"Melding literary history with social history, this fascinating work reveals the seminal influence poetry anthologies have had on British culture and society for four centuries."
Essential reading for lovers of literary history, and for folks interested in British social and cultural history, Clare Bucknell’s The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture is a richly informative joy.
Beautifully written and presented, it leads readers on an enthralling journey through the history of poetry anthologies, examining the pivotal role they’ve played in shaping British literary culture — and culture more broadly — across four centuries.
In her Introduction, Bucknell points out that anthologies “exist not outside history, but in it, reflecting the ideas and priorities of their time, influencing patterns of taste, determining what’s available to be read and what isn’t encouraging new and different kinds of reading publics to emerge”. Anthologists seek, she argues, “to make their mark on culture – to shape, whether briefly or enduringly, the society in which they are to be read.”
Within this framework we discover how, for example, 18th-century poems and ballads contributed to widespread superstition, which in turn led to many poets of the day writing about the likes of witches, ghosts, and other supernatural subjects. Then, in the Victorian age, the working-class were educated by The Golden Treasury. Demonstrating the social impact of anthologies, the author asserts that “Workers who had been inculcated with sound middle-class principles and given access to middle-class kinds of knowledge, it was believed, would be far less likely to protest against their labour conditions or enter a violent confrontation with their employers.”
From social control in Victorian times, through to 1960s pop culture, The Treasure Anthologies is a veritable trove of literary gold, and, though scholarly, it’s also engagingly accessible.
| Primary Genre | Poetry |
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