23/09/2026
Congratulations to Robinson Fellow Elizabeth (Lizzi) Rawlinson-Mills whose book "Poets, the Press and the South African War: Imperial Masculinities at the Fin-de-Siècle" has just been published.
Thousands of poems were published in British daily newspapers during the South African War. Serious poets and enthusiastic amateurs, serving soldiers and anonymous correspondents chose newspaper publication, self-consciously assuming a range of public roles and contributing to public debates. Many of these poems have been hidden away in archives ever since, and the networks of relationships between canonical names and anonymous and undiscovered poets have remained invisible. This book brings these works and relationships into the light.
Lizzi commented,
"This book is the result of 13 years of scholarship on poems published in newspapers over a three year period at the turn of the twentieth century. It might surprise you to know that there were poems in newspapers, but there certainly were in fact, most Victorians will have read many many more poems in that form than in the more high-status poetry volumes we are accustomed to thinking of as the natural home for poems. One strand of my argument, therefore, is that we are getting literary history wrong by limiting our scholarship to the “big name” poets (like Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Algernon Swinburn, Alfred Austin) whose work comes down to us in books and anthologies. The field of Victorian poetry is much noisier and more diverse than that”.
Read more about Lizzi’s book and research here:
https://www.robinson.cam.ac.uk/news/poets-press-and-south-african-war-imperial-masculinities-fin-de-siecle-elizabeth-rawlinson
Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge
