Photography, Novelty, and Victorian Poetry

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Photography, Novelty, and Victorian Poetry
• Helen Groth (bio)

Returning to my essay—“Consigned to Sepia: Remembering Victorian Poetry”—takes me back to a significant moment in the history of Victorian poetry criticism. It was a moment crystallized in many ways by Isobel Armstrong’s generative provocation to think Victorian poetry anew in Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, Politics (1993). Victorian poetry was an uneven and various political art form that required new critical methods, Armstrong argued. The readings that she enlisted to make her case for the aesthetic and political complexity of a selection of poems by Tennyson, Barrett Browning, Browning, Arnold, and others, modeled a process of “double reading” that revealed the experimental and epistemological reflexivity of Victorian poetry: a “systematically ambiguous language, out of which expressive and phenomenological readings emerge.”¹

I began my essay with an epigraph taken from Armstrong’s study that still intrigues me after multiple readings and many intervening years: “The major critical and theoretical movements of the twentieth century have been virtually silent about Victorian poetry. As the stranded remnants of high bourgeois liberalism, the poets have been consigned to sepia” (p. 1). These two sentences capture the urgency of a different “now” in two images of arrested development. The first evokes the acoustics of critical indifference: a resounding silence in contrast to the polemical noise generated around the nineteenth-century novel, Romanticism, or Modernism, to name just three dominant areas of theoretically ambitious critical inquiry in the second half of the twentieth century. The second enlists the metaphor of sepia, a visual effect often associated with photography in the nineteenth century and beyond, to capture the perceived untimeliness of Victorian poetry. The sepia image in Armstrong’s conceptual construction is the enemy of Victorian poetry, arresting its dynamic variety in a still image of smug middle-class conservatism, like an unflattering reddish-brown monochromatic portrait gathering dust on a neglected shelf in a rarely used room. [End Page 493]

Reading against the grain of Armstrong’s suggestive, albeit negative, conjuncture of a familiar visual effect (sometimes photographic) and Victorian poetry, my essay responded to her critical challenge with a certain degree of willful optimism. The resulting argument attempted to articulate a very different kind of “timely” relationship between the visual image and poetry to the one Armstrong had in mind: a relationship materialized in the form of the photographically illustrated book and brokered by a poetics sensitized to the commerce of publication. To make my case I drew on archival source material in the form of nineteenth-century efforts to harness the novelty of photography to illustrate the work of well-known poets, such as Scott, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Barrett Browning. The example that served as the focus of my 2003 essay, and to which I return with a very different emphasis here, is an 1891 Bodley Head edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s long political poem Casa Guidi Windows.² This edition was introduced by the critic and poet Agnes Mary Frances Robinson and featured a photograph of the Casa Guidi, the Brownings’ home during their Italian sojourns, as its frontispiece.³

As the title of my essay suggests, the following analysis of this slim volume considers how photographic illustration indexed the ambivalent relationship of Victorian poetry to commercial modes of production, exemplified here by the photograph’s gimmicky paratextual function in a decorative limited edition published by Bodley Head in the first years of its existence as a publishing house.⁴ The first section of this essay reads the photograph of Casa Guidi and Robinson’s introduction as paratexts that ultimately perform comparable evaluative functions: a syncretic structural “threshold” that raises a number of questions.⁵ Why did Bodley Head include a photographic illustration here? Was it expedience? A labor-saving device, as Sianne Ngai describes the gimmick, efficiently visualizing the logic of pilgrimage (temporal and geographic) that is one of this volume’s purposes, as Robinson’s preface makes clear.⁶ Or is the inclusion of the photograph an aesthetic decision designed to amplify the timeliness and aesthetic allure of this new stand-alone edition of a single largely neglected long poem, Casa Guidi Windows, featuring a preface by...