In My Own Land’s Sins, the chronological order of poems suggests that poetical forms advanced through the efforts of a multitude of authors over long periods of time. The reader can glimpse at the state of English poetry at any given moment during the Victorian age. The poems included form a continuous narrative both about the advancement of English poetry and about the social history of Britain under Victoria. The selection of the poems was based on three criteria: their modernity; their preoccupation with the social circumstances of the era; and their usefulness in the classroom.

My Own Land’s Sins is slenderer than most anthologies of Victorian poetry because it attempts to show more with less. There is less text, but more poets (90) than in most anthologies. The poems, some of which have never before been anthologised, are more modern, more socially oriented, better suited as instruments in a cultural-studies analysis of the Victorian era, at graduate and undergraduate levels. They are also more varied thematically than ever before, which should allow for a more complete perspective and a more profitable array of interpretations.