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BRIAN MAIDMENT his essay attempts to read the aesthetically and culturally unambitious verse to be found in the newly proliferating cheap illustrated humorous journals from the 1830s to the 1850s as a significant form of social history. This is not to say that diversionary or comic verse is necessary simple in its formulations, but rather to raise the larger question of how far commercially successful and relatively down-market poems and lyrics, many of them deriving from performances taking place elsewhere within popular culture, might offer access to an important strand of historical understanding. In order to give shape to this investigation the focus is on poems published in magazines in this period that discuss a single major historical topic, the "march of intellect," that set of socio-economic, cultural, and scientific changes that underpinned the transformations in the class structure and economic base of British society in the first half of the nineteenth century.1 Central to these transformations was the democratization of print culture and the acknowledgement that mass literacy and access to the printed word was an inevitable consequence of, and a major force in structuring, the march of intellect.2 A discussion of the ways in which a
Victorian Poetry – West Virginia University Press
Published: Mar 30, 2014
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