The history of periodical poetry begins in the early nineteenth century, running parallel to and intersecting with the conventional history of Victorian poetry and poetics. Each decade of the nineteenth century saw the rise of a new kind of periodical, which created new and specific publishing opportunities for both professional and amateur poets. Bradbury and Evans's Once a Week (July 1859–April 1880), for example, published established poets such as Alfred Tennyson alongside unidentifiable amateurs or ‘outsiders’ as the periodical's second editor, Edward Walford, referred to them in an 1857 letter (Buckler 1953: 537). While this book focuses on the literary periodicals of the 1860s (periodicals that published high-quality texts, some of which entered the canon), the initial rise of the periodical as the dominant publisher of poetry occurred much earlier with the collapse of the market for books of poetry. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, consumers were no longer buying volumes of original poetry by a single author. As a consequence, publishers were no longer willing to risk publishing single-author poetry volumes (see Erickson 2007). Instead, both poets and publishers turned to the literary annual, a genre which built on the pre-existing audience for commonplace books (see St Clair 2004: 224–9). The production of the literary annual in the 1820s and 1830s irrevocably redefined the way Victorian readers consumed poetry, altering ‘the place of the poet in Victorian literary culture’ (Ledbetter 2007: 13). Essentially, the poet became part of the mass-produced literary culture defined by serial novels, periodical publications and decorated gift books. The rise of the literary annuals (and the illustrated shilling monthlies that followed) thus reaffirmed the divide between popular, mass-produced literature and the reified poetry of small-run poetry volumes. The critical discourse that evolved in response to this relocation of the poet and poetry into periodical culture reverberated throughout the nineteenth century, influencing the cultural and critical perception of periodical poetry as trite and sentimental well into the twentieth century.

Literary periodicals represent only one outlet for the Victorian poet, however. Local and national newspapers, working-class publications (stamped and unstamped), religious periodicals, and family-orientated magazines all published poetry alongside the literary periodicals run by the era's established publishing houses.