What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies

Written With Their Blood: Contemplating Death in South Africa in the Newspaper Poems of 1899–1902

“…39 The soldiers are 'brown-clad', wearing 'dull khaki' and undifferentiated from the surrounding ground, 'As dust-brown as the ant-heaps'; when the speaker calls this 'our modern chivalry', she or he appears unconvinced (10,(5)(6). The moment of the soldiers' deaths is celebrated as the point at which they resign their khaki uniforms, making a grisly exchange, when 'through the brown encasing slow crept the bright red gore | As one by one our boys resigned for ever from the corps' (7)(8). While khaki uniforms suggest an unsettling affinity between dead men and land, the blood of the soldiers' death-wounds returns them to the old spectacular glory for which the poem is nostalgic, and marks them out visually from a landscape which threatens to hide them forever.…”

“…Meanwhile, contemporary fears that the popular poetry of the South African War was no more than 'dismal' or 'outrageous twaddle' set the tone for a century of critical neglect. 7 In the only book-length study of the poetry of 1899-1902, a work of prodigious bibliographic research, Malvern Van Wyk Smith describes 'popular ballads, music hall songs and newspaper doggerel' as 'more or less bovinely jingo'; Elleke Boehmer likewise describes the literature provoked by the South African War as a 'strident burst of jingoism'. 8 Closer study reveals a more interesting picture, however, of varied newspaper poems speaking to and inspiring a broad constituency of readers and writers who encountered poetry not as the preserve of the literary elite but as a mode of engaging with the events and cultural questions of the day.…”

Five Million Poems, or the Local Press as Poetry Publisher, 1800–1900

“…Poetry is now accepted as a ubiquitous part of the Victorian periodical thanks to the work of Linda K. Hughes, Kathryn Ledbetter, Natalie Houston, and Alison Chapman. 1 My small research project, The Local Press as Poetry Publisher, 1800-1900, aims to join the debate by saying, as I often do, "Don't forget about newspapers, especially the local paper." Throughout the Victorian era, local newspapers were widely read publications, reaching a broader readership than London newspapers, magazines, and reviews, let alone part-works or books.…”

Victorian Print Culture, Journalism and the Novel

“…These include: The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900 , a bibliographical record of thousands of serial publications, and The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900 , which identifies the authors of anonymous and pseudonymous contributors in 45 titles whose identities – much to the frustration of modern audiences – had been camouflaged by editorial policies prohibiting signed work. The Wellesley Index Poetry Project has recently corrected the absence of poetry from the original index as many of the century’s major poems from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘The Cry of the Children’ (1843) to Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’ (1900) first appeared in the pages of magazines (Hughes 92). Other resources have been bundled together into a single resource.…”