Verse Moves: Poetry, Revision, and Periodical Space in John Murray's European Handbooks for Travellers, 1836–1901

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed a wealth of new attention to poetry in the Victorian periodical press, including newspapers, magazines, and literary annuals and other gift-books. 1 Dwelling more at the border of periodical and book production, the travel guidebook pioneered by the firm of John Murray III (1808-92) has been largely overlooked in this effort, and yet these handbooks included numerous poetic extracts. While literary critics and book historians have studied the Murray guidebooks and the ways they incorporated literary references, they have not fully considered how Murray's unique kind of literary travel anthology, generally reissued on a biennial basis, functioned within a periodical space of production and consumption. 2 Previous critical attention has likewise stressed the damage this extraction performed on the meaning and significance of the poems themselves: guidebook Byron, for instance, served mostly to provide a ready source of cultural capital that distinguished more literary-minded travelers from mere "tourists." 3 By refocusing our attention on the evolving periodical contexts and spaces in which the poetic content of the handbooks was presented and consumed, I aim to construct a different critical narrative that, following Caley Ehnes in her recent study of poetry and Victorian periodicals, questions "the divide between popular, mass-produced literature and the reified poetry of small-run poetry volumes." 4 Rather than removing poetry from a more authentic private sphere of volume publication, the Murray handbooks readapted an already mobile, periodical genre to the unique social, textual, and geographical spaces that coemerged with new technologies, texts, and social patterns of travel in the early Victorian

Crafting a “Species of Literature”: John Murray’s Multidisciplinary, Polyvocal Handbooks for Travellers

“…His Romantic inclinations are best exemplified by his constant excerpting in the Handbooks of poets like Byron, a rhetorical strategy that has received significant scholarly attention, most recently by Christopher Keirstead. 18 Take, for example, a passage from the first Handbook to the Continent, which introduces Drachenfels (a popular Romantic destination in North Rhine-Westphalia) by blending attention to its natural features and literary legacy and which is immediately followed by three stanzas from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: "the most interesting of the whole group, from its shape and position, but more than all from the verses of Byron, is the famed Drachenfels (Dragon Rock), whose precipices rise abruptly from the river side, crowned with a ruin." 19 Passages like these underscore Murray's depth of literary knowledge and interdisciplinary approach to touristic spaces.…”

“…and the subsequent changes undergone by poetry in these contexts, provide an important if largely overlooked critical framework for understanding the evolving cultural authority of poetry in the Victorian period." 60 In Keirstead's analysis, "Murrays" operated much like periodicals in perpetuating the popularity and influence of verse. Here again we see the exchange between the guidebook form and its literary and cultural context: just as gains in science and sociology appeared within and reflect the methods of seeing suggested by the Handbooks, so, too did the guidebook form borrow from and impact a literary genre important to the period.…”