Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Here is the story as it has been told so far: in the middle of the nineteenth century, at the very heart and height of the Victorian period, a peculiar and peculiarly perverse genre, the verse novel, arose in England only to disappear again by the 1870s. By the late 1860s, the form had achieved enough cohesion and visibility to be parodied in Edmund C. Nugent's Anderleigh Hall: A Novel in Verse (1866), a sure sign of a genre's ossification and imminent obsolescence. The verse novel took rather different forms in the two decades of its emergence, from the straightforward plot of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856, dated 1857) to the epistolary fiction of Arthur Clough's Amours de Voyage (1858), from the sonnet sequence of George Meredith's Modern Love (1862) to the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning's Ring and the Book (1868–9). None the less, each work could be said to respond to the increasing marginalization of poetry that occurred after the collapse of the poetry market in the 1820s. As Lee Erickson (1996) has argued, whereas the publishers of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron enjoyed huge profits because of conditions that supported a luxury market for poetry in the Romantic period, by 1825 conditions were in place for the emergence of a mass market that oriented itself to the middle classes and their preference for novelistic forms. After this date, and perhaps ... log in or subscribe to read full text