"Making poetry" in Good Words: why illustration matters to periodical poetry studies.

Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen

In April 1867, a fifteen-stanza poem by Frances R. Havergal entitled "Making Poetry" appeared in Good Words, accompanied by a full-page illustration by Arthur Boyd Houghton (fig. I).1 Houghton's picture gave readers access to an intimate domestic scene inside a comfortable middle-class home. Resting her head against the back of an upholstered armchair, a young woman gazes into space, her hands resting on the book open on her lap. The room is lit by a large window overlooking a treed expanse, but all the views in this carefully staged scene are directed inward. Positioned behind the foregrounded woman with the book, a young boy kneels on the window seat, absorbed in writing on a sheet of paper. Bringing the domestic activities of reading, writing, and contemplation into a single frame, Houghton's picture not only visualizes Havergal's accompanying verses, but also highlights some overarching themes about "making poetry" in Good Words.

Turning to the poem that shares the picture's title is instructive, not least because the continuous reading experience is disrupted by the facing full-page image and subsequent page turn. Printed in double columns, the first three stanzas of Havergal's poem appear at the bottom of the printed page, below an essay "On Some New Forms of Industrial Co-operation."2 Directly facing Houghton's illustration, these stanzas initiate an exchange between mother and child:

   Little one, what are you doing,
     Sitting on the window-seat?
   Laughing to yourself, and writing,
   Some right merry thought inditing,
     Balancing with swinging feet.

In response the child confesses, "'Tis some poetry I'm making," and formulates a life goal:

   "I should like to be a poet,
        Writing verses every day;
   Then to you I'd always bring them,
   You should make a tune and sing them;
     'Twould be pleasanter than play."

The twelve remaining stanzas are printed in double columns on the next page, immediately above an essay on "one of the most strange and unexpected phenomena that science has yet disclosed to the human mind," the discovery of a star on fired Spoken entirely in the voice of the mother, the verses teach son and reader together that poetic expression is as much a part of modern life as knowledge of economic cooperatives and stellar conflagrations. "Poetry is not a trifle, / Lightly thought and lightly made,' she explains, but rather "the essence of existence," wrought from the common human experiences of "Joy or Sorrow." Both deeply personal and intensely social, poetry is also, the verses insist, something manufactured and reproduced: its material form constitutes a "copy" or "transcript" of what is "Carved in letters deep and burning / On a heart that long endures." Taken together, poem, picture, and layout make an argument about the nature and purpose of poetry in Victorian periodicals. First, poetry is a made thing. Expressed in the physical relationships of letterpress, white space, and wood-engraved scene, its material form belongs to the age of mechanical reproduction, when human experience of all kinds is shared through the dissemination of inscribed letters and images impressed into multiple copies. Second, poetry is an essential part of everyday life. Neither a frivolous "trifle" in the capitalist world of getting and spending nor an elite form of high art remote from domestic experience, poetic expression is integral to what it means to be human in the modern world.

The verses published in illustrated periodicals have much to tell us about Victorian poetry's intimate relationship with visual culture and the image, and its place in both domestic space and the public sphere. Popular rather than canonical, with many authors appearing anonymously or pseudonymously, these poems require us to shift our scholarly attention from authors to readers, and from aesthetic/poetic intentions to material effects. Taking Alexander Strahan's Good Words (1860-1911) as its case study, and arguing that the age of the image is inevitably the age of the reader, this paper examines a selection of pictured poems from the 1860s to show why illustration matters to periodical poetry studies. As one of the most successful illustrated periodicals to emerge in this decade, Good Words made pictured poetry part of the daily experience of Victorian modernity. (4) Described by Michel de Certeau as an unprecedented "growth of vision, measuring everything by its ability to show or be shown and transmuting communication into a visual journey, modern life manifests as an "epic of the eye and of the impulse to read." (5) Reading the pictured poetry in Good Words through de Certeau's theoretical lens, I aim to show the ways in which this highly mediated form offered Victorian readers a visual poetics of everyday life, empowered them as "poets of their own acts" of making (de Certeau, p. xviii), and contributed to modernity's standard of valuation, that which can be shown or transmuted visually.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

1

Until relatively recently, Victorian poetry studies focused almost exclusively on authors and books rather than readers and illustrated periodicals. Considering the verses filler and the images irrelevant, the original editors of the Wellesley Index of Victorian Periodicals included neither poetry nor pictures in their compendious record of contents. (6) This editorial decision long delayed knowledge of the important place pictured poetry held in nineteenth-century periodicals, and thus in the everyday lives of ordinary readers. Thanks to the pioneering work of Alison Chapman, Natalie Houston, Linda K. Hughes, and Kathryn Ledbetter, scholars now recognize the ubiquitous presence of poetry in Victorian newspapers and magazines. (7) Moreover, the expansion of scholarly databases and digital archives has given virtual access to periodical poetry in its original visual context, making it possible not only to locate and analyze individual illustrated poems, but also to map the frequency, scope, and nature of pictured poetry in the popular periodicals of the day. (8) According to Caley Ehnes, who is indexing Good Words for Chapman's Victorian Poetry Network, over half of the poetry in Good Words was illustrated in its first two years of publication. Significantly, "the percentage of illustrated poems per volume steadily increased from 27 percent in 1861 to 81 percent in 1862," suggesting the importance of illustrated poetry to the readers of Good Words. (9)

With its monthly circulation of between 80,000 and 130,000 per issue and its duration until just before the onset of World War I, (10) Good Words testifies to the place of poetry and pictures in the lives of middle-class Victorian families. Launched in 1860 by publisher Alexander Strahan as a weekly paper for a general readership, by January 1861 Good Words had become a sixpenny illustrated monthly, combining a religious outlook with a diverse content. (11) Under the editorship of the Reverend Norman Macleod (1860-72), who shared Strahan's Christian commitment to morally based, intelligent, and informative content appropriate for family consumption and Sunday reading, Good Words rapidly became the highest-circulation monthly of the period (Mitchell, p. 145). Macleod's editorial aim, "that our pages should, so far as possible, reflect the every-day life of a good man, with its times of religious thought and devotional feeling, naturally passing into others of healthy recreation, busy work, intellectual study, poetic joy, or even sunny laughter," (12) focused on the quotidian as much as the spiritual, allowing for a wide variety of high quality contents "from virtually all of the most popular middlebrow writers." As Sally Mitchell observes, the periodical provides a record of "the literature of respectable bourgeois England" (p. 145).

Beyond its respectable literary contents, however, the chief selling feature of Good Words resided in its full-page and inset illustrations by leading artists. Engraved after designs by Arthur Boyd Houghton, Arthur Hughes, John Everett Millais, Frederick Sandys, and Frederick Walker, among others, the pictures represented the nation's best in black-and-white art as well as the height of its modern technological capacity in the age of mechanical reproduction. As editor, Macleod played a formidable role in shaping the artists' commissioned work, always insisting, according to Simon Cooke, on "the need for 'graphic' intensity and apposite' design," and instructing "his illustrators to provide visual representations that made a clear link with the everyday world of his readers." (13) Strahan, who controlled the purse strings of the periodical, had the final say in accepting, modifying, or rejecting an artist's design (Cooke, p. 84). This close oversight of illustrative style and content ensured that the overall message of Good Words was consistent with the periodical's business plan as well as its Christian mission. Strahan and Macleod were thus an integral part of the corporate authorship responsible for the pictured poetry in Good Words. In addition to the publisher and editor, this hybrid form's multiple makers included artists, engravers, poets, and readers. Multi-mediated and collaboratively produced, the poetry in Good Words demands to be read not as a single-author composition but as a composited work, made in the commercial, industrialized spaces of publishers, print shops, and engraving firms for a designated market of middle-class Christian readers. (14)

Crucial as they were to the magazine's branding, the illustrations represented a considerable investment by the publisher: in addition to paying the Dalziel Brothers for overseeing the visual contents and engraving the individual designs on boxwood, (15) Strahan also paid the artists between 10[pounds sterling] and 20[pounds sterling] per drawing (Cooke, p. 54). Add to this the cost of manufacturing an electrotype for each engraved woodblock, necessary to withstand the high print runs for periodical publication, (16) and the individual cost of each illustration appearing in Good Words constituted a significant outlay on the part of the publisher. Indeed, the woodengraved illustrations were an integral part of the magazine's structures of meaning within each issue. Far from being insignificant visual entertainment whose function was subsumed solely within the magazine's marketing plan, the pictures that appeared in Good Words were value-laden in every sense for both producers and readers. A product of what Pierre Bourdieu names "large-scale cultural production," Good Words was a commodity aimed at a middlebrow audience; nevertheless, the magazine's symbolic value rested in no small part on the artistic status of its celebrity artists and the elite culture associated with their pictures. When those pictures accompanied poetic verses (as opposed to scientific essays or serialized novels), the symbolic value intensified, as poetry also conveyed some of the "high art" connotations associated with the field of restricted cultural production. (17)

Paired with poetry, the pictures had the immediate sensuous and empirical value of showing what could be conveyed visually about modern experience. Readers could see idealized versions of their own domestic lives and feelings, or imaginatively enter exotic otherworlds of geographic, temporal, or fantastic dislocation. A related value, for both producers and readers, was the complex ways in which pictured poetry could make the printed page an object of moral, aesthetic, and intellectual contemplation about, in Macleod's words, "the every-day life of a good man"--though this "good man" must be understood as a middle-class British subject and his family, the gendered and classed readers of the magazine. Economically, the value of pictured poetry in Good Words lay in its generative power. As we shall see, this generative power went beyond the publisher's capitalist imperative of boosting sales by increasing readership. The generative power and cultural value of pictured poetry in Good Words included the conversion of readers into makers and the consolidation of a broad middle-class audience for the popular gift books of poetry that emerged in tandem with the illustrated magazines of the 1860s. Notably, Alexander Strahan himself published illustrated books of verse for the giftbook market, featuring the poets and illustrators who appeared in the pages of his magazine. (18)

The high costs of paying artists and engravers seem to have been offset, to some extent, through a fairly extensive practice of publishing poetry by pseudonymous or anonymous poets in Good Words. There were exceptions, of course. Courting Alfred Tennyson when his relationship with the Moxon publishing firm soured, Strahan paid him the exorbitant fee of 700[pounds sterling] for a six-stanza poem entitled "The Victim" in January 1868 (Ledbetter, p. 66). But payments of this caliber would have been rare. In contrast to The Cornhill, which deliberately targeted an audience of cultivated readers by featuring only a few prominent poets such as Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Hughes, "What the Wellesley Index Left Out," pp. 94-95), Good Words published an eclectic variety of poems by contributors ranging from the laureate to laborers. Hughes argues that editors of nineteenth-century literary magazines often included poetry to "enhance the cultural value and prestige of the periodical itself' and the "symbolic capital of their enterprise" by publishing "serious poetry [as] a 'value-added' feature" (p. 94). However, the value of verses in Good Words does not seem to have been entirely anchored in the notions of consecrated authorship necessary to canon formation in the realm of "pure poetry" and the symbolic capital that derives from knowing it as described by Bourdieu's field of restricted cultural production (Bourdieu, p. 1237). Rather, as we have seen in "Making Poetry," the verses published in Good Words acquired some of their immediate cultural value through their embededness in, and affective response to, the complexities of everyday life in a rapidly changing, increasingly industrial, modern world.

By virtue of their status as visual objects on the printed page, poems provided Victorian readers with clearly marked signposts on their "visual journey" (de Certeau, p. xxi) through the illustrated periodical, which was itself, as Hughes observes, "a textual counterpart to the experience of the modern city" ("What the Wellesley Index Left Out," p 99). Like sign posts in city streets, the authorial identifier attached to poems in Good Words often marked the poet's place as worker in the metropolis, simultaneously testifying to a shared human capacity for making artistic order out of disruptive experience. Sometimes identified only by occupation--with bylines such as "By a Police Constable," "By a Railway Surfaceman," or even "By a Working Man,"19 for example--the frequently anonymous or pseudonymous poets featured in Good Words collectively present themselves as periodical readers who are also writers. This was strategic on Strahan's part. First, the publication of verses by readers inculcated the magazine's evangelical agenda of spreading "good words" across the nation. Second, circulating verses that expressed common experiences by ordinary people had the potential to unite a broad audience into a reading community. (20) Finally, publishing unknown writers was an inexpensive business practice for the publisher, balancing payments to named and well-known poets. This was very much in keeping with Strahan's policy. Prominently emblazoned on the wrapper of each issue was a decorative banner declaring: "Good Words are Worth Much and Cost Little." (21)

While payments to anonymous or pseudonymous poets would have been relatively inexpensive, other publishing costs associated with the pictured poetry in Good Words were not. One unavoidable expense of this composited form was the cost of setting up the type and page layout. Because of its short lines and stanzaic structures, lines of verse demanded finicky work by compositors in the print shop. Poetry also required more physical space on the page, relative to word count, than prose. As we have seen in "Making Poetry" (fig. 1), editorial layout typically economized on the spatial demands of verse by displaying it in split columns. The arrangement of poetic lines in relation to images introduced hermeneutical challenges at the level of both production and reception. Indeed, as Margaret Beetham points out, the heterogeneity of the illustrated periodical made "the relation of blocks of text to visual material ... a crucial part of their meaning" (Beetham, p. 24). For example, the layout for "'Until her Death'" required the compositor to arrange the seven quatrains "by The Author of John Halifax, Gentleman" (Dinah Mulock Craik), in relation to the inset illustration by Frederick Sandys within a single-page unit (fig. 2). (22) A significant editorial intervention here is the numbering of stanzas to clarify the sequence of the poem's individual parts. Without this numerical guide, readers might not immediately recognize that the verses were not to be read top-down and left-right in two vertical columns but rather in two horizontal chunks. (23) The visual effect on the page is to make the verses function as a decorative frame to the image as central event--effectively, to present poetic lines as textual headers and footers to the inset picture. Practically and experientially, the poem must be read through the visual lens of the image.

The image instantiates a claim about the creative authority of readers as makers by its visualization of the subject of the poem, '"Until her Death.'" The pictured scene shows a seated woman in Renaissance garb contemplating a skeletal figure who offers her two choices of dress in which to meet Death: a nun's habit and a bridal gown. (24) With its finely scored black lines, intricate detail, and arresting subject, the illustration dominates the page. Together, verses, image, and layout enact a meta-moment of contemplation, drawing the reader into considerations of life choices and unavoidable endings in a periodical reading context that was itself inevitably concerned with temporal cycles and arbitrary closures. (25) The theme of reading dominates the pictured poem, with the overturned book in the lower right corner of the image diagonally connected to the first words of the poem, a quotation alluding to another, off-camera, moment of reading: '"Until her death!'--the words read strange yet real.... Following this introductory quotation of an uncredited text, the verses proceed as a series of questions about when, and how, the female subject of the poem will face her death. A Christian resolution attempts to terminate and silence all such questioning in the final stanzas:

        VI

   No more. Within His hand, divine as tender,
       He holds the mystic measure of her days;
       And be they few or many, His the praise,--
   In life or death her Keeper and Defender.

        VII

   Then, come He soon or late, she will not fear Him;
      Be her end lone or loveful, she'll not grieve;
      For He whom she believed in--doth believe--
   Will call her from the dust, and she will hear Him.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Read in the context of the inset picture (as required by the page layout) the conviction of the concluding lines is unsettled, just as the sequential reading experience is disrupted. In representing the theme of Craik's poem as a dramatic moment of choice, Sandys visualizes the divine "He" of the verses as a secular Grim Reaper. Picturing the woman on a monumental scale and presenting her in the moment of selecting her life path, the image asserts the human power to choose despite temporal, physical, and cultural limitations. Far from being straightforward, simplistic, or conclusive, the pictured poem provokes multiple meanings and encourages continued contemplation and interpretation. As a sign post on an ongoing visual journey, the intense detail of the image reminded readers that artists were also reader-interpreters whose visualizations, drawn from highly personal points of view, licensed their own interpretive acts of making.

One of the ways in which the pictured page of "'Until her Death'" pushed the boundaries of interpretation was its combination of an allegorical Renaissance scene with elements of everyday life in contemporary England. Despite the bizarre forms of the pictured figures, the landscape itself was, Sandys assured the engravers, "exact, literal. The view I have is from my house looking from Thorpe [in Surrey] across the valley ... to the village of Trouse. It was drawn on the spot" (Cooke, p. 180). Together with the close relationship of picture, poem, and page, this combination of the documentary and symbolic reconstituted the pictured poetry in Good Words as modern emblems. To make sense of the whole, readers had to move between image, text, and lived experience in a hermeneutic practice that assumed repeated, iterative study and application. This structure of meaning-making was built into the magazine's pages, features, and sequences. Produced explicitly for Sunday reading when Sabbath restrictions were strictly observed in respectable middle-class families (Mitchell, p. 145), Good Words schooled its readers in interpreting visual signs as emblematic representations pointing to spiritual meanings. Indeed, in the "Sunday at Home" feature immediately following '"Until her Death,'" W. Arnot tells readers that visual art had the power to make "the truth more attractive," if "artisans, the pith and marrow of the nation," were in conformity with the "ordinances" of the gospel.26 Despite this strictly evangelical view of art's value and purpose, however, '"Until her Death'" suggests that while the attractive--and attracting--images published in Good Words increased the aesthetic pleasure of the printed page and encouraged an emblematic approach to reading, the "truths" they generated were multivalent rather than singular, produced out of the dialogic relationships of image, text, and monthly number.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

Within the context of Victorian industrial capitalism Sandys's intricate illustration represents costly human labor by both artist and engravers. The pressures of the periodical's deadline, Sandys wrote the Dalziels, made his illustration of Craik's poem particularly difficult: "I was fairly worn out with close working, and pressed so much for time" (Cooke, pp. 179-180). Just as the value and meaning of the pictures in Good Words were caught up in their production as commodities, so too were the value and meaning of the poems they accompanied. While the inset picture framed by verses constituted one value-laden page format, another expensive layout in Good Words occurred when a poem was printed in the center of a single page or series of pages, as it would be in a good quality gift book. The value conferred by so much white space seems self-evident in the editorial decision to print Tennyson's "The Victim" on a page exclusively its own (fig. 3). However, the rationale for dedicating an entire page to "Polly," an anonymous poem about a three-year old girl's playtime activities and bedtime rituals, is less immediately evident (fig. 4). (27)

Addressing itself explicitly to a domestic audience, "Polly" seems especially aimed at mothers and children, whose bedtime rituals frequently followed family reading in the day's fixed cycle of activities. The opening stanza of "Polly" presents a random list of physical elements, both human and non-human, culminating in a culturally specific gender definition:

   Brown eyes,
     Little nose;
   Dirt pies,
     Rumpled clothes;

   Torn books,
     Spoilt toys;
   Arch looks,
     Unlike a boy's.

The verses move from this paean to consumer culture's ceaseless accumulation, destruction, and replacement of commodities to the bedtime routine of a young girl saying her prayers. The poem presents this routine as another apparently meaningless cyclical activity, admitting that Polly, "Saying prayers, / Understands / Not, nor cares." The adult voice of the poem recuperates meaning from the scene by substituting another, spontaneous, prayer as a final intercession--"Heaven keep / My girl for me."

Why should such slight verses be accorded an entire page in a periodical issue only sixty-four pages in length? This costly editorial decision is an important one, as it signals a valuation system distinct from the aesthetic measurement standards used to establish canons of Victorian poetry. Devoting such generous margins to the short, two-stress lines of "Polly" sent a signal to readers of Good Words that poetry was "not a trifle," however trifling its contents might seem, just as the quotidian activities of domestic life were not without value. The periodical's message about the importance of poetry and the everyday was underscored by Macleod's commissioning of John Everett Millais, perhaps the most celebrated artist of the period, to illustrate the humble "Polly" (fig. 4). The value conferred upon this picture/poem pair is underscored by its layout as a double-page opening, a recurring feature of Good Words whose significance has not been fully appreciated. While William Morris recognized that, from the perspective of the reader, "the two pages making an opening are really the unit of the book," his insight came with the revival of fine printing at the end of the century, and his examples were early modern printed books, not the popular illustrated magazines of the high Victorian period. (28) However, the practice of tipping in full-page illustrations to face lines of verse in Good Words resulted in the formation of the double-page opening as a significant unit of the periodical's distinctive design. This layout was itself an interpretive editorial act, with deliberate designs on the reader. As we saw in "Making Poetry," Macleod used double-page openings and pictured poetry strategically as an effective landing place where readers could pause, contemplate, and return. Indeed, the set up encouraged readers to redeploy the magazine's contents in their everyday lives, as the dedication of exclusive page space enabled the easy extraction of picture and poem for a personal scrapbook or even for framing and display on the nursery wall.

The double-page opening for "Polly" presents the single-column poem in direct relation to Millais' image of a small girl in a nightgown kneeling in prayer beside her bed, with an open book and various toys scattered around her. Amidst the cluttered pages of miscellaneous contents in Good Words, this page opening enacts the silence of the hushed moment represented by the pictured "Polly." Readers are encouraged to linger on this ritualized, sanctified, and sentimentalized closing to an eventful day of "Torn books, / Spoilt toys" and "Little rages." Macleod might easily have accommodated Millais' full-page illustration by printing the poem on a split page, beside a column of prose, or (as in "Making Poetry") by setting the verses in a double column, immediately above or below a prose article. Either of these layouts would have conformed to the magazine's typical mise-en-page, so singling out these anonymous verses in this way was in every sense a value-laden act, enacting and affirming a visual poetics of everyday life for Victorian readers.

In "Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre," Margaret Beetham reminds us that each issue of a magazine, and each element within it, was "part of a complex process in which writers, editors, publishers and readers engaged in trying to understand themselves and their society; that is, they struggled to make their world meaningful" (p. 20). Making poetry in Good Words involved many meaning-making decisions at the editorial level. We have seen the interpretive impact of the editor's choices about page layout, but Macleod also determined which poems to publish, which to give pictorial treatment, and which artist to commission for the selected verses. In "Making Poetry," Macleod paired Arthur Boyd Houghton (1836-75), a celebrated artist of bourgeois life, with Frances Ridley Havergal (1836-79), a popular evangelical hymn writer. (29) This combination makes both aesthetic and economic sense: artist and author were equally suited to the domestic situation explored in "Making Poetry," and their popular status in their respective fields had the potential to boost sales. Moreover, as regular contributors to Good Words, their work was aligned with recurring features of the magazine's contents. Satisfying readers' expectations in this way helped Strahan consolidate a committed readership that could anticipate a particular illustrative or poetic style, or a favorite artist or writer, in a future issue. (30)

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

If pictured poetry was an important recurring feature of Good Words that helped establish the magazine's distinctiveness for its targeted readers, the pairing of image with text was also a structural part of its meaning-making. As we have seen in "Polly," the relative obscurity or prestige of contributing poets was not a factor in commissioning artists to illustrate their poems. Macleod was as likely to give verses by anonymous or pseudonymous writers to his best artists for illustrating as he was to celebrity or popular poets. Humble versifiers were thus given as much visual attention, in terms of both pictorial details and dedicated page space, as well-known writers. Indeed, Macleod seems to have selected poetry for Good Words as much for its pictureability--that is, for what could be shown about its subject and communicated visually--as for either its moral message or aesthetic beauty. To understand the nature and purpose of the poetry in Good Words, therefore, it is essential to examine it in the context of the pictures with which it was paired. It is also crucial to understand the various kinds of "editor function" (31) involved in producing this multi-media form for Victorian readers.

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

The editorial process of commissioning artists reminds us just how mediated the pictured poetry in Good Words was: Macleod selected artists based on their recognized strengths in particular visual genres and paid them to provide detailed interpretive drawings, regardless of the cultural status of the author they illustrated (Cooke, pp. 89, 95). The editor's primary concern for the pictured poetry in his magazine was not rooted in notions of authorship, but in subject matter, visual effects, and readers. Guided by this editorial mandate, Macleod must have seen Millais (noted for his representations of sentimental scenes of childhood and the domestic) as an obvious choice for "Polly." At the same time, Millais' association with the periodical enabled "Polly" to become a publishable poem when its obscure author submitted it to the magazine. In other words, editorial selection of both poetic texts and visual images was governed in part by the available artists in the Good Words stable and what they could draw. A bourgeois realist and chronicler of contemporary life, Arthur Boyd Houghton illustrated, as we have seen, Havergal's "Making Poetry" (fig. 1), but he was also given topical poems such as Isa Craig's "St. Elmo," celebrating Garibaldi's unification of Italy, and literary themes such as Tennyson's "The Victim" (fig. 3), about a legendary maternal sacrifice. (32) An Anglo-Indian, Houghton was considered to have a flair for orientalist scenes and could expect Macleod to send him commissions for eastern subjects such as "Omar and the Persian" (fig. 5), a poem dramatizing the "sacred" nature of "the warrior's word" by the pseudonymous S.A.D.I. (33) Macleod assigned Arthur Hughes, known for his appealing representations of childhood and the maternal, a poem entitled "The Mother and the Angel," by a writer identified only as "A Railway Surfaceman" (34) (fig. 6). The editor's matching of artist to poem, determination of layout, size of image, and placement within the periodical, contributed to what Hughes calls a range of "visual effects" ("Inventing Poetry and Pictorialism") in Good Words. Each poem was not only a visual object in its own right on the printed page, and viewed through the visual lens of its associated image; its meaning was also overlaid with a complex series of editorial choices that created interpretive visual mediations of poetic expression and meaning.

Ehnes argues that the visual composition of Good Words served a specifically devotional function: the wide margins framing poems invited readers to engage with, mark up, and reflect on, poetry and the "physical page," while the illustrations acted "as prompts for devotional thought" (pp. 475, 481). While this seems particularly applicable to a poem like "Polly," and there can be little doubt of Strahan and Macleod's joint Christian agenda, the sampling of pictured poetry in Good Words discussed above shows a more complex diversity of poetic subjects canvassed in its pages, including pagan legends such as "Omar and the Persian" (fig. 5) and Tennyson's "The Victim" (fig. 3). Neither of these pictured poems has a specifically Christian meaning and, while the theme of self-sacrifice in "The Victim" might seem apposite, the honor-among-thieves theme of "Omar and the Persian" seems less adaptable to an allegorical reading. Houghton's dramatic visualization of the latter depicts a battle scene of severed body parts, flashing scimitars, and violent confrontation between two warring leaders, the victorious Omar and his Persian foe. The poem's placement directly under C. J. Vaughan's scriptural meditation, "Arise! Shine!," (35) and indeed its location within the evangelical pages of Good Words as a whole, may have encouraged readers to interpret the poem as commenting on the fight against sin. However, the full-page illustration it faces seems to celebrate a heroic masculinity quite distinct from Christianity, however muscular: the composition offers no guide to identifying good or evil characters and its visualization of the fierce and unyielding warriors focuses on prowess rather than piety. The juxtapositions and adjacencies of visual and verbal content in Good Words made the business of meaning-making very much a process of negotiation involving publisher, editor, author, artist, and reader. (36)

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

Pictured poems could also speak to themes pursued across the monthly issues and accumulated years of the periodical, as well as to cultural representations outside the magazine itself. All-encompassing maternal love links Houghton's full-page image for Tennyson's "The Victim," in which a pagan mother sacrifices herself to save the life of her child, and Arthur Hughes's inset illustration for "The Mother and the Angel" (fig. 6). The theme of womanly sacrifice is, of course, a recurring trope in Good Words and a prominent feature of Victorian discourse. However, Hughes's visualization of the poem by "A Railway Surfaceman" extends its discursive context by its interpictorial reference to a contemporary Pre-Raphaelite painting (and poem) addressing romantic, rather than maternal, love and death. (37) Arranged as a horizontally divided diptych, with the sorrowful mother depicted in heaven, yearning for her infant, and the dead child on earth being taken up by an angel, Hughes's illustration recalls the theme of love beyond the grave presented in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting The Blessed Damozel, begun in the same year. (38) At the same time, Hughes's image cites his own illustration for Christina Rossetti's "Our little baby fell asleep," from Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book, published as a Christmas gift book within months of this number of Good Words (fig. 7). (39) These two interpictorial references within a single illustration gesture toward what we are only beginning to grasp: the complex ways in which images circulated in Victorian visual culture, negotiating paths of connection among periodicals and books, visual and verbal art, and the restricted cultural production of easel painting and the large-scale production of commercial print culture. Indeed, we might see the pictured poetry in Good Words as a nodal intersection point for a network of visual images, verbal texts, quotidian living, and topical events, rendering chaotic experience into aesthetic order for the magazine's readers.

[FIGURE 9 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 10 OMITTED]

2

Linda K. Hughes observes that within the random yet determining textual system of the Victorian periodical, poetry represented "traditional cultural and literary ideals such as wholeness, harmony, and communal virtue" and therefore mediated the miscellaneous and ephemeral nature of both the periodical and the modern world ("What the Wellesley Index Left Out," p. 99). To an even greater degree, the wood-engraved illustrations in Victorian periodicals mediated the ephemeral nature of passing events and topical opinions recorded on disposable paper. With a more immediate representational association with lived experience than that produced through the arbitrary systems of alphanumeric codes and typography, pictures provided a reassuring grounding for readers. Even when the images themselves represented figures, landscapes, or objects that readers had never seen--perhaps never could see--their recognizable shapes suggested a material presence, a familiar visuality connected to the ordinary reader's world. This familiarity was shaped by the presence of wood-engraved images in everyday reading material. Until the final decade of the nineteenth century, almost every image in the periodical press was reproduced by the technology of wood engraving--a splendid miscellany, including daily events in the metropolis, nation, and empire; diagrams, charts, and maps for scientific and geographic essays; and illustrations for literature of all kinds. The ubiquity of Victorian wood engraving has dulled our sensitivity to the way in which this technology was not simply a mode of representation, but also, crucially, a way of seeing and understanding, for generations of Victorians. The common materiality of wood engraving brought the world, and its representations in pictures and print, into recognizable view and tactile apprehension for periodical readers.

Printed along with topical concerns, poetry and pictures belonged to the present moment. Dora Greenwell's "Love in Death," for example, reformulates news as poetry, implicitly aligning the poet with readers of transatlantic press reports. (40) "Love in Death" appears in Good Words in 1862 immediately after a long essay by J. M. Ludlow on "A Year of the Slavery Question in the United States." (41) The topical and transatlantic concerns of the essay are underscored by the proximate placement of Greenwell's poem, which takes its inspiration (as noted in parentheses under the title) from a recently published American news story about "a woman [who] perished in a snow-storm while passing over the Green Mountains in Vermont; she had an infant with her, who was found alive and well in the morning, carefully wrapped in the mother's clothing." This newsworthy item becomes incorporated with the ongoing poetic theme of maternal sacrifice in the pictured poetry featured in Good Words, linking topical event, poetic expression, and ideological discourse. "Love in Death" also highlights another recurring theme in the magazine's poetic selections: verses can be produced by reading--the reading not only of literature, as in Tennyson's "The Victim" or Craik's '"Until her Death,"' but also of news stories in illustrated periodicals. When a pictured poem in Good Words references a topical event, the reciprocal, formative, relationships of reading, writing, and the domestic observed in "Making Poetry" become crucial to its structures of meaning.

The illustration for "Love in Death," drawn by Fred Walker, engraved by the Dalziels, and inserted into the heart of the poem's second page, provides a documentary trace of the reported experience that grounds Greenwell's verses (fig. 8). By visualizing, in de Certeau's terms, what can be shown about "Love in Death," Walker's picture simultaneously validates the recorded event, Greenwell's poetic response, and the reader's affective experience in a mediated, transnational world. Although printed on ephemeral paper in a disposable periodical, this pictured poem is both iconic and generative. Walker went on to rework his commissioned design as an easel painting (Cooke, p. 76), but unlike that unique art object, the drawing he made to accompany Greenwell's poem about a news story had a wide-ranging and far-flung audience beyond gallery walls.

Indeed, some of the periodical readers of this pictured poem may have gone on to cite it in pictured poems of their own making. While there is no evidence that Christina Rossetti read "Love in Death" in Good Words in 1862, she was certainly acquainted with Greenwell's poetry and, by December of the following year, was in correspondence with the poet. (42) A poem Rossetti later published suggests both she and her illustrator, Arthur Hughes (a regular contributor to Good Words) may have been influenced by "Love in Death" as written by Greenwell and pictured by Walker. Written in the late 1860s, and published in Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book, Rossetti's "Crying, my little one, footsore and weary?" takes up Greenwell's subject of a solitary mother comforting her child as she treks through a winter storm:

   Crying, my little one, footsore and weary?
   Fall asleep, pretty one, warm on my shoulder:
   I must tramp on through the winter night dreary,
   While the snow falls on me colder and colder. (43)

Rossetti's brief lyric echoes the voice of the mother in Greenwell's longer narrative poem; however, reformulated for a young audience, Rossetti's lyric contrasts the inclement weather with the child's warm security, rather than focusing on the fatal end of the Vermont story as retold by Greenwell. The multiplicity of makers generated out of the American news report is highlighted in Arthur Hughes's illustration for Rossetti's poem in Sing-Song. Hughes's headpiece vignette forms a visual quotation of the scene visualized by Walker and inset into the heart of Greenwell's poem (figs. 8 and 9). The position and dress of the woman, including her hat and shawl, seem directly influenced by Walker's image for Good Words. As much as the intertextual echoes, this interpictoriality reminds us that poets and artists were also readers of periodicals, influenced by their contents in their own acts of making. The complex connections between pictured poems in periodicals and those published in the period's illustrated books, however, have yet to be adequately mapped.

Like all periodicals, Good Words was "characteristically self-referring," directing readers to texts that had appeared in earlier numbers as a way of consolidating readers (Beetham p. 26). Such deliberate self-referencing is evident in "Shades," a pictured poem published in 1861, when Strahan and Macleod were intent on building a committed readership for their magazine as it transitioned from a weekly to a monthly (fig. 10). (44) The value accorded to this anonymous poem by "F.G." is evident not only its pictorial treatment, but also in the full page devoted to it. The page is neatly divided into two vertical columns, with the usual left-to-right, top-to-bottom movement of the reader's eyes directed, in this case, to take in the image on the left before reading the stanza on the right. The extra white space between stanzas shows the care taken by the compositors to ensure that each of the four verses lined up with its corresponding pictorial section on the left. These pictorial sections are divided not by white space but by a trellis device that signals changes in person, place, and time as the poem progresses. Included in this array are the iconographic symbols of serpent, skull, butterfly, and grave, signifying sin, death, and resurrection. Drawing on anaphora and playing with a range of meanings for "shade," each seven-line stanza opens with a variation on "There is a shade on a brow." The verses sketch a dramatic narrative of a woman's faithful love and a "bad man's" fatal darkening of her life. A reader of "Shades" needed well-developed skills of visual/verbal literacy to read the complexities of this printed page.

As much as it is a complex page to be read, "Shades" is also a product of its pseudonymous author's reading of periodical literature. Like Greenwell's "Love in Death," "Shades" is a transmutation of a previous reading experience, and like the former poem, "Shades" also provides a cross-reference to its originary periodical source. An asterisk beside the title directs the reader to a footnote, which gives the information that the entire poem--and thus its decorative apparatus as well--was "suggested by a sentence in Good Words for 1860, page 618." The intertext comes from the magazine's first year of operation: an illustrated essay, "Mistakes," about a woman whose once joyful life became shadowed by the burden of a sick and suffering husband. (45) The presence of this self-referential footnote has two important implications for the study of periodical poetry. First, it suggests that the editorial practice of Good Words aimed to encourage readers to retain back issues of the periodical as a way of consolidating a committed readership. Second, the connection between "Shades" and "Mistakes" marks an interpretive poetic response to the reading of periodical prose, reminding us once again that readers are, in de Certeau's words, "unrecognized producers, poets of their own acts" of making (p. xviii).

3

Although studies of Victorian publishing demonstrate that the most popular form of poetry sales was the illustrated book, (46) scholars have only begun to explore the complex ways in which, as Laurel Brake has shown for prose, the "spheres of the serial and the book" were interrelated and interdependent for nineteenth-century poetry. (47) This undertaking requires us to adjust our authorcentric approach to one that encompasses the multiple makers and mediations involved in the mass-production of poetry for the modern reader. Taking its examples from the magazine's first decade of publication, this case study has aimed to demonstrate the significance of illustrated poetry as a defining feature of Good Words, the middle-class magazine with the highest circulation of the period. The fabric of reading poetry in Good Words was woven through with many strands, including the pictures, prose, and topical events within the magazine and the life experiences of the readers they addressed. Mediated as it was by the periodical's modes of production, evangelical mission, and editorial choices in layout and sequencing, the poetry in Good Words has much to tell us about middlebrow Victorian taste and culture. The intellectual, affective, and creative responses of readers themselves had value for Victorians negotiating the increasingly large, ever-changing, and ephemeral world in their daily mediated lives. A rich and virtually untapped storehouse of pictured poetry, Good Words show us why illustration matters to periodical poetry studies in particular, and Victorian studies more generally. First, by granting public space to a wide variety of poetic expression, from the famous to the anonymous, Good Words simultaneously claimed poetry as part of everyday life and affirmed modern readers as "poets of their own acts" of making. Second, by according the same visual space and artistic prestige to the illustration of unknown poets as to celebrated ones, Good Words implicitly claimed the poem itself as a visual object, one whose value was precisely that it could be transmuted into vision, that could be shown in a visual poetics of the everyday. And third, by physically associating pictures and poetry on the printed page in a single unit of composition, illustrated periodicals schooled Victorian readers in a verbal/visual literacy reinforced in the illustrated gift books that dominated poetry sales in the second half of the nineteenth century. Perhaps at no time before or since have poetry and pictures been such an integral part of daily life for a mass readership, and if we care about readers as much as we do about authors, it is worth turning the pages of Good Words to find out why.

Notes

The illustrations in this essay are reproduced with the kind permission of University of Victoria Special Collections. I would like express my gratitude to Caley Ehnes for her help in accessing the volumes and reproducing the images, as well as for her generous sharing of her knowledge of poetry in Good Words. I am also deeply grateful to Alison Chapman for her editorial insights, encouragement, and patience.

(1) Fanny R. Havergal, "Making Poetry," illustrated by Arthur Boyd Houghton, Good Words 8 (1867): 248-249. Note that full-page illustrations in Good Words are tipped in, and therefore unpaginated, so that this picture and poem are actually spread over three pages of the periodical.

(2) J. M. Ludlow, "On Some New Forms of Industrial Co-Operation," Good Words 8 (1867): 240-248.

(3) C. Pritchard, "A True Story of the Atmosphere of a World on Fire," Good Words 8 (1867): 249.

(4) The other two high-circulation illustrated literary periodicals to emerge at this time are Once A Week, launched in 1859, and The Cornhill, launched six months before Good Words in 1860.

(5) Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), p. xxi.

(6) The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900 (available online via Pro Quest) provides attribution information connecting around 11,500 contributors to 91,012 articles within 45 Victorian periodicals. Each contributor is presented with biographical and bibliographical information, details of pseudonyms used and links from the titles of articles written to the relevant article indexing. The Wellesley's focus on authorship attribution excludes poets and artists.

(7) Linda K. Hughes, "What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies, Victorian Periodicals Review 40, no. 2 (2007): 91; Kathryn Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2007); Natalie M. Houston, "Newspaper Poems: Material Texts in the Public Sphere," Victorian Studies 50, no. 2 (2008): 233-242; Alison Chapman, Victorian Poetry Network, http://web.uvic.ca/~vicpoet/.

(8) Alison Chapman's Victorian Periodical Network is the host site for her Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry, which currently includes (at time of writing) over 5,600 poems and over 1,650 poets, and provides the tools for searching by periodical, poet, illustrator, and title; the Database also provides notes on contributors, identifying pseudonymous or anonymous poets where possible, and links to scanned images of the poem and accompanying picture. The Periodical Poetry Index (www.periodicalpoetry.org), edited by Natalie Houston, Lindsy Lawrence, and April Patrick, is a research database of citations to English-language poems published in nineteenth-century periodicals, with links to the volumes in which they appeared; the index, which thus far includes The Cornhill Magazine, Macmillan's Magazine (forthcoming), and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, aims to supplement the Wellesley Index by providing information about poets, illustrative content, and poem length; unlike the WI, its focus is on the poem rather than authorship or provenance. More general e-resources for illustrated poetry include the digitized periodicals available via British Periodicals Online, the internet archive, and the Hathi trust.

(9) Caley Ehnes, "Religion, Readership, and the Periodical Press: The Place of Poetry in Good Words," Victorian Periodicals Review 45, no. 4 (2012): 470. In "Inventing Poetry and Pictorialism in Once a Week: A Magazine of Visual Effects," Linda K. Hughes argues that illustrated poetry dominated Once a Week to a greater extent than either The Cornhill or Good Words; in its first six months of operation, The Cornhill published 1 of 15 poems with illustrations and Good Words published 3 of 32, whereas Once a Week featured 42 illustrated poems out of a total of 53 (VP 48, no. 1 [2010]: 42). Hughes also notes that in its next six months, perhaps pressured by competitive rivalry with Once a Week, Good Words increased its illustrated poetry count to 13 (p. 68n6). As Ehnes' indexing of Good Words indicates, the percentage of illustrated poems per volume continued to increase: by its third year, 8 out of 10 poems published in Good Words were illustrated (p. 470).

(10) See Amy Lloyd, "GOOD WORDS (1860-1911)," Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, C19: The Nineteenth Century Index, ProQuest, c 2005-2012. Accessed May 5, 2013. See also Patricia Thomas Srebrnik, who writes: "in the course of 1864, if Strahan's own advertisements are to be believed, Good Words achieved an average circulation of a staggering 160,000 monthly, outselling not only the Cornhill but every other monthly magazine in the English-speaking world." Alexander Strahan: Victorian Publisher (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1986), p. 64.

(11) See Lloyd, "GOOD WORDS," and Sally Mitchell, "Good Words," British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837-1913, vol. 3, ed. Alvin Sullivan (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1984), pp. 145-149.

(12) Norman Macleod, "Note by the Editor," Good Words 1 (1860): 796.

(13) Simon Cooke, Illustrated Periodicals of the 1860s: Contexts & Collaborations (New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 2010), p. 89.

(14) 1 elaborate on the ideas of corporate authorship and the illustrated poetic page as a composited work in Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture 1855-1875 (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 2011), pp. 12-33.

(15) Edward and George Dalziel, The Brothers Dalziel: A Record of Fifty Years' Work in Conjunction with Many of the Most Distinguished Artists of the Period 1840-1890 (London: B. T. Batsford, 1978), p. 156.

(16) According to Cooke, "Practically none of the magazine illustrations was printed from the original wood" (p. 173). Proofs were pulled from the woodblocks, but electrotyped plates were used for the actual print runs.

(17) Pierre Bourdieu, "The Market of Symbolic Goods," The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David H. Richter (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998), p. 1234.

(18) For example, after publishing Tennyson's "The Victim" and " 1865-66 in Good Words in 1868 (January and March, respectively), Strahan commissioned Arthur Hughes to illustrate the poet's lyrics for Arthur Sullivan's song-cycle, The Window (1871). When Tennyson vetoed the illustrations, Strahan published two of Hughes pictures with the poet's verses and the musician's scores in Good Words, by way of promoting the forthcoming book while making use of the rejected images. See Good Words 12 (1871): 32-33, 113-115.

(19) "The Mother and the Angel," by a Railway Surfaceman, illustrated by Arthur Hughes, Good Words 12 (1871): 647-648; "Out Among the Wild-Flowers," by a Police Constable, illustrated by Frederick Walker, Good Words 3 (1862): 657-659; "Some Verses Written by a Working Man for the Children to Sing at an Anniversary Meeting m Hertfordshire," illustrated byj. D. Watson, Good Words 3 (1862): 433-434.

(20) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006).

(21) Because wrappers were typically discarded when the monthly issues were bound into half-yearly or annual volumes, locating and examining them can prove difficult. An excellent example of the highly detailed ornamental design on the pinkish-red monthly wrapper of the original issue of Good Words for May 1864 (reduced to 68%) is reprinted in Cooke (illustration 15b).

(22) [Dinah Mulock Craik], '"Until Her Death,"' illustrated by Frederick Sandys, Good Words 3 (1862): 312.

(23) Crucially, the numbering assists readers struggling to complete the broken sentence run-on between Stanzas 2 and 3: "or meet / Death's dust in midst of weeping? And that billow- // Her restless heart-will it be stopped, still heaving." Without the numbered guide, readers could potentially try to connect the end of Stanza 2 with the beginning of Stanza 5, which is presented immediately below it, after the inset picture (see fig. 2), resulting in the following confused reading: "or meet / Death's dust in midst of weeping? And that billow-// With fond lips felt through all the mists of dying."

(24) MS in John Rylands Library, Manchester, quoted in Cooke, p. 180.

(25) See Margaret Beetham's discussion of the periodical's relationship to temporality and reading in "Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre," Investigating Victorian Journalism, ed. Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 19-32.

(26) W. Arnot, "At Home with the Scriptures: A Series of Family Readings for the Sunday Evenings in May," Good Words 3 (1862): 320.

(27) "Polly," illustrated byj. E. Millais, Good Words 5 (1864): 248.

(28) William Morris, The Ideal Book: Three Essays on Books and Printing, ed. Richard Mathews (Tampa: Univ. of Tampa Press, 2007), p. 12.

(29) See Paul Hogarth, Arthur Boyd Houghton (London: Gordon Fraser, 1981); and John Ferns, Frances Ridley Havergal," Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 199, Victorian Women Poets, ed. William B. Thesing (Detroit: Gale Research, 1999), Literature Resource Center. Web. April 22, 2013.

(30) See Beetham's comments on the periodical form and readership, p. 26.

(31) Robert L. Patten and David Finkelstein, "Editing Blackwood's; or, What Do Editors Do?," Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition, 1805-1930 (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 147-148; see also Linda K. Hughes, "Inventing Poetry and Pictorialism," p. 43.

(32) Isa Craig, "St. Elmo," illustrated by Arthur Boyd Houghton, Good Words 4 (1863): 64; and Alfred Tennyson, "The Victim," illustrated by A. B. Houghton, Good Words 9(1868): 17-18.

(33) S.A.D.I., "Omar and the Persian," illustrated by A. B. Houghton, Good Words 8 (1867): 105. According to the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry, S.A.D.I was one of the pseudonymns used by Sarah Williams (1837-1868), a novelist and poet.

(34) The Mother and the Angel," by a Railway Surfaceman, illustrated by Arthur Hughes Good Words 12 (1871): 647-648.

(35) C. J. Vaughan, "Arise! Shine!" Good Words 8 (1867): 101-105.

(36) See Beetham, p. 25.

(37) Julia Thomas, "Reflections on Illustration: The Database of Mid-Victorian Wood-Engraved Illustration (DMVI)," Journal of Illustration Studies (December 2007). Web. Accessed June 4, 2013.

(38) Called by Jerome McGann "the foundational Rossettian subject of the emparadised woman ... imagined as dreaming downward, as it were, to her lover who remains alive in the world," The Blessed Damozel was first published as a poem in The Germ (1850) and first painted on canvas in 1871; D. G. Rossetti continued to work on studies and versions of this subject for the next decade. See McCann's commentary for The Blessed Damozel in the Double Works section of The Rossetti Archive. Web. Accessed June 4, 2013.

(39) Christina G. Rossetti, "Our little baby fell asleep," illustrated by Arthur Hughes, SingSong: A Nursery-Rhyme Book (London, 1872), p. 4. Although forward dated to 1872, the book actually came out in November 1871.

(40) Dora Greenwell, "Love in Death," illustrated by Frederick Walker, Good Words 3 (1862): 184-185.

(41) J. M. Ludlow, "A Year of the Slavery Question in the United States (1859-60)," Good Words 3 (1862): 177-184.

(42) Letters of Christina Rossetti, ed. Antony H. Harrison, vol. 1 (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1997), no. 204, p. 190.

(43) Christina G. Rossetti, "Crying, my little one, footsore and weary," illustrated by Arthur Hughes, Sing-Song: A Nursery-Rhyme Book (London, 1872), p. 19.

(44) See F.C., "Shades," illustrated by G. H. Bennett, Good Words 2 (1861): 522. Good Words converted from weekly to monthly issues in its second year, beginning January 1861.

(45) "Mistakes," Good Words 1 (1860): 616-618. This issue appeared in December, and was thus among the last of the magazine's weekly numbers.

(46) William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Victorian Period (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), p. 134; Lee Erickson, "The Market," A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 345-360.

(47) Laurel Brake, Print in Transition, 1850-1910: Studies in Media and Book History (Houndmills, Hants: Palgrave, 2001), p. 3.