During the Victorian era, we find a kind of boom in literature with authors from Poe and Milton to the Brontë sisters and Oscar Wilde (and many more). What kind of process would a person go through to publish poems, novels, and the like? Did anything interesting occur at the time that made it particularly difficult or easy to become published?
Did anything interesting occur at the time that made it particularly difficult or easy to become published?
It was a time in between when the industrial revolution began and the invention of other forms of entertainment such as TV, Radio, and Film.
So now paper is much cheaper (made by hand until 1800), publishing in general is much cheaper. It's comparable to the rise of the film industry.
At this time most storytelling outlets relied on the writer more than today. Books, obviously, rely on the writer. For other forms, instead of having an actor carry a bad film you would have a play that might be staged by multiple groups of performers or at least by traveling performers who wouldn't 'sell' the tickets. You had to have a good story.
Here's a source on the role of technology: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/482597/history-of-publishing/28632/Modern-publishing-from-the-19th-century-to-the-present