[Download] "Protesting Success: Tennyson's "Indecent Exposure" in the Periodicals." by Victorian Poetry # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Protesting Success: Tennyson's "Indecent Exposure" in the Periodicals.
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2005
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 221 KB
Description
FIVE POEMS IN SEVEN PERIODICALS COMPRISED TENNYSON'S ENTIRE LIST OF publications for the year 1868: "The Victim" in Good Words (January 1); "The Spiteful Letter" in Once a Week (January 4); "Wages" in Macmillan's Magazine (February); "1865-1866" in Every Saturday (U.S., February 22) and Good Words (March); and "Lucretius" in Macmillan's Magazine (May) and Every Saturday (U.S., May 2). The output worried Swinburne, who pleaded to Lord Houghton: "Cannot you, as a friend of Mr. Tennyson prevent his making such a hideous exhibition of himself as he has been doing for the last three months? I thought there was a law against 'indecent exposure'?" (1) Such attitudes suggest that periodicals generally published inferior literature, and that writers whose works appeared in them devalued both literary quality and reputation through unsophisticated exposure in the mass media. Tennyson outwardly concurred, repeatedly claiming to hate publishing in periodicals. He typically returned a negative answer to editors' requests, as in this letter to an unidentified correspondent on May 25, 1859: "It is so contrary to the wont of my whole life to write in Magazines that I cannot accept your proposal, but I will become your subscriber-at least for a year." (2) Upon learning that Thackeray was to be the editor of a new monthly magazine, the Cornhill, Tennyson wrote to him on November 6, 1859: He tells American publisher James Ripley Osgood, who may have been soliciting poems for any of the publications owned by Ticknor and Fields (April 4, 1867): "I am not in the habit of inserting poems in the English Magazines, and why should I in the American?-particularly as in this unhappy condition of international Copyright law the English Magazines would immediately pirate any thing of mine in yours" (Letters, 2:457 and n.).