The Work and Play of Rhyme in Victorian Verse Cultures, 1850-1900 by Adam Martin Mazel a Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfi
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The Work and Play of Rhyme in Victorian Verse Cultures, 1850-1900 by Adam Martin Mazel A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2014 Doctoral Committee: Professor Yopie Prins, Chair Associate Professor Kali Israel Professor Marjorie Levinson Professor Adela Pinch Dedication To my Mom and Dad With Love ii Acknowledgments I am so grateful for Professor Yopie Prins, my dissertation chair, for helping me, for being patient with me, and for encouraging me throughout this project. The merits of my dissertation are largely due to her intellectual generosity. I am also particularly grateful for my wonderful dissertation committee: Professors Adela Pinch, Marjorie Levinson, and Kali Israel. They were always available when I needed support, and the generous time and energy they gave me fed the growth of this project and my growth as an intellectual. I also owe special thanks to Professor Kerry Larson, for helping the development of Chapter One, and Professor Sid Smith, as well as the Poetry and Poetics Workshop—Professor Gillian White and Professor Petra Kuppers and Julia Hansen and Aran Ruth—for helping the development of Chapter Four. To my writing group—the “A. B. C.’s of D.”: Ben Pollak and Carolyn Dekker—you are such a great team and great friends! I thank the members of my second writing group—Ben Graham, Tim Greene, and Sylvia Tita—as well as Paul Barron and Ray McDaniel of the Sweetland Writing Center, all of whom helped my writing considerably. To my friend Joe Chapman for talking with me about my dissertation on our twenty-one mile marathon training runs—you are a great and brilliant friend! Thank you to my friend Lisa Jong for helping me with Chapter Two and to Susie Shutts for responding to drafts of my writing. I thank the University of Michigan English Department and the Rackham Graduate School for generously funding my research and travel. I can only take credit for the flaws of this dissertation. Credit for the merits go entirely to the above. iii Table of Contents Dedication ....................................................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................................iii List of Figures.............................................................................................................................................. v Dissertation Abstract ................................................................................................................................. vi Introduction The Work and Play of Rhyme............................................................................................ 1 What Happened to Rhyme in 1869? ......................................................................................................... 7 Playing with Rhyme................................................................................................................................ 21 Chapter Summary: From Play to Work and Back Again ....................................................................... 28 Chapter 1 Round Games Swinburne and the Ends of Rhyme............................................................ 36 “Faustine”: “A Love-machine / With clockwork joints”........................................................................ 40 A Century of Roundels ........................................................................................................................... 49 Crimes of Rhyme .................................................................................................................................... 56 Art of Chance.......................................................................................................................................... 62 Chance and Intention .............................................................................................................................. 66 Chance and Attention.............................................................................................................................. 74 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 79 Chapter 2 “You, Guess” Christina Rossetti’s Guessing Games and the Resolutions of Rhyme ..... 83 Riddle Cultures, 1780-1900.................................................................................................................... 95 The Enigma of the Poetess.................................................................................................................... 100 The Riddle of Rossetti’s Lists of Similes ............................................................................................. 108 Game Over?: The Closure and Disclosure of Rossetti’s Guessing Games .......................................... 115 Chapter 3 Classifying Rhyme Cockney Rhyme and the Sound of Class, 1800-1900...................... 123 The Roots of Cockney Rhyme.............................................................................................................. 126 Print vs. Speech (Verse vs. Voice)........................................................................................................ 130 Cockney Rhyme and Standardizing English......................................................................................... 136 Imperfect Rhyme .................................................................................................................................. 145 Pronouncing Rhyme.............................................................................................................................. 152 Revising Cockney Rhymes................................................................................................................... 161 “Cockney rhyme. Cf. Keats and Mrs. Browning” ................................................................................ 165 Rhyme without the “Aitch” .................................................................................................................. 172 Speech Impediments: Rhyme and Disability........................................................................................ 180 Playing with Cockney Rhyme .............................................................................................................. 184 Chapter 4 The Age of Rhyme Cambridge Revisited: 1850-1900...................................................... 191 Calverley and Cambridge’s Rhyme Culture......................................................................................... 201 University Rhyme vs. Nursery Rhyme ................................................................................................. 210 University Rhyme as Nursery Rhyme .................................................................................................. 216 Nursery Rhyme Over University Rhyme.............................................................................................. 223 Outgrowing Rhyme............................................................................................................................... 226 The End of Rhyme................................................................................................................................ 235 Conclusion A Brief History of Rhyme................................................................................................... 239 Works Cited............................................................................................................................................. 259 iv List of Figures FIGURE 1: FRONTISPIECE TO A CHOICE COLLECTION OF RIDDLES, CHARADES, REBUSES, &C. (1792) ............................................................................................................................................. 104 FIGURE 2: FRONTISPIECE TO HOME AMUSEMENTS (1849; 2ND ED. 1859) ..................................... 105 v Dissertation 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