This book presents a selection of poetry from 1872–1900, with Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee year of 1887 serving as a ‘mid-point’. Most of the poems have been published before or in 1900, with two exceptions: Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose main body of work was published in 1918, and A. E. Housman's verse written after the trial of Oscar Wilde: composed in 1895; yet not published until 1937. A feature of these years is the quality and quantity of verse produced by less well-known writers alongside the established ‘major authors’ Tennyson, Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘early’ Hardy and ‘early’ Yeats, and the traditional poets of the fin-de-siècle. Where possible, the poetry is contextualised in terms of the significant intellectual and historical forces informing the later phases of Victoria's Empire. In a poem discussed in the introduction, for example, Constance Naden speaks of Darwin as a ‘Seer, savant, merchant, poet’.

As is common with the agonies of selection in an undertaking such as this, it simply has not been possible to include every one and every thing. Though there are many poets here, the main criteria has been ‘quality rather than quantity’, as well as a conviction that, however modish the expectation, one can err by ‘overinclusion’. A favourite Venetian saying of Robert Browning's was ‘Tutti ga i so gusti e mi go i mii’ (‘Everyone follows his taste, and I follow mine’). Yet I hope that, among the hundred and fifty voices represented here, a characteristic and representative flavour of the intelligence of this period can be found.