ABSTRACT
The most familiar story of the relationship between poetry and nineteenth-century publishing institutions, one told by historians such as Lee Erickson, documents a dramatic decline in interest in the genre from the 1820s onwards-a decline relative, that is, to the enormous increase in the popularity of prose fi ction. The markets and readerships for poetry, Erickson argues, were ‘far different from and much smaller than those for novels and periodicals’. This situation was in part a consequence of the fact that poetry readers were purchasers rather than borrowers of books (the circulating libraries dealt principally in fi ction), and so from the point of view of economics, the appeal of poetry, Erickson suggests, was effectively limited to some ‘27,000 families’ with incomes in the ‘top 3 per cent’ (Erickson 2002: 349-50).In this account, it is not suggested that sales for works of poetry necessarily declined in absolute terms over the course of the century; it was rather that to publish volumes of poetry, particularly by new writers, became steadily less profi table as the constant downward pressure on unit costs made large print runs an economic prerequisite for all forms of publishing. As Alexis Weedon has demonstrated, profi ts from publishing fi ction derived largely from cheap reprints of novels whose appeal had already been tested by readers belonging to the circulating libraries, those institutions which for a large part of the century were the principal purchasers of the expensive three-decker fi rst editions of fi ction (Weedon 2003). This cushion provided by the libraries was not available to publishers of poetry, and as a consequence to deal in poetry became an increasingly uncertain business.
