Secular literary periodicals such as Household Words, Macmillan's Magazine and the Cornhill undoubtedly defined a significant portion of the literary market for middle-class readers interested in reading the era's latest novels and consuming poetry, illustrations and non-fiction essays in a curated and family-friendly setting. However, alongside the popular literary weeklies and the shilling monthlies helmed by famous authors, a secondary periodical market flourished, far exceeding that of secular publications: the religious press. Mark Knight suggests that ‘it is difficult to imagine the nineteenth century without the religious debates and influences that played such a crucial and extensive role. Periodicals’, he argues, ‘were crucial to this vitality’ (2016: 363). The numbers support Knight's assertion. In 1864, a table of circulation numbers for London publications suggests that the sale and circulation of monthly religious periodicals greatly exceeded the circulation numbers of ‘magazines and serials of a higher class’ (Altick 1998: 358). Several decades later, a late-nineteenth- century source identifies religious periodicals as the largest category of periodical publications, representing 43 per cent of the total periodical market (Knight 2016: 355). The index appended to Josef Altholz's The Religious Press in Britain, 1760–1900 (1989) alone lists 571 titles published during the nineteenth century. Given the number of religious periodicals circulating in the 1860s – around 228, according to Altholz's index – it is, to adapt Knight's phrasing, difficult to imagine nineteenth-century periodical poetry and poetics without considering the periodicals produced out of the religious discourse of the period.

Religious periodicals took a variety of forms during the nineteenth century: some were linked to a specific religious domination with the literature therein explicitly promoting a particular theology, some exclusively focused on doctrinal and philosophical issues, some were associated with religious publishers, some ‘included material that might be deemed “secular” … [but] continued to signal a theological orientation through various means’ (Knight 2016: 356), and some, like Good Words, published a mix of non-denominational secular and devotional literature aimed at a broadly Christian audience. For the purposes of this book, I have chosen to focus on Goods Words as a representative example of the religious literary periodical.