Whithering: Or 'Tis Twenty Years Since

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• Whithering: Or ’Tis Twenty Years Since
• Linda K. Hughes (bio)

I open by paying tribute to John Lamb, the outgoing editor of Victorian Poetry, who suggested the idea—a brilliant one—for this special issue back in 2022. The collected essays it gathers comprise a fitting capstone to his editorship of Victorian Poetry from 2005 to 2023.

This afterword appends a meta-retrospect to the retrospects (as well as the forward-looking prospects) on Victorian poetry scholarship the issue’s gifted contributors offer. Rather than responding to each “Whither Redux” commentary in turn, I focus on the larger impressions and cumulative status report on the fortunes of Victorian poetry they form. One happy revelation from the special issue is that so many of the nascent scholars who contributed to “Whither Victorian Poetry?” in 2003 have since had such successful and productive careers—a heartening fact when we more often hear about blocked or merely marginal opportunities within our profession. Some “Whither Redux?” essays can even be read as a collective memoir of professional life during the past two decades, especially Jason Rudy’s, Charles LaPorte’s, and Stephanie Weiner’s accounts of how their scholarship has evolved, sometimes in markedly new ways, over the course of their now mature careers. Continuities are evident as well as change; Michele Martinez continues to pursue research in the sister arts, now within a much wider ambit, and Helen Groth again focuses on poetry and photography, in this case, an 1891 Bodley Head edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows with an introductory essay by fin-de-siécle poet A. Mary F. Robinson (by then Mme. Darmesteter). Monique Morgan, Lee O’Brien, and Stephanie Weiner helpfully provide illuminating surveys of the 2003 “Whither?” special issue, enabling readers of the current issue to gauge more comprehensively how well the new directions embraced or predicted in 2003 have been borne out by subsequent scholarship. The major lacunae in these predictions of two decades [End Page 569] ago, Monique Morgan suggests, are the anti-racist and ecocritical approaches to poetry that are now central to innovative scholarship today.

As is to be expected, the 2023 contributors form no monolithic group, nor a monolithic consensus. Whereas some emphasize the contraction of opportunity in the humanities generally, and poetry scholarship and classroom teaching in particular, others see an expansion. Those perceiving contraction especially underscore the dramatic decline of interest among students and other department faculty in historical studies, and an even more radical decline in “depth” reading, as do Charles La Porte, Lee O’Brien, Monique Morgan, and Marion Thain. When short phone texts and once-over-lightly screen reading form the greater part of students’ engagements with language and literature, it is not surprising that entering deeply into a literary text seems irrelevant or opaque to so many. (Not all, fortunately; I am surely not alone in having recent experiences with students, especially in upper-level courses, who are willing to take that deep dive, even as I concede that I encounter few genuine “readers” today—those who regularly read extended narratives and find joy in them.) The rapid decline in historical studies, or students’ willingness to look back beyond the twentieth century, is recognizable in hiring patterns (though Renaissance studies maintain a magnetic attraction). The primary area of interest among doctoral students today is contemporary literature and culture. And with some states (like Texas) eliminating a high school requirement in British literature, entering undergraduate students have scant reason or motive to seek out British-centered courses. I was so concerned about the declining interest in historical literary studies a decade ago that I asked the British historian at my university how he attracted students to the past; he laughed and merely replied, “Linda, we’re the history department!” But in his department, British history itself is now a minor Ph.D. field under the rubric “Atlantic World,” unlike the major fields of US and Latin American history.

Other “Whither Redux?” contributors emphasize the ongoing expansion of research in Victorian poetry, especially in the wake of the influential scholarly agendas of “undisciplining” and “widening” Victorian studies generally. To be sure, the move to “undiscipline” Victorian...