Reading the Victorian Souvenir: Sonnets and Photographs of the Crimean War

The prevalence and popularity of the sonnet--rule bound and freighted with historical and national associations--throughout the Victorian period, when many poets were exploring unrhymed and less structured forms, invites exploration as to why and how Victorian poets and readers would turn to an old form to represent and understand their self-consciously modern experience. Although the amatory sonnet sequences by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Meredith, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti are today perhaps the best known examples of Victorian sonnet writing, those famous works are in fact exceptions to the great number of sonnets published during the period, many of which were not published in sequences and which tended to focus on descriptions of landscape and especially scenes of travel; portraits of famous people, friends, and family; moral or political reflections on specific events or issues; and moments from everyday life. 1 Victorian poets and readers understood that these contemporary uses for the sonnet form were substantially different from the Renaissance amatory sequences addressed to an idealized beloved: