Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context will appeal to members of the two scholarly camps identified by the main title's binomial elements. This is a book, in other words, addressed to Tennysonians and to historians of nineteenth-century print culture, an increasingly industrialized system of production that featured a remarkable profusion of periodicals of all kinds, including dailies, weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies, and gift-book annuals. The book's general argument is likewise suggested by the subtitle. For Kathryn Ledbetter will have us know that just as periodicals were the material manifestation of—and primary media for—a consumer culture that relied on steam-powered machinery and telegraphic communication, Alfred Tennyson—as an image, a name, and a maker of poems—became a valuable commodity to be diffused on a scale and with an impact that was unprecedented for a living poet writing in English. Such claims about Tennyson's stature are not, in general terms, breaking news to the British studies community. But Ledbetter has given us the first book-length study to disclose in detail how that stature reached unequaled heights thanks, in large part, to the cultural and commercial agency of periodical publications. Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals thus takes its place alongside June Steffensen Hagen's Tennyson and His Publishers (London, 1979) as required reading for any aspiring Tennyson scholar. At the same time, Ledbetter's book is an implicit critique of the presumptions that had induced Hagen to “omit significant discussion of Tennyson's appearance in periodicals” (65).

A believer in the value of placing “poetry in its proper context as a material product with commodity status, in conflict and cooperation with market, publisher, and author demands” (83), Ledbetter's project is theoretically consistent with Jerome McGann's call (made in such works as The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory [Oxford and New York, 1985]) to align the interpretive gestures of literary criticism with a searching curiosity about the social history of texts. Starting with a discussion of Tennyson's appearance in and contempt for the annuals so prominent in the second quarter of the century, Ledbetter's excursion into this territory shows the influence of Lee Erickson's The Economy of Literary Form (Baltimore, 1996) and the work of other scholars from the 1990s that has inspired a renewed interest in this multimedia genre. The next chapter describes Tennyson's more general ambivalence about periodicals, detailing both the complaints Tennyson made about them as well as the various rationales that induced him to appear on their pages. Chapter 3 divides its focus between poems published in the 1850s, including “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854), and poems published in the 1870s and 1880s, all of which in some way deal with war or fears of its outbreak. Chapter 4 then turns to poems composed directly as a result of Tennyson's position as poet laureate from 1851 to 1892. In the final chapter, Tennyson's textual life in the United States is described as a mixed affair; the poet was both the victim of unrestrained reprinting as well as the recipient of unusual considerations and courtesies.

Chapter 3—“War Scares and Patriot-Soldiers: Political Poetry”—strikes me as being the most consistently interesting by virtue of an underlying coherence that is extruded from the material discussed, a disparate collection of pseudonymous and signed work appearing in organs ranging from The Examiner in the 1850s to Macmillan's Magazine in the 1880s. In Ledbetter's analysis, this occasional writing collectively reveals Tennyson giving himself the task of speaking directly to “the people” and inspiring in them martial virtues that were desperately needed (in the poet's eyes) as the nation's hereditary aristocracy was slowly abdicating leadership to industrial and commercial magnates primarily interested in unrestricted trade, the movement of goods across borders, rather than the chivalric defense of territorial honor. The great complication of this stance is the fact that Tennyson's bardic attempts to rally traditional heroism in the age of the steam were accompanied by a pragmatic understanding that technological innovations funded by a state willing to expand its fiscal scope were what was truly needed for the British to keep up with European rivals. Tennyson addressed a quasi-mythic yeomanry and sturdy seafarers with hearts of oak, but the period's war machine would ultimately rely on the captains of industry remaining interested in practicing the arts of peace and war.

In contrast, chapter 4—“‘God Save the Queen’: Laureatic Responses”—is overly descriptive and sometimes lacks a sense of argumentative development. One can imagine a revised version of this chapter discovering a more explicit critical rationale through a clearer exploitation of the fact that most of the verse mentioned relies on the process at the heart of In Memoriam (1850): death and burial are answered by weddings and renewals in an act of will subject to repeated hesitation.

The book's lack of a conclusion is also a disappointment that might have been remedied by a coda uncovering the ways in which periodicals showed up in Tennyson's poetry. While Tennyson's poetry appeared in authorized and unauthorized periodical contexts, it is also the case that the extraordinary expansion of print in the nineteenth century had a way of making a mark on Tennyson's works. Surely, the many scenes of reading Tennyson depicts are inspired by (even when protesting against) the proliferation of print that took place during a period that Ledbetter rightly calls “the age of periodicals” (144).

To be fair, one can say that several criticisms excited by this book are evidence of how much work remains to be done on a subject that now has, thanks to Ledbetter, an essential survey. What is accomplished here is well edited, accompanied by three useful appendices, and generously illustrated. There are only a few potentially or distinctly misleading turns of phrase: in one illustration an unstrung bow is named a “quiver, empty of arrows” (20); an illustration from 1868 is described “as drawn by Lord Frederic Leighton” (73), who was then a long way from being made a peer (on his deathbed) in 1896; and Tennyson is portrayed as “initially” refusing the offer of a baronetcy in 1873 as a prelude to later “accept[ing] the title in 1883” (146). This last version of events implicitly and wrongly equates the unremarkable chance to become “Sir Alfred” and the unprecedented occasion of being made into “Lord Tennyson.” In general, though, this study deserves praise for its accuracy in dealing with a literary career spanning two-thirds of a century.