Beyond the Literary Annuals: Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Periodical Poetry

This chapter builds on the recent influx of scholarship studying the intersection of new media forms, the development of women’s poetry, and the public figure of the poetess. While scholars of Hemans and Landon have previously considered the role of these poetesses in new media of the early nineteenth century, most have focused on their original contributions to the prominent literary periodicals and annuals of the 1820s. Few have considered how their recirculation in the new media of the 1830s simultaneously anticipates and contributes to the rise of the family literary periodical and its poetics at mid-century. This chapter begins to fill this gap by analysing Hemans’s and, to a lesser extent, Landon’s reprinted poetry in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal between 1832 and 1841. Hemans’s and Landon’s presence in this early Victorian journal encourages a reassessment of the function of the poetess and her poetry in the developing periodical culture of the early nineteenth century. The reproduction and recirculation of the poetry and the public-facing personas of Hemans and Landon in a publication like Chambers’s emphasises how the poetry of the 1820s and ’30s set the stage both aesthetically and commercially for the rise of periodical poetry and the Victorian poetess.