Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing — 2011 ·

The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855-1875

“Janzen Kooistra makes a superb contribution to the literature on the history of the book. . . . This volume itself is a beautiful artifact, generously illustrated with examples of gift-book engravings, often displaying the entire printed page in order to display the interplay between text and illustration. Summing Up: Highly recommended.”

Choice

“Kooistra persuasively argues that in the 1860s, the illustrated book of poetry became one of the most important literary commodities of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. With great clarity and depth, she articulates the central relevance of ornamental, illustrated poetic gift books to literary culture, British identity, and the place of poetry in histories of authorship, reading, and publishing. . . . There is nothing stale about her contribution to book history studies.”

Review 19

“Thoroughly researched and lucidly argued, Kooistra’s study makes a convincing case for the centrality of the gift book to understanding Victorian poetry, illustration, book production, and consumer culture.”

Elizabeth Carolyn Miller — author of Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle

In Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing eminent Rossetti scholar Lorraine Janzen Kooistra demonstrates the cultural centrality of a neglected artifact: the Victorian illustrated gift book. Turning a critical lens on “drawing-room books” as both material objects and historical events, Kooistra reveals how the gift book’s visual/verbal form mediated “high” and popular art as well as book and periodical publication.

A composite text produced by many makers, the poetic gift book was designed for domestic space and a female audience; its mode of publication marks a significant moment in the history of authorship, reading, and publishing. With rigorous attention to the gift book’s aesthetic and ideological features, Kooistra analyzes the contributions of poets, artists, engravers, publishers, and readers and shows how its material form moved poetry into popular culture. Drawing on archival and periodical research, she offers new readings of Eliza Cook, Adelaide Procter, and Jean Ingelow and shows the transatlantic reach of their verses. Boldly re-situating Tennyson’s works within the gift-book economy he dominated, Kooistra demonstrates how the conditions of corporate authorship shaped the production and reception of the laureate’s verses at the peak of his popularity.

Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing changes the map of poetry’s place—in all its senses—in Victorian everyday life and consumer culture.

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra is the author of The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Books and Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History. She is co-editor of The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts and The Yellow Nineties Online. She teaches at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada.