The People's Journal, `A Penny Saturday paper devoted to the interests of the Working Classes', was one of the most successful and culturally influential publications in Victorian Scotland. From the beginning, the Journal set out to represent ordinary men and women, providing a platform for their opinions and experiences, publishing readers' letters, stories, and especially their poetry. Collected here are more than one hundred examples of these poems - comical, sentimental, political and polemical - on a dizzy variety of subjects, from domestic pleasures and local events to national questions and foreign affairs. These works, written by tradesmen and women, factory workers, servants, and others, are both deeply fascinating and highly entertaining. Their voices are part of a literary heritage that deserves recovery, and their concerns and interests often chime, more than we might expect, with issues still very much current in the modern day.

* A fresh and authoritative perspective on a figure who had an immense influence on nineteenth-century literature and culture * A unique volume, providing the first major reassessment of Keble's work for several decades, at a time of burgeoning interest in John Keble * Interdisciplinary approach will appeal to students of Victorian history, literature and culture, as well as those employed by the Church or engaged in Church work and history, and Anglicans and Anglo-Catholics worldwide. John Keble had an immense influence on nineteenth-century literature and culture. A founding figure of the Oxford Movement, he was mythologized as the living embodiment of Christian ideals. His 1827 volume of verse The Christian Year was the bestselling book of poetry in the Victorian era, while his lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry were highly influential. Those indebted to his ideas include figures as diverse as John Henry Newman, Christina Rossetti and Alfred Tennyson. Despite his evident importance, Keble's social, political and cultural impact on his times have until recently been significantly underestimated. This interdisciplinary volume is a major contribution to our understanding of the importance of Keble's life and work. It brings an entirely fresh perspective on Keble's writings, brings critical work on Keble into the 21st century, in particular demonstrating the importance of his contribution to nineteenth-century literature, politics and theology. Including work by a number of prominent scholars, John Keble in Context provides a wide range of perspectives on Keble's place in politics and religion, his writings and his influence on his literary heirs and successors. This unique andtimely volume offers the first major reassessment of Keble's work for several decades, and a comprehensive introduction to this major figure. John Keble in Context will appeal to students of Victorian literature, history, religion and culture.

Kirstie Blair explores Victorian poetry in relation to Victorian religion, with particular emphasis on the bitter contemporary debates over the use of forms in worship. She argues that poetry made significant contributions to these debates, not least through its formal structures. By assessing the discourses of church architecture and liturgy in the first half of the book, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion demonstrates that Victorian poets both reflected on and affected ecclesiastical practices. The second half of the book focuses on particular poets and poems, including Browning's Christmas-Eve and Tennyson's In Memoriam, to show how High Anglican debates over formal worship were dealt with by Dissenting, Broad Church and Roman Catholic poets and other writers. This book features major Victorian poets - Tennyson, the Brownings, Rossetti, Hopkins, Hardy - from different Christian denominations, but also argues that their work was influenced by a host of minor and less studied writers, particularly the Tractarian or Oxford Movement poets whose writings are studied in detail here. Form and Faith presents a new take on Victorian poetry by showing how important now-forgotten religious controversies were to the content and form of some of the best-known poems of the period. In methodology and content, it also relates strongly to current critical interest in poetic form and formalism, while recovering a historical context in which 'form' carried a particular weight of significance.

Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart is a significant and timely study of nineteenth-century poetry and poetics. It considers why and how the heart became a vital image in Victorian poetry, and argues that the intense focus on heart imagery in many major Victorian poems highlights anxieties in this period about the ability of poetry to act upon its readers. In the course of the nineteenth century, this study argues, increased doubt about the validity of feeling led to the depiction of the literary heart as alienated, distant, outside the control of mind and will. This coincided with a notable rise in medical literature specifically concerned with the pathological heart, and with the development of new techniques and instruments of investigation such as the stethoscope. As poets feared for the health of their own hearts, their poetry embodies concerns about a widespread culture of heartsickness in both form and content. In addition, concerns about the heart's status and actions reflect upon questions of religious faith and doubt, and feed into issues of gender and nationalism. This book argues that it is vital to understand how this wider culture of the heart informed poetry and was in turn influenced by poetic constructs. Individual chapters on Barrett Browning, Arnold, and Tennyson explore the vital presence of the heart in major works by these poets--including, Aurora Leigh, "Empedocles on Etna," In Memoriam, and Maud--while the wide-ranging opening chapters present an argument for the mutual influence of poetry and physiology in the period and trace the development of new theories of rhythm as organic and affective.