Parian ware — the unglazed white biscuit porcelain developed by Copeland in the 1840s, resembling Carrara marble — appears in Victorian poems as the democratisation of sculpture: Raphael and Shakespeare in every parlour; A poem about the Victorian household's aspirations might describe a Parian ware bust of Milton on the bookcase: "the same white brow that Carrara lent to dukes, here cooling on a clerk's shelf — ambition's affordable monument"; The name "Parian" — evoking the Greek island famous for its white marble — gives the material a classical respectability that its manufacturers deliberately cultivated; In a poem about art's reproducibility (anticipating Walter Benjamin), a Parian figure of a bathing Venus is "the original's argument that it needed no original — the copy complete in itself, the beauty not diminished by repetition"; Parian ware figures of famous poets — Tennyson, Burns, Byron — appear in poems about celebrity and the consuming of literary greatness: "he sat on a thousand bookshelves simultaneously — the poet as Parian, the face reproduced until it meant everything and nothing"; A poem about a Victorian parlour's aspirations might catalogue its Parian ware alongside its bound volumes and its framed engravings: the household's claim to culture, each object a small manifesto.