Alison Chapman

Virtual Victorian Poetry

In 1895, reviewing his attempt over 20 years earlier to provide an account of Victorian poetry—to define, categorize, and canonize the genre—E. C. Stedman commented that “even the adjective ‘Victorian’ was unfamiliar, if it had been employed at all.”1 But the adjective “Victorian” still required explication in his Victorian Anthology 1837– 1895, as well as in his critical book Victorian Poets.2 In fact, defining the field of Victorian poetry was a question many critics and poets reflected upon at the end of the century, especially in essays, reviews, and poems published in periodicals (by which I mean all forms of serial ephemeral print). This chapter addresses attempts to categorize poetry’s value at the end of the nineteenth century through the cultural work of poems published in periodicals. At a time when the body of poetry from the Victorian era was under scrutiny, the status of poetry within serial print became a particular marker of modernity: it signified immersion in a virtual world, but also reflected that virtual world’s limitations.