The Work and Play of Rhyme in Victorian Verse Cultures, 1850-1900.

Abstract

This dissertation recovers a remarkable range of debates about rhyme between 1850-1900, in order to ask how rhyme made sense to communities of readers and writers, and how rhyme in turn produced those communities. As a form of social play, rhyme also performed ideological work in Victorian verse cultures. For the Victorians, rhyme did more than merely bind lines; it also bound persons to individual and collective identities. The introduction argues that the 1860’s were an important turning point in Victorian ideas about rhyme, as versification manuals proliferated to impose rules on the rhyming games of popular Victorian verse, while the growing popularity of nursery rhymes reflected the continual reworking and replaying of ideas about rhyme. The first two chapters demonstrate how Algernon Swinburne and Christina Rossetti responded in different ways to the popularization of rhyme. Swinburne mastered rhyme so that rhyme might master him, while Rossetti reworked a tradition of rhyming riddles in Poetess verse to explore the relationship of rhyme and poetic closure. The last two chapters consider more broadly how the Victorian culture of rhyme produced various class and gender identifications. The third chapter analyzes debates about the proper pronunciation of rhyme, by tracing how anxieties about “cockney rhyme” that were originally applied to John Keats intensified over the course of the century and became applied to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. My fourth chapter considers how youths at Victorian Cambridge, particularly Charles Stuart Calverley, did and undid their manhood though extravagant performances of rhyme, expressing ambivalence about outgrowing the age of rhyme. The dissertation contributes to historical poetics by offering a new set of concepts for how to read rhyme in the nineteenth century. Rhyme play, I argue, was a mode of display, and particularly a performance of class. Indeed, for the Victorians, rhyme worked to create relations not only between words but also between persons: what was most social about the poetic genres considered in this dissertation, surprisingly, was rhyme.