SUSAN BROWNpositions. Its contributors include Matthew Arnold, Anna Jameson,
Geraldine Jewsbury, Harriet Martineau, ED. Maurice, Caroline Norton,
Coventry Patmore, Alfred Tennyson, and William Makepeace Thackeray,
together with members of the Langham Place circle such as Bessie Rayner
Parkes and Isa Craig. The editor of this landmark publication was
Adelaide Anne Procter, who had established herself as a popular poet -
indeed she was the Queen's favorite - through her contributions to
Charles Dickens's Household Words. Procter was also a member of the
Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, the organization that
founded the Press. Her work demonstrates in microcosm the degree to
which the notions of sexual difference mobilized in the construction of the
poetess could both be assimilated to the values of a middle-class reading
public and inform an active desire for feminist reform. It is fitting that
Victoria Regia would be one of last of the gift books, for in a sense it
crowns the achievement of the annuals in their function of fostering a
female publishing community.
At the same time, the devaluation of the poetess had much to do with the
annual as a mode of publication. The gift book was clearly part of a rapidly
accelerating commodity market where a book was treasured as much for its
features as a material object as for its literary content, which was often
scorned as hack work. Moreover, since annuals served as gift books - with
an elaborate engraved presentation page to be filled out by the donor - they
accentuated the degree to which material goods increasingly mediated
human relations. This was doubly uncomfortable, for both poetry and
women were traditionally supposed to compensate for the cash nexus.
Mary Ann Stodart echoed the views of many in arguing at the close of a
discussion of poetesses, that poetry was sadly required "to prevent our
sinking into materialism." 28
Annuals were thus associated with the commercialization and professio-
nalization of literature, and its commensurate debasement within a culture
based on economic exchange. Despite contributions by prominent male
poets such as Coleridge, John Clare, Thomas Moore, Shelley, and Words-
worth while the annual was relatively young, it became a particularly
feminized and derided form of poetic publication. Hartley Coleridge uses
the phrase "annual value" to disparage weak poetry by women. 29 Charlotte
Bronte praised her sister Emily's poetry with a sweeping condemnation of
such verse: "I know - no woman that ever lived - ever wrote such poetry
before - Condensed energy, clearness, finish - strange, strong pathos are
their characteristics - utterly different from the weak diffusiveness - the
laboured yet most feeble wordiness which dilute the writings of even very
popular poetesses." 30
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