Kirstie Blair explores Victorian poetry in relation to Victorian religion, with particular emphasis on the bitter contemporary debates over the use of forms in worship. She argues that poetry made significant contributions to these debates, not least through its formal structures. By assessing the discourses of church architecture and liturgy in the first half of the book, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion demonstrates that Victorian poets both reflected on and affected ecclesiastical practices. The second half of the book focuses on particular poets and poems, including...

Examining how labouring-class poets constructed themselves and were constructed by critics as part of a canon, and how they situated their work in relation to contemporaries and poets from earlier periods, this book highlights the complexities of labouring-class poetic identities in the period from Burns to mid-late century Victorian dialect poets.

The People's Journal, 'A Penny Saturday paper devoted to the interests of the Working Classes', was one of the most successful and culturally influential publications in Victorian Scotland. From the beginning, the Journal set out to represent ordinary men and women, providing a platform for their opinions and experiences, publishing readers' letters, stories, and especially their poetry. Collected here are more than one hundred examples of these poems - comical, sentimental, political and polemical - on a dizzy variety of subjects, from domestic pleasures and local events to national...