tells you where all the poems were. There have been a lot of publications they’re doing from discoveries they’re making.
Looking at these periodicals, they’re finding a lot of women poets and having to deal with theoretical issues of what do you do with a translation? Is it original? Is it not? They’re having to decide what to include, how to include it, how to categorize it, how to index it, because it’s open access. One of the blessings of both of those resources [is] They’re open access.
On Multilingualism in the Periodical Press
GW: Are there any methodological, archival, or theoretical challenges to periodical poetry studies that scholars have yet to address?
LH: One is the whole problem of the language issue. If you’re going to look at nineteenth-century periodicals connected to the British Empire, who’s going to be able to access all those poems and periodicals in another language? How is it to be done ethically? I know there was a discussion of this in one of the RSVP digital events. [Editor’s Note: All three events in our 2022 Digital Events series focused on multilingualism in the nineteenth-century press.]
I remember Aled Jones was … one of the hosts of the first RSVP conference I attended in Aberystwyth. That’s a name I’ve long known, so I remember that name in particular … but not everybody knows Welsh. You can’t study nineteenth-century press and not include the Welsh periodicals. A lot of them had a lot of English. But what do you do with those that aren’t?
How do you give proper credit to researchers? It’s not fair for primarily English-speaking native speakers to ask somebody who can speak two languages, or three, or four, or five to just have equal billing. I mean … that’s really a problem that’s going to need to be addressed and done with real care – both to widen the scope of nineteenth-century periodical research but also to do it ethically and fairly. And to get as much wide representation as possible.
On The Need to “Fold” Periodical Poetry Into Nineteenth-Century Research
The other issue, mentioned earlier, is how do you get everybody to see, or at least to take into account in some way, the poetry in these larger contexts that we’re now able to have in periodical research. And to fold it into what else is being worked on. And if I’ve wronged anybody by that, I hope somebody will quickly correct me. But… I don’t recall reading all that much about it.
A lot of scholars are intimidated by poetry. I have colleagues who are doing superb research, and say “Oh, I don’t work with poetry, I wasn’t trained in that.” And I think that’s a problem to be solved. If, in fact, poetry is a fundamental element in Victorian periodicals, how can we ensure that people feel comfortable dealing with poetry?
Finding a way so that scholars working on any aspect of periodical research can feel they have the skills they need to also incorporate and fold in the poetry is something that needs, I think, further work as well.
