Victorian Periodicals Review

A fascinating footnote on the origins of some Romantic era women’s poetry sparked Katherine Harris’s long quest to discover, and then research, literary annuals. Many scholars working on nineteenth-century women’s poetry or book history will be familiar with her hypertextual archive of Rudolph Ackermann’s Forget Me Not. Given that annuals straddle academic [End Page 725] fields of book and periodical research, readers of VPR should find much interest in this study. Harris’s original plan for the definitive publishing, textual, and bibliographical history of early literary annuals inevitably proved impossible because the field is so extensive and complex, but her methodology is an ambitious interdisciplinary one: to analyze the annual “through multiple lenses concerning textuality and the sociology of the text” (5).

Her introduction, “The Sociology of the Literary Annual,” opens with the “Poetess Tradition” and its relationship to the literary annual genre in a climate of innovative publishing technologies and a widening middle-class market for culture following the British industrial revolution. By explaining her methodology in the context of scholarship on the annuals, presenting reasons for focusing on particular British examples during the period 1823–32, and outlining the contents of each chapter, Harris opens up intriguing possibilities for research. Readers are, however, also alerted to a major hurdle—problems of access to primary sources. Her book addresses this difficulty in several ways. The extensive bibliography includes special collections and online resources, with additional sources identified in the text. Separate appendices, compiled from various sources, list prominent annual contributors, editors, and publishers of British titles, 1823–31, and British and American annuals, 1823–35. Collectively, they provide a valuable and convenient resource reflecting the compiler’s personal experience of researching the genre.

For example, Frederick Faxon’s Literary Annuals and Gift Books: A Bibliography, 1823–1903 and Andrew Boyle’s An Index to the Annuals (1820–1850) inevitably form the basis of Harris’s appendix of thirty Romantic and Victorian “Prominent Contributors,” but she supplements these with additional comments and corrections. She notes that Felicia Hemans’s ninety-four entries and Letitia Landon’s 163 listings include some works published in more than one literary annual. She lists Boyle’s “Mrs. Moodie” as the Canadian writer Susannah Strickland, whose papers are housed in the National Library of Canada and who has attracted some scholarly attention. Harris’s selection of “Prominent Contributors” includes a number of lesser known yet prolific contributors, as well as canonical Victorians such as Charles Dickens and Robert Browning, with just two contributions a piece, and authors typically included in introductory courses on Romanticism. Overtly and implicitly, she presents the case for more digital projects to improve accessibility. However, one persistent theme throughout this study is the importance of the material book in relation to illustrated annuals. Digital resources alone are insufficient.

Apart from Ackermann’s influence on publishing, Harris pays particular attention to Friendship’s Offering, the Literary Souvenir, and the Keepsake. She also focuses on the Comic Annual, a periodical that provided a [End Page 726] satirical response to the explosion of annuals in the late 1820s. Harris’s subject may be British publications, but she also highlights international aspects of the genre in her argument. In chapter 1, covering Ackermann’s professional life and the birth of the British annual, her focus on German inspirations is to be expected. It may be a pleasant surprise, however, to find several pages devoted to No me Olvides, the Spanish version of the Forget Me Not sold to Latin American countries, and the London Literary Gazette’s favorable review, which praised its translations as “distinguished by great spirit and freedom” (59). Another chapter, “A Family History of Albums, Anthologies, Almanacs and Emblems” (a reworking of her 2007 article in the Poetess Archive Journal 1, no. 1), discusses in considerable detail the French almanac Hommage aux Dames, which shares some of the features of...