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...the world should know."
New York Times (July 21, 1897:5).
During her lifetime, Jean Ingelow enjoyed celebrity status in Britain and the United States. Her friends included John Ruskin (who sent a cross of roses to her funeral) and Christina Rossetti, and her knowledge of the literary market inspired young writers such as Edmund Gosse to seek her advice (Peters 86). Toward the end of her life, Ingelow's American supporters petitioned the Queen to name Ingelow to succeed Tennyson (himself an admirer of Ingelow's early verse) as Poet Laureate. But after her death in 1897, Ingelow's literary reputation diminished and her writings gradually sank into oblivion. Despite sporadic attempts to focus scholarly attention upon Ingelow's life and work, the late 20th-century revival of interest in Victorian women writers has largely bypassed Ingelow, for whom there is still no scholarly biography, nor an adequate listing of her prolific writings.
Biographical research on Ingelow has been hindered both by a lack of primary sources, and by a failure to investigate those sources that do remain. Approximately 200 of Ingelow's letters survive in British and American research libraries, most dating from the 1860s and later; unfortunately, these include very few family letters which could offer useful insight into Ingelow's relationships and personal concerns. (1) And although Ingelow's correspondence with Ruskin has attracted some attention, the bulk of Ingelow's correspondence remains unpublished and unexamined. (2) Another important primary source, Ingelow's publishing history, has received even less attention than her letters. There is no complete bibliography of Ingelow's published work, and studies of Ingelow's printing and publishing history are almost nonexistent. (3) The lack of scholarship on this important aspect of Ingelow's life obscures the scope and impact of Ingelow's literary career, and perpetuates an image of her authorship first formed by Victorian reviewers who viewed Ingelow and her work as an embodiment of the feminine ideal. Nineteenth-century accounts of Ingelow's authorship often represent her as a writer to whom success came early and easily, or as a wealthy woman who wrote at her leisure, eschewing the struggle for fame in favor of the domestic concerns that in their view characterized her poetry and fiction. In keeping with these notions, the few substantive references to Ingelow's publishing history to be found in contemporary and even in recent biographical accounts downplay Ingelow's ambition and agency by focusing attention upon the encouragement and intervention of friends and family at various points in her writing life.
The two biographies of Ingelow--one of which was published only a few years after her death--fail to challenge Victorian representations of Ingelow's life, and writings, as easy, placid and conventional. The first biography, Recollections of Jean Ingelow and Her Early Friends (1901) remains the most detailed and useful contemporary account of Ingelow's life. Recollections of Jean Ingelow has recently been attributed to Ingelow's sister Eliza Straffen, the wife of Robert Straffen, Vicar of Evesham. (4) As Jennifer Wagner notes, Straffen's biography displays "a clear agenda: to prove Ingelow a model of Victorian propriety and decorum, and thus to distinguish her vigorously from the 'modern woman' by whom [she] is so evidently troubled" (239). For Straffen, Ingelow's life was "singularly retired and uneventful" (118), and she "never put literature for a moment before her duty as a woman in her own home" (125). Maureen Peters's slim 1972 biography, Jean Ingelow: Victorian Poetess, provides additional detail about Ingelow's family but offers much the same view of Ingelow as Straffen. Peters says surprisingly little about Ingelow's literary career, and ultimately relegates Ingelow, and her work, to the scrap heap of outmoded Victorian values: Ingelow "lived too long, until her work was out of fashion and her simple moral standards were scorned" (105).
There are, however, glimpses within these same materials of a different life story. Straffen recounts the story of Ingelow's mother discovering that her daughter had written poetry on the window shutters of her room, recounting that "After this unlucky day Jean could no longer hide her poems, and wrote on foolscap instead" (15-16). Although Straffen's presentation of this anecdote emphasizes Ingelow's reluctance to share her verses with her family, it also testifies to the strength of her impulse to write. And while Straffen avoids mentioning the Ingelow family finances, Peters introduces the possibility that Ingelow's family circumstances may have pushed her to write not only for pleasure but for a hoped-for profit that would "ease the family's financial burden" (40). Specifically, the business difficulties of Ingelow's father--a bankruptcy when Ingelow was 6, and a similar catastrophe when she was 25 (Peters 38) could have been the impetus for Ingelow, the oldest of eight surviving children, to seek ways to help keep the family afloat, and to tear the prospect of losing whatever financial security she had, a lesson that was further reinforced in 1868 by the scandalous bankruptcy of Henry Pye, the father of Ingelow's friend Charlotte Barnard (Peters 76-77). And both Straffen and Peters reveal that success did not come immediately to Ingelow, who struggled for over a decade to find her niche among various genres. Ingelow's first attempts at publishing her work--a book of poetry and a religious novel issued in 1850 and 1851, respectively--fell flat, as did her first collection of stories, Tales of Orris, in 1860. Ingelow's first commercial success occurred in 1863, when her second volume of poems met with fulsome praise and strong sales. But from then on, Ingelow strove to remain productive and profitable in the face of a changing marketplace. As her knowledge and experience grew, she attempted not only to look after her own interests but to assist other aspiring women writers to do the same. Unfortunately, Ingelow's success in the literary marketplace--hard won as it was--contributed to a critical backlash that slowly undermined her sales along with her literary reputation.
Although this essay can only begin to suggest the different picture that might emerge if Ingelow's life were indeed to be imagined "in her books," it can offer some starting places for further investigation of the relationship between Ingelow's private concerns and public life as revealed through her struggle to master the literary marketplace. Specifically, I will examine three important periods in Ingelow's publishing history: her early career, as viewed through her contributions to and editorship of the Youth's Magazine in the 1850's; her attempts to capitalize upon the success of her 1863 Poems through her negotiations with American publishers and the republication of her magazine fiction; and Ingelow's revealing responses to the loss of income from American publications in the 1880s.
Jean Ingelow and the Youth's Magazine
The surviving accounts of Ingelow's early publishing history frequently emphasize the role played by Ingelow's family and friends in fostering her career. The Ingelow children printed a family newspaper, St. Stephen's Herald, of which no copies survive (Peters 22; Straffen 50), and there are no known publications of any of Ingelow's writing prior to the 1850 collection, A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings, published when Ingelow was 30 years...
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