Cosmopolitanism and the Scottish Working-Class Writer: John Parkinson/Yehya-en-Nasr and Islam in Ayrshire

Explores the grassroots cosmopolitan and international literary interests of Scottish working-class writers, through the writing of the Scottish poet and convert to Islam John Parkinson or Yehya-en-Nasr (1874-1918), in the Ardrossan and Saltcoats Herald, in the monthly The Islamic World and the weekly newspaper The Crescent, as a journalist in Rangoon, and in book form, notably his Lays of Love and War (Ardrossan, n.d.), arguing that Parkinson\u27s Muslim cosmopolitanism and his local Ayrshire identity and contexts were inextricably intertwined

'The Steam Arm': Proto-Steampunk Themes in a Victorian Popular Song

This article introduces an early Victorian popular song, with some preliminary reflections on how it, and indeed similar texts, might be relevant to twentieth and twenty-first century practitioners and critics of steampunk. ‘The Steam Arm' describes a veteran who acquires a prosthetic limb, with disastrous consequences. As a text from the start of the ‘steam age', it reveals the fantasies and anxieties surrounding technological progress in early Victorian literature

"Let the nightingales alone": correspondence columns, the Scottish press, and the making of the working-class poet

This article examines the presence of poetry and poetic criticism in the correspondence columns of the mid-Victorian Scottish popular press. It argues that these columns are a major, unacknowledged resource in the working-class poetic tradition and that editorial advice helped to shape the form and content of newspaper poetry during this period. It also suggests that these columns fostered satirical as well as serious poetic production

Advertising Poetry, the Working-Class Poet and the Victorian Newspaper Press

This article investigates the neglected topic of advertising poetry, focusing on its substantial presence in the provincial press. It argues that advertising poetry and newspaper verse, both usually produced by working-class authors, have a complicated relationship in the Victorian period, and that this relationship highlights questions about working-class consumerism and about poetry itself as a marketable commodity

Excelsior! Inspirational Verse, the Victorian Working-Class Poet, and the Case of Longfellow

First paragraph: In Stiefvater's popular young adult fantasy sequence, The Raven Cycle, "Excelsior" is a catchphrase used repeatedly and superstitiously by the protagonist, Richard Gansey III, whose quest for a lost Welsh king buried in rural Virginia shapes the four-book narrative. "Excelsior," roughly meaning "ever higher," was a term popularized in the nineteenth century by Longfellow's eponymous poem, in which a mysterious youth climbs onwards and upwards into the Alps, ignoring various warnings, and is then found frozen to death in the final stanza. For Gansey to cite it at the outset of new adventures or when entering a magical location is entirely appropriate. Like Longfellow's hero, he is on a lonely, [End Page 1] self-appointed, and grimly determined mission, likely to end in his death. In addition, Gansey's "Excelsior" is a signifier of his excessive white male privilege. His elite private education, his wealth, his family's standing, are thematically central to the series. That he is familiar with a poem by Longfellow, a highly educated, cosmopolitan, white male Harvard professor with a love of all things European (while Blue, a working-class woman, is unfamiliar with it) is not at all surprising. "Excelsior" signals Gansey's resolve to venture into the unknown and strength to keep going in the face of danger and despair. However, since none of the other characters in The Raven Cycle recognize the allusion, referencing Longfellow also signifies something unusual for the twenty-first century; a young American hero who not only knows his poetic canon but is in many ways attuned to perceived nineteenth-century ideals of duty and perseverance

The Influence of the Oxford Movement on Poetry and Fiction

First paragraph: In the twentieth and twenty-first century, the Oxford Movement has received a very substantial amount of attention as a literary movement, not simply a historical or theological phenomenon. It is difficult to study the politics or theology of Tractarianism without taking into account that of the three men most generally associated with it, Keble was primarily famous as a poet rather than for any of his prose works, and Newman had a substantial if not equal reputation for poetry and fiction. More importantly than their own literary productions, the leaders and followers of Tractarianism in its early days placed an extremely high value on literature – the right kind of literature – and never lost sight of its importance as a means of disseminating ideology. Private reading, as Joshua King’s recent study demonstrates, would become a means of imagining ‘participation in a national Christian community’, created and sustained by the circulation of ideas in Victorian print culture (King 2015: 14)

'We may not know, we cannot tell': Religion and Reserve in Victorian Children’s Poetics

First paragraph: Religion has, of course, always played a very substantial role in poetry written for children, and the complex interplay between children’s poetics and the English hymn tradition – from Isaac Watts’ 1715 Divine and Moral Songs for Children, to Eleanor Farjeon’s ‘Morning Has Broken’, first published in 1931 – has lent a vitality and persistence to eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth-century Christian poems for child readers, in many cases ensuring their continued survival for twenty-first century audiences. This essay explores a small part of this rich body of work by considering the importance of religious poems for children in the High Church, Anglo-Catholic or Tractarian tradition of the nineteenth century. While Tractarian poetics has attracted considerable recent criticism, and has been reassessed from a variety of critical perspectives, there has been little discussion of the role of children’s literature in the Oxford Movement. The most relevant exceptions, Alisa Clapp-Itnyre’s two significant articles on children’s hymnody in the nineteenth century, take a general overview of this field while noting the popularity of Tractarian hymnbooks for children as the movement gathered strength.2 Clapp-Itnyre’s 2010 article argues convincingly that Tractarian hymn-writers develop a tradition of ‘writing to children as adults’ (156). Without disagreeing with her fine readings, I suggest here, in concentrating on two of the nineteenth-century’s most famous children’s poets, Cecil Frances Alexander and Christina Rossetti, that Tractarian poets also wrote to adults as children, and that their successful volumes of verse aimed at pre-adolescent, or even pre-literate children, speak to adult readers (and singers) about children, as well as speaking to children. Rossetti and Alexander were both passionate advocates of High Church principles and directly influenced by the key theological and literary works of the Oxford Movement, but they have not been considered together. Rossetti’s SingSong: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872), as I argue below, makes an indirect contribution to a larger body of Anglo-Catholic poetry for children, whereas Alexander’s enormously popular Hymns for Little Children (1848) is a direct and explicitly polemical addition to the sub-genre of children’s poetry designed to build on the popular success of John Keble’s The Christian Year (1827) and adapt its principles for younger readers. Indeed, Keble himself participated actively in this endeavour, both by lending his patronage to authors and by publishing, as a longawaited follow-up to the bestselling Christian Year, Lyra Innocentium: Thoughts in Verse on Christian Children, Their Ways and Privileges (1846), a volume which followed works for children by other leading Tractarians, such as Isaac Williams’ Ancient Hymns for Children (1846) and John Mason Neale’s three series of Hymns for Children (1842-67). As I will argue here, this body of verse provides significant insights not only into the aesthetics of children’s verse, but also into the aesthetics of Tractarianism, and beyond that, into Victorian (poetic) attitudes towards faith in a period often stereotyped as an age of uncertainty

The newspaper press and the Victorian working-class poet

The relationship between the aspiring working-class poet and the newspaper press has always been crucial. Indeed, it is possible to argue that at least from the late eighteenth century onwards, every laboring-class or working-class poet had a significant relationship with the press. In the case of many, like Robert Burns, the relationship was vexed. As Lucyle Werkmeister’s detailed studies have shown, Burns sent a number of poems to London and local newspapers in the late 1780s and 1790s, both pseudonymously and under his own name, and developed relationships with editors like Peter Stuart of the London Star. “I would scorn to put my name to a Newspaper Poem,” he wrote to one friend; yet, in a letter to Stuart in the same week, he observed that “I am charmed with your paper. I wish it was more in my power to contribute to it” and gave Stuart license to do what he wished with the poems Burns sent him, short of publishing Burns’s name with them (Burns 405, 407). Burns valued the press for its publication of political poems, though as a government employee, he had to be cautious, running into trouble when satirical poems on Establishment figures were wrongly attributed to him, or when editors were unable to resist adding his name to his own satires (see Werkmeister). John Clare, as Eric Robinson has shown, was also an avid reader of and contributor to the newspaper press, local and national, though the extent of his contributions has still not been fully traced. Burns and Clare, who was supported and championed by the London Morning Post, had a status that entitled them to consideration by the London papers. As the press expanded and expanded again in the course of the nineteenth century, however, and as the rise of literacy and the prior reputation of poets like Burns increased the number of would-be working-class poets, the primary relationship tended to be between a working-class poet and one or more of their local newspapers

« The Drunkard’s Raggit Wean » : la culture des imprimés placardés et la politique de la poésie de la tempérance

This article examines the circulation of a well-known temperance poem and song by Glasgow poet John Crawford, ‘The Drunkard’s Raggit Wean’, considering its function as a broadside and its reprinting in the newspaper press and other venues. It argues for the significance and continued popularity of broadsides in the mid-Victorian period, and highlights the importance of temperance verse in this period’s popular culture

Cosmopolitanism and the Scottish working-class writer : John Parkinson/Yehya-en-Nasr and Islam in Ayrshire

Explores the grassroots cosmopolitan and international literary interests of Scottish working-class writers, through the writing of the Scottish poet and convert to Islam John Parkinson or "Yehya-en-Nasr" (1874-1918), in the Ardrossan and Saltcoats Herald, in the monthly The Islamic World and the weekly newspaper The Crescent, as a journalist in Rangoon, and in book form, notably his Lays of Love and War (Ardrossan, n.d.), arguing that Parkinson's "Muslim cosmopolitanism" and his local Ayrshire identity and contexts were inextricably intertwined