History and Critical Reception

In 1839, the painter William Mulready exhibited The Sonnet, a painting which depicts ‘a young woman reading the sonnet of her hopeful yet bashful lover’. Even though the sonnet had enjoyed, in the previous few decades, a popularity and increase in level of publication that had not been seen since Elizabethan times, the subject and style of the painting are indicative of a still prevalent preconception of the merit and subject matter of the sonnet at the beginning of Victoria's reign. As studies by critics such as Raymond Havens, George Sanderlin, Jennifer Wagner, Joseph Phelan and others have shown, such a view underestimated the breadth of subjects that were being treated in sonnets. The revival of the sonnet had begun at the end of the eighteenth century, continued under the leadership of William Wordsworth, and was given a further reinvigoration by the Victorians, its popularity in the late nineteenth-century reaching a zenith not seen for over three hundred years.

This anthology shows the evolving nature of the sonnet, both thematically and formally, in the decades after 1840, especially as shown in the sonnets of poets who have now largely disappeared from the literary scene but who were considered influential sonneteers in their own time. The sonnet sequence, in particular, was nurtured and brought into vogue by Victorian poets. This anthology includes numerous examples of complete sonnet sequences enabling the reader to see how central such a form came to mean in the poetic canon of the middle and late nineteenth century.