Have you ever found that a space in your house suddenly appears when you have been moving things around? Or maybe you have moved into a new house and after furnishing and decorating it to your taste, there are few shelves that remain free.
You sit there with your partner and over a cup of tea wonder what to put onto these shelves. Possibly the cookery books but no, they are already promised to the kitchen. It might be your collection of Eagle annuals or football programmes.
But then again democracy takes it course and a full discussion takes place. The obvious answer to the question is to place books on the shelves. But what type of books? Possibly your collection of Martin Amis novels but then these will not fill both shelves and your beloved points out the importance of continuity.
The shelves remain empty for a few weeks only populated by the odd unwanted pot which although hideous, you cannot give away as it was a present from an elderly aunt. You do not want to spend a fortune on a set of books and modern books are so expensive but there is an answer at hand which ticks all the boxes.
Victorian Poetry Books
But I know very little about poetry, you think, apart from that poem about daffodils by that Wordsworth chap or those very romantic poems by John Keats which you used to add in part to your letters in your courting days.
There are plenty of bookshops in the town which stock a variety of Victorian poets but these are contemporary editions, clean, uniform and very modern and normally priced at about ten pounds.
Then one day when the thermometer is misbehaving, you jump on a train for some country air and find a small town populated with a number of antique establishments.
You wander around for a while as the air is cooler inside and soon find yourself in the book section. A large number of books face you but amongst the biographies and plate books on castles you note a number of beautiful extremely well crafted poetry books.
These must cost a fortune you think to yourself after all, some are over a hundred and fifty years old but you open them up and see that the Shelley is two pounds and the Patmore is only seventy five pence and soon after a number of visits to these outlets, your shelves begin to fill and sometimes become the topic of conversation when friends arrive.
“I read about him at school” .
“I loved that poem but never knew who it was by”.
“My parents have a set of Tennyson’s in the bookcase and I do not think they have been touched since I was little and explored them with my sticky fingers “.
These might be imaginary conversations but during your quiet hours, you begin to look at these books and admire the poetry held between the covers and slowly but surely you meet Queen Mab and explore the minds of Coleridge, Wordsworth and the other giants of Victorian poetry.
I was the child with sticky fingers who at a young age was found leafing through a book of Byron’s works. My mother read from Childe Harold and before long, I was hooked on poetry. Not just Victorian poetry but all kinds of poetry ranging from the French Symbolists to Chaucer.
I write poetry which I find incredibly relaxing in the busy days that seems to cover most of your waking hours and it is thanks to these Victorian Poets that I first became interested.
But what of Victorian poetry? Most people have heard of John Keats, Percy Shelly and Lord Byron all romantic figures who died young which added to their legend.
But who has heard of Arthur Hugh Clough, Thomas Lovell Beddoes or Letitia Elizabeth Landon (LEL) who also died young, the latter two the victims of suicide?
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are often remembered more for their love story than their actual poetry, which is excellent.
Alfred Tennyson is remembered for his many books of poetry but how many people know why he wrote In Memoriam and that he waited for seventeen years before marrying his wife in a small church in Shiplake near Henley.
There is no real start or finish to what can be described as Victorian poetry. The Queen was born in 1819 and came to the throne in 1837 and by that time Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and Byron were all dead but they are considered Victorian poets which is a little confusing.
Personally, I consider Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and Byron to be poets of the Victorian era. I may be wrong, and I may be wrong again in considering that Victorian poetry faded with the death of Robert Bridges in 1930 and to a lesser extent Alice Meynell in 1922.
That is the beauty of Victorian poetry everybody has their own thoughts about it. Unlike today’s poets they were, to some extent, the superstars of their own age. Byron, it is said, woke up famous. How many poets does that happen to today?
For me, poetry is too comfortable at present. There are some excellent poets around today but they do not, in my view, challenge as some of the Victorian poets did and one must take into account that we live in a less restrictive society today.
This said, a great number of Victorian poets did conform and found their own levels. But there were exceptions such as the multi –talented Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister Christina Rossetti and the rather likable Algernon Charles Swinburne who were all unusual in their different ways.
There was the naughty Richard Monckton Milnes who is more remembered for his famed breakfasts and his collection of pornography rather than his actual verse. Other forgotten poets whose poetry is also rather good include both Lionel Johnson and Francis Thompson.
I am just scraping the surface as there were many, many Victorian poets. Some came from well off families and were able to finance the publishing of their own books of verse. Others came from more humble backgrounds and struggled throughout their lives.
My favourite Victorian poet was a man who never had any of his work published in his lifetime. He was a brilliant student at Baliol in Oxford and was a follower of the Oxford Movement converting to Catholicism in 1866. The name of this poet was Gerard Manley Hopkins who, in my view, was the most extraordinary of all the Victorian poets. He was not all that prolific and when he became a Jesuit priest, he destroyed most of his early work as his thought was, that he might offend God if he wrote poetry. He was a poet tortured by his religion and only began writing poetry again in the final fourteen years of his life. But what stunning poetry this was. My own personal favourite is, The Windhover which starts with the following lines:
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
As I noted, Hopkins who died in 1889 never published in his lifetime, and it was through the dedication of his great friend Robert Bridges that his poetry was published in 1918 and was subsequently praised by TS Eliot amongst others. You obviously will not find any Victorian editions of Hopkins poems but really he is the exception. Another favourite of mine, Matthew Arnold can be found easily in antique shops and strangely, Francis Thompson is quite easy to locate.
In a week last summer, I happened to visit bookshops in the Charing Cross Road in London and in Devizes, where I found the collected works of Thompson in both establishments and the coincidence continued when I found a single copy of his work in Hungerford Arcade, here in Hungerford.
If you are looking for a set of books from Victorian poets, then Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson seem to be the most common. You can purchase a set of these books very cheaply if you look around with care and often, these books which have not had many owners are in quite good condition.
This said, you will find other collections of poets in your travels. The Victorians loved collecting their named poets and obviously to satisfy demand large collections were released and as with most things Victorian, they were made to last. This is why they are quite easily available today.
The Victorians also liked to publish large volumes of a poets work even if they had been dead for a number of years.
I recently purchased a collection of Robert Burns poetry and the book is the size of a small paving stone and just as heavy. But it is a magnificent book nonetheless.
Poets from America such as Longfellow and Whittier and even Edgar Allan Poe were also published in this country and some of these editions are very fine indeed. Foreign poets of the period are also quite easy to find but are usually books that were published in the poet’s native country and brought across to the UK. These books are usually un-translated although, I have seen one or two Victorian translations of poets such as Heine and a little surprisingly, Novalis. The Victorian’s also liked collecting the works of people such as Shakespeare, Dante and Milton.
Only recently, I found a set of books by Shakespeare which were made with embossed leather covers and the pages fringed with gold leaf.
These books were works of art themselves and for once, were rather expensive.
But do not let this put you off as there a many collections and single editions which are just as highly decorated and many contain memorable etchings within.
Editions of Sir Water Scott’s works often contain a good number of etchings to illustrate the poems although this is the case with a number of poets and not exclusively Scott.
Etchings were also used by the poet-artist William Blake as well as illuminated printing in his works. You can pick these up but they are a little harder to find. If you purchase a set or a single book of Victorian poetry then there is a good chance that the pages will contain some etchings and some of these will be still protected by the original tissue sheets.
My appreciation of Victorian poetry is quite Broad Church, I have my favourites but I favour much of the work published during that era and some of the later poets who were beginning to cross over into twentieth century and its modernism such as Charlotte Mew.
You might need a background knowledge of some of the poets (which is easily researched on the internet) but when you are familiar with their work, then the luxury begins.
Your shelves might favour the works of Scott or the Romantic Poets. You might have the complete works of Tennyson or Browning or you might just collect odd but fine editions of a variety of poets. It is your choice.
The nice thing about collecting Victorian poetry books is it is such an inexpensive pastime. Many books in good condition can cost as little as a pound or even less and you can often purchase the collected works of various poets for less than a tenner. Again, as you buy these books, you will quite quickly get an idea of how much you are likely to have to pay.
Some establishments will try to charge you considerably more for a common edition of let’s say, a Longfellow than others would. But that is the same for most things and it pays to shop around.
You might find that after filling up the original vacant shelves, you have caught the bug and you invest in a bookcase to house more editions of poetry and the like.
Good hunting, it is great fun.