CYNTHIA SCHEINBERGthe Home and Foreign Review in 1862); and the Wesleyan Methodist
Magazine (1822). 21 Most of these journals included specific literary
sections, and writers could start their careers in publishing by contributing
to these forums. Early publication in these outlets could in turn launch a
first volume of poetry, one that would be available to a more diverse
readership. And while some poets sought to secure poems in periodicals
aimed at likeminded readers, it is clear that other writers tried to place
poetry wherever they could. For example, when the Jewish poet Grace
Aguilar sent her work to the Jewish Chronicle and when that journal took
too long to reply to her submission, she sent the same poem off to the
Christian Ladies Magazine. 22
Stepping back from this broad overview of the worlds of Victorian
poetry and religion, I suggest that any Victorian poet, in contradistinction
to a Renaissance writer such as Sidney, would have had a clear awareness
of the heterogeneity of audiences for which he or she wrote. In what
follows, I explore the work of three poets from disparate religious
traditions, reading their poems with an eye to how they address, both
implicitly and explicitly, the climate of religious diversity in Victorian
England. My discussion focuses on the formal and intellectual strategies
that individual poets use to represent their particular religious experiences
to readers who might not share their beliefs and assumptions. In Grace
Aguilar's "Song of the Spanish Jews" (1844), Christina Rossetti's "Consider
the Lilies of the Field" (1862), and Gerard Manley Hopkins's "To Seem the
Stranger" (probably composed in 1888), each speaker articulates a distinc-
tive religious perspective that requires certain transformations of both
English poetic conventions and the readerly assumptions embedded in
those conventions.
IIAguilar was undoubtedly one of the most widely read, and indeed
respected, Jewish writers of the Victorian period. Novelist, poet, teacher,
and theologian, as well as advocate for Jewish women's education, Aguilar
thought that the creation of Jewish literature in English would provide both
Jews and Christians with a better understanding of Jewish identity. Aguilar
herself demonstrated enormous commitment to the production of an
Anglo-Jewish literature in works published before her premature death at
the age of thirty-one in 1847, as well as in volumes published posthumously
by her mother. Much, though not all, of her work took up specifically
Jewish issues and historical narratives, including numerous poems in
American and British journals, a nonfiction work of theology (The Spirit of
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