Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855-1875. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780821419649. Price: US$59.95/£49.35

I doubt that most readers have thought deeply about the illustrated Christmas gift books of the 1860s. But Lorraine Janzen Kooistra’s book reveals fascinating information in a genre that has never been considered worthy of sustained study before. These illustrated volumes offer “new ways of looking at the place of poetry in the high Victorian period,” Kooistra claims, specifically discussing the ways that this “hybrid multimedia form mediating ‘high’ and popular art, the gift book’s corporate authorship and feminine readership intervene in literary history to challenge romantic notions of individual creators and consecrated canons” (249). As these lines suggest, Kooistra is especially interested in five areas: the material history of the book, female readership and authorship, high art versus popular audiences, the interaction between visual images and written lines, and personal testimony versus mechanical reproduction. The gift book sits at the crossroads of these values, and Kooistra does a consistently masterful job of reading the tensions, compromises, failures, and recalibrations necessary to bring poetry and pictures into line with each other and with the marketplace, especially as both readership and visual technologies changed. Chapter 3 turns to the Dalziel Brothers, who developed “a new kind of ekphrastic poetry for the gift-book market” (103). The enormous success of the illustrated periodical, which Kooistra compares with the developments of our own digital age, made a whole new consumption of images possible. The volumes spoke to a female readership whose conventional preferences for pleasant scenes of pastoral and domestic comfort were rewarded with work from name-brand artists. It is a pleasure to follow Kooistra’s attentive readings of the interplay between image and text, as for instance she reads Arthur Boyd Houghton’s illustration for Dora Greenwell’s “A Child’s Garden” as a dialogue of unsettling wildness amidst the cozy atmosphere (116-117). How did the Christmas gift books sell transatlantic popular female poets like Eliza Cook, Adelaide Anne Procter, and Jean Ingelow, considered “second-rate poets for second-rate readers”? Their poetry was “narrative in nature, direct in expression, musical in appeal, and affective or sentimental in content” (131). Kooistra discusses how each poet worked, or didn’t work, for gift books. Cook’s democratic, working-class politics, not to mention the open secret of her lesbianism, consorted oddly with the fancy gift-book format, while Procter’s upper-middle class status and idealized early death made for a better fit. Ingelow, whose poems were particularly prized for oral recitations, could sustain an acceptably feminized presentation. These popular illustrated gift books offered familiar, accessible, pleasing images and language, cementing the association between popular readerships and mass culture (177). In her final chapter, Kooistra returns to Tennyson. In this chapter, she traces how the corporate nature of the gift book meant that Tennyson lost artistic control. Unable to dictate the work of his illustrators, determine the layout of his poems, or demand the sole attention of his readers, Tennyson hated publishing in this venue. Moreover, the feminized associations of the gift book affected Tennyson’s reception. As Kooistra writes, “In our intense focus on the poetic word, we lose an opportunity to touch and see the past—to get a sense of how these verses expressed their meanings in physical formats to nineteenth-century readers.” This oversight “shows how committed we remain to a romantic ideology of poetry as the creative expression of individual genius—the disembodied voice and inspired breath of the poet. But breath cannot exist outside a living body, and bodies are always enmeshed in human social relationships” (180). This chapter restores our sense of the book as a product of many makers, dictated by material and technological conditions, and directed towards readers. Kooistra explores the …