ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on telegraphic coding to explore the way that meaning is created by articulating gaps or marks (signal) which appear within a tonal field of random plurality (noise). It brings the publishing phenomenon of the miscellany into conversation with landscape painting, wood engraving and nature writing in the 1860s and 1870s. Miscellanies published by the Dalziel Brothers in the late 1860s and 1870s mix poetry with engravings by ‘Idyllic’ artists such as George John Pinwell, John William North and Frederick Walker. The standard account suggests that the clash between the moralists and the Aestheticists in this period positioned the plural prettiness of nature against the stripe or dark accent. Yet the presentation of the idyll in verse and visual imagery is one that mixes soothing fuzziness with troubling accents. This chapter returns to the ‘Fleshly School of Poetry’ controversy, to follow Robert Williams Buchanan, poet and editor of the Dalziels’ Wayside Posies (1866), and author of an infamous anonymous attack on Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetry. It finds that ‘idyllic’ nature in the miscellanies offers both the spread and pulse of noisy, edgeless colouristic tones and hints of more insistent marks and stripes, concluding that the Idyllic School of the 1860s and 1870s is already producing fleshly Aestheticist effects.
