The history of nineteenth-century literature cannot be separated from the rise of new media and the expansion of the periodical market to encompass all facets of the era's mass readership from rural readers of the local press to urban working-class audiences and those reading in middle-class parlours. By the middle of the century, ‘[p]rint was proliferating in exponential numbers more cheaply and more rapidly than before … and there was a literate, eager readership’ looking for print material to fill their leisure time (Chapman and Ehnes 2014: 8). The literary periodical – be it a weekly like Household Words or a monthly like the Cornhill – represents one response to the rapid rise of and appetite for the periodical press as publishers adapted their catalogues in response to the evolving and overlapping social, cultural and literary forms of the period. The changing demands of Victorian readers and publishers determined the market available to poets. If poets wanted access to the mass readership (and related financial opportunities) of Dickens, Eliot and Trollope, they had to publish their poems in the periodical press alongside the era's popular serial fiction. Each chapter in this book has explored the implications of this shift for Victorian poetry and poetics, concluding that periodical poems do not sit apart from the canon of Victorian literature and poetry. Rather, the poetry of the periodical press is the poetry of the Victorian period. In other words, to paraphrase and slightly revise Hughes's seminal argument (2007: 91), periodical poems should matter to all those interested in Victorian poetry whether they care for periodicals or not. Indeed, with the rise of digital projects related to Victorian periodicals and poetry, we can no longer ignore the presence of poetry in the era's popular press. The new media of the twenty-first century has allowed scholars to access and claim space for periodical poetry in a way that was seemingly impossible prior to the digital turn.

Going Digital: Accessing Periodical Poetry

Over the past decade, the new media of the Victorian period, including its periodicals and illustrations, has gone digital. Victorian texts, including the era's periodicals, are now more accessible than ever.