The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession 9781107421042, 9781107039629

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THE FO R M AT I O N O F T HE V I C TO RI A N L I T E R ARY P RO F E SS I O N

Richard Salmon provides an original account of the formation of the literary profession during the late Romantic and early Victorian periods. Focusing on the representation of authors in narrative and iconographic texts, including novels, biographies, sketches, and portrait galleries, Salmon traces the emergence of authorship as a new form of professional identity from the 1820s to the 1850s. Many first generation Victorian writers, including Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Martineau, and Barrett Browning, contributed to contemporary debates on the ‘Dignity of Literature’, professional heroism, and the cultural visibility of the ‘man of letters’. This study combines a broad mapping of the early Victorian literary field with detailed readings of major texts. The book argues that the key model of professional development within this period is embodied in the narrative form of literary apprenticeship, which inspired such celebrated works as David Copperfield and Aurora Leigh, and that its formative process is the ‘disenchantment of the author’. r i c h a r d s a l m o n is a senior lecturer in the School of English at the University of Leeds, where he has taught Victorian and Romantic literature since 1996.

cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture

General editor Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge Editorial board Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck, University of London Kate Flint, Rutgers University Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley D. A. Miller, University of California, Berkeley J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine Daniel Pick, Birkbeck, University of London Mary Poovey, New York University Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia Nineteenth-century British literature and culture have been rich fields for interdisciplinary studies. Since the turn of the twentieth century, scholars and critics have tracked the intersections and tensions between Victorian literature and the visual arts, politics, social organization, economic life, technical innovations, scientific thought – in short, culture in its broadest sense. In recent years, theoretical challenges and historiographical shifts have unsettled the assumptions of previous scholarly synthesis and called into question the terms of older debates. Whereas the tendency in much past literary critical interpretation was to use the metaphor of culture as ‘background’, feminist, Foucauldian, and other analyses have employed more dynamic models that raise questions of power and of circulation. Such developments have reanimated the field. This series aims to accommodate and promote the most interesting work being undertaken on the frontiers of the field of nineteenth-century literary studies: work which intersects fruitfully with other fields of study such as history, or literary theory, or the history of science. Comparative as well as interdisciplinary approaches are welcomed. A complete list of titles published will be found at the end of the book.

THE FORMATION OF THE V I C TO RI A N L I TE R ARY PROFESSION RICHARD SALMON

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, S˜ao Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107039629  c Richard Salmon 2013

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Salmon, Richard, 1965– The formation of the Victorian literary profession / Richard Salmon. pages cm. – (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-03962-9 (hardback) 1. English literature – 19th century – History and criticism. 2. Authors in literature. 3. Literature and society – England – History – 19th century. 4. Authors, English – 19th century. 5. England – Intellectual life – 19th century. I. Title. pr461.s26 2013 2013005738 820.9 008 – dc23 isbn 978-1-107-03962-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Alison

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements 1

page ix xi 1

Introduction: Living authors

2 Thomas Carlyle and the luminous author

39

3 Thackeray and the novel of literary apprenticeship

67

4

Dickens and the profession of labour

102

5 Broken idols: The development of the working-class author

135

6 Moving statues: The iconography of the ‘printing woman’

174

Conclusion: The disenchantment of the author

210 221 259 274

Notes Bibliography Index

vii

Illustrations

1 Daniel Maclise, ‘Sir Walter Scott’, No. vi of ‘The Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, Fraser’s Magazine, Vol. 2 (10), C The British Library Board page 20 November 1830.  2 Daniel Maclise, ‘Edward Lytton Bulwer, ESQ’, No. xxvii of ‘The Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters, Fraser’s C The British Library Magazine, Vol. 6 (31), August 1832.  Board 21 3 ‘The Author of Waverley’, ‘Living Literary Characters’, New C The British Monthly Magazine, Vol. 31 (121), January 1831.  Library Board 23 4 ‘Edward Lytton Bulwer’ in The Authors of England: A Series of Medallion Portraits of Modern Literary Characters, Engraved from the Works of British Artists, by Achille Collas. With Illustrative Notices by Henry F. Chorley (London: Charles Tilt, 1838). Reproduced by permission of Leeds University Library 25 5 Kenny Meadows, ‘The Fashionable Authoress’ in Heads of the People: or, Portraits of the English [Vol. ii] (London: Robert Tyas, 1841). Reproduced by permission of Leeds University Library 29 6 Daniel Maclise, ‘Baron Von Goethe’, No. xxii of ‘The Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, Fraser’s Magazine, Vol. 5 (26), C The British Library Board March 1832.  48 7 Phiz, title page of Thomas Miller, Godfrey Malvern (Second edition, 1844). Author’s copy 150

ix

Acknowledgements

This book has taken shape over the course of more than a decade and I have incurred many debts along the way. I am grateful, firstly, to the School of English and the Faculty of Arts of the University of Leeds for awarding periods of study leave in 2004 and 2008, which allowed me to focus exclusively on this project. I would like to thank staff in the Special Collections of the Brotherton Library at Leeds and in the British Library (St Pancras and Boston Spa), where I have conducted much of the research. At Leeds I have benefited greatly from the experience of working with Victorianist and Romanticist colleagues, especially David Higgins, Gail Marshall, Francis O’Gorman, Julia Reid, Matt Rubery, Simon Swift, and John Whale. I have also been fortunate to work with many postgraduate students at Leeds whose ideas and enthusiasm have helped to shape this book; in particular, Alice Crossley, Alison Fisch-Katz, and the students who took my MA module, ‘Professions of Authorship in Victorian Literary Culture’, from 2001 to 2009. Elsewhere, I am grateful to those who allowed me to discuss research for this book at conferences and seminars, including Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi, Ralph Jessop, Sally Ledger, Rosemary Mitchell, Helen Small, and Marcus Waithe; and to Aruna Krishnamurphy and Tom Mole for enabling me to publish work-in-progress associated with the project. Isobel Armstrong has continued to be an encouraging ex-supervisor throughout this period, and I have also received generous support from John Barnard and Lyn Pykett. I am grateful for permission to include material that was previously published elsewhere. Parts of Chapters 2, 3, and 4 appeared in earlier versions in the Journal of Victorian Culture, Vol. 7 (1), Spring 2002; Studies in the Novel, Vol. 36 (1), 2004; and Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Vol. 29 (1), March 2007. A section of Chapter 5 was published in an earlier form in The Working-Class Intellectual in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Aruna Krishnamurthy (Ashgate, 2009), chapter 9. I would like to thank xi

xii

Acknowledgements

Linda Bree, Gillian Beer, and the two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press for helping me to refine the manuscript of the book in its final stages. Most of all, I am thankful for the support of my family: Alison, Tom, and Joe.

c h a p ter o n e

Introduction Living authors

At some point in the middle of the second decade of the nineteenth century authors began to live. The emergence of the ‘living author’ was not, as Michel Foucault famously described a cognate historical development, a ‘privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas’, but rather one of collective embodiment and group recognition.1 A plethora of volume and periodical publications dedicated to documenting the serial names and images of living or contemporary authors date from this period. As John Watkins and Fredric Shobal, the editors of A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain (1816) declare, one of the primary aims of such publications lay simply in enumerating the ‘present race of Authors and their works’ for the ‘intelligence’ of the reader.2 One practical function of the identification of ‘living authors’ was to affirm that these authors currently existed, and were thus open to channels of communication with the reading public to which the dead were plainly impervious. This is not to suggest that dead authors were no longer of interest to contemporary readers. Watkins and Shobal declare in their Preface an intention to publish a complementary ‘DICTIONARY OF DECEASED AUTHORS OF GREAT BRITAIN’ in the future.3 What is striking, though, is that the category of ‘deceased authors’ must be rigorously separated from that of the living, a practice which became commonplace in collective biographies of the early nineteenth century. Wherever possible, the living and the dead were forced to inhabit separate textual spheres, designed to elicit different, though equally compelling, readerly sympathies. While representations of deceased authors are typically framed as acts of memorialization or posthumous fame, A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain was intended not merely to compile information but also to display the industry of contemporary authors to the public, marking an awareness of professional identity and solidarity. The recognition of living authors as a distinct collective body was consolidated by some of the most prominent collective (or serial) biographies 1

2

The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession

of the following two decades. What is now the most familiar of these texts, William Hazlitt’s The Spirit of the Age (1825), was assembled from biographical sketches originally contributed to series on ‘Living Authors’ in The London Magazine (1820–1) and ‘The Spirits of the Age’ in The New Monthly Magazine (1824), and thus very much the product of a popular generic format within literary periodicals of the period. As its title indicates, The Spirit of the Age defines the genre of collective biography within temporal boundaries that enforce an exclusive concentration on contemporary figures. For Annette Wheeler Cafarelli, Hazlitt’s text provides a ‘composite historical portrait’ of the present within which the trope of biographical portraiture provides ‘a way of spatializing his critical investigations of the Zeitgeist’.4 Of course, Hazlitt’s critical and ironic treatment of the leading intellectual figures of his age makes his book far from an exercise in professional self-aggrandisement: if the format of collective biography may be described as ‘iconographic’, as Wheeler Cafarelli suggests, the tone of the individual sketches is often iconoclastic.5 Many of the same generic features can be found in William Maginn and Daniel Maclise’s ‘Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, published in Fraser’s Magazine from 1830 to 1838, a work of serial biography often noted for its vehement hostility to the progressive politics of Hazlitt and the periodicals to which he contributed. Recent critical discussion of Fraser’s ‘Gallery’ as a text which exhibits an emerging ‘Victorian’ consciousness of collective identity amongst professional writers during the 1830s has tended to erase its continuity with some of the practices of Hazlitt and other ‘Romantic’ biographical sketches.6 Most obviously, ‘The Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’ was conceived as a literary portrait gallery devoted predominantly to living authors and to a self-conscious expression of the transient historical conditions within which it was produced. Though Hazlitt himself is not mentioned by name, Maginn was clearly responsive to the serial biographies promoted by rival periodicals and gained much of his satirical impetus from this exchange. In this respect, Fraser’s ‘Gallery’ may be viewed as a Tory adaptation of a formula patented in Radical and Liberal magazines of the 1820s. On the other hand, Maginn presents his ‘Gallery’ as an ephemeral parody of, and tribute to, Edmund Lodge’s monumental twelve-volume historical work, Portraits of Illustrious Personages of Great Britain (1823–34). In its combination of verbal and visual media (biographical sketch plus portrait), Lodge’s publication provides a more exact generic template for Fraser’s ‘Gallery’ than The Spirit of the Age, and indeed for the multitude of biographical portrait galleries which followed. Yet whereas Lodge fashioned a ‘Gallery of Illustrious Dead’, posthumous

Introduction

3

in focus and restricted to a traditional hierarchy of biographical significance (the model of the aristocratic portrait gallery), Maginn presents an oxymoronic Gallery of the ‘illustrious obscure’, humorously deflating any pretension to monumental form.7 Often the subjects of Fraser’s ‘Gallery’ are selected precisely on the grounds of their supposed lack of lasting cultural significance, giving it some resemblance to a latter-day Dunciad: in particular, the number of magazine writers and editors featured in the series indicates a deliberate correspondence between its formal medium and thematic reflection on the transient condition of modern literary reputation.8 Like Hazlitt, though, Maginn implies that the very contemporaneity of the ‘Gallery’ gives it a representative status which may, paradoxically, appeal to posterity. In other examples from the 1830s and 1840s, the desire to represent contemporary or recent authors as a visible collective body took a more conventional iconographic form. Henry Fothergill Chorley’s 1838 collection, The Authors of England, combined Fraser’s professional demarcation of the ‘literary character’ with the reverential formality of Lodge’s biographical portraiture. Of the fourteen authors featured in this volume, only about half were living at the time of publication, but its focus is firmly on ‘contemporaries’ as against ‘predecessors’; Chorley planned to extend the series so as to ‘include the portraits of all our modern authors of celebrity’.9 Thus, the commemorative style of engraved portraits accompanying the biographical sketches – typically featuring the author’s bust in classical posture – does not distinguish between the likes of Sir Walter Scott or Lord Byron (deceased) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton or William Wordsworth (still living) on empirical grounds, but is rather a signifying code for the cultural respect afforded to modern authors in general. Contemporary authors are deemed worthy of what might be termed proleptic commemoration, an act constructing the aura of enduring fame which it appears simply to record. To later readers, Chorley’s collection may seem to possess a strangely hybrid character, mingling a majority of writers from the ‘Romantic’ period with a few (largely unfamiliar) early Victorian figures, but this, of course, is not likely to have been a contemporary response. Nevertheless, the early to mid-century endeavour to establish the category of ‘living authors’ was forced to confront the inherently unstable nature of its referent. Less than twenty years after the publication of The Spirit of the Age, Richard Hengist Horne (with substantial assistance from Elizabeth Barrett) published A New Spirit of the Age (1844), which set out to update Hazlitt’s collection on the grounds that ‘a new set of men, several of them animated by a new spirit, have obtained eminent positions in the public mind’.10 Conceived

4

The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession

as a necessary supplement to Hazlitt’s original text, A New Spirit of the Age begs the question as to what has changed during the relatively short intervening period: how does Horne account for the process of transition to this ‘new spirit’ of the age, which both departs from and yet is modelled on its predecessor? At no point in the two volumes of the collection is there a clear attempt to address this question. Andrew Sanders views the prominence of Charles Dickens – the subject of the opening essay whose portrait is reproduced in the frontispiece of the first volume – as evidence that the collection charts the emergence of a distinctively ‘post-Romantic’, Victorian generation, but there is little concrete indication as to how the ‘spirit’ of Dickens’s age differs from, say, that of Walter Scott.11 Both Hazlitt and Horne define the ‘spirit of the age’ in broadly reformist and progressive terms: just as the radical Dickens is judged by Horne to be ‘manifestly the product of his age . . . a genuine emanation from its aggregate and entire spirit’, so, for Hazlitt, the reactionary Scott ‘would fain put down the Spirit of the Age’.12 As, then, the ‘spirit’ of 1844 remains not dissimilar to that of 1824, the difference between the two publications arises implicitly from Horne’s urge to document the emergence of a new group of living authors: the supplementary text both validates and replenishes the perceived deficiency of its original source. In the Preface to the First Edition of 1844, Horne reveals his anxiety to avoid overlap not only with Hazlitt’s selection of biographical subjects but also Chorley’s much more recent volume. Whereas Chorley’s focus on the commemoration of established contemporary names gives, retrospectively, a slightly dated air to The Authors of England, Horne specifies that ‘our selection has not been made from those who are already “crowned”, and their claims settled, but almost entirely from those who are in progress and midway of fame’.13 It is the policy of choosing to represent emergent figures – authors in the process of formation – rather than those who are ‘already “crowned”’, which makes A New Spirit of the Age appear to later readers as a distinctively Victorian collection. It is important to recognize, however, that the impetus for this effect comes not so much from Horne’s recognition of an essentially new spirit of the age as from his desire to record the changing ranks of contemporary writers – to value their newness for its own sake. An obvious corollary of the supplementary logic of Horne’s text is that it leaves scope for future editions, each wishing to articulate a spirit even newer than the last. A similar logic is at play in Thomas Powell’s The Living Authors of England (1849), a volume which, despite its lack of visual illustration, was later published under the title Pictures of the Living Authors of Britain

Introduction

5

(1851). Powell introduces his up-to-the-minute literary portrait gallery by admitting some writers of the ‘last generation’, such as Wordsworth, on the grounds that although ‘somewhat “past the bourne” of contemporary criticism, yet the fact of their physical existence renders some account of them necessary in a book which professes to treat of the living authors of England and America’. Thus, between the current generation of the 1840s and the generation of two decades earlier lies an intermediate category of authors who are neither fully living nor entirely dead: ‘To a certain extent, they are already judged, and have received a posthumous fame which seldom belongs to writers who are still alive.’14 The ultimate extension of this increasingly refined attempt to capture the ‘living author’ can be seen in an extraordinary publishing phenomenon of the second half of the nineteenth century, the biographical dictionary Men of the Time, first published in 1852 and reissued in thirteen separate editions over the course of the next forty years. Variously described as a collection of Biographical Sketches of Eminent Living Characters and a Dictionary of Contemporaries, Men of the Time was clearly established on the generic and conceptual foundations of earlier works, but succeeded in achieving the truly encyclopaedic scale that previous writers had only projected. While not narrowly restricted to cataloguing contemporary authors, the dictionary sought to document what it called ‘the aristocracy of intellect’, a class of persons which it claimed was not adequately represented by more traditional social and professional registers, such as the peerage and army lists.15 The most essential attribute for inclusion in the dictionary, however, was the sheer contemporaneity of the living subject with each successive edition. New editions of Men of the Time were published in order to remove the names of the deceased, which were replaced by those which have ‘during the same period come prominently before the public’; in some editions a separate ‘Necrology’, or list of ‘eminent persons deceased’, was printed at the end of the volume as if to demarcate spatially the temporal distinction between contemporary recognition and posthumous fame.16 The taxonomic function of such monumental biographical projects reflects, however indirectly, an increasing professionalization of personal identity through the nineteenth century. In the specific sub-field of Literature one of the primary goals of early Victorian proponents of professional reform, such as Dickens, was simply to ‘register the names and works of all the authors in the British empire’, thereby establishing the basic identity and membership of the collective body whose professional ‘rights’ were to be defended.17 Byron had written in Don Juan (1819–23) of his protagonist’s experience of fashionable literary society: ‘At great assemblies

6

The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession

or in parties small,/He saw ten thousand living authors pass,/That being about their average numeral’.18 Yet the composition of this horde of ‘living authors’ was not easy to identify in a period when authorship was not fully recognized as a legitimate profession and the convention of anonymous publication prevailed throughout most of the periodical press. The national Census of 1841 grouped authors under the category of ‘Other Educated Persons’, of which only 167 out of 626 individuals declared their main occupation as writing. The 1861 Census was the first to recognize authorship as a distinct professional grouping, or rather cluster of groups that include editors, journalists, artists, actors, and musicians, amounting to some 1,673 individuals, and by the 1880s the number of self-declared authors had risen to 6,111. Only in 1911, though, did the official number of professional authors (13,786) come to exceed Byron’s estimate.19 Thus, during the period examined in this study – from the early 1820s to the late 1850s – the existence of what later came to be understood as the ‘literary profession’ cannot be taken for granted. The biographical sketch collection is just one of the cultural forms that were used during this early phase of professional development to validate a new kind of author. If the enumeration and cataloguing of contemporary writers forms one strategy for achieving professional recognition, another relies conversely on the capacity of authors to endure, and accrue value, beyond the transient present. Moreover, these seemingly opposing strategies were strikingly coextensive: during the very same period that authors were marshalled into the category of ‘living authors’, they were also (as noted above) increasingly ranked amongst the dead. Andrew Bennett has argued that a ‘culture of posterity’ defines Romanticism as a rhetorical intervention within the construction of literary tradition: whereas ‘neoclassicism may be said to involve the invention of the (English, literary) canon as a category of dead writers, Romanticism involves the imaginative insertion of the living writer into that canonical cadre’.20 What is significant, for Bennett, is not so much the fact that in popular cultural mythology Romanticism came to be represented as a cult of dead authors, as that the notion of ‘posterity’ was installed at the very foundation of authorial practice: ‘the judgement of future generations becomes the necessary condition of the act of writing itself’.21 The capacity to achieve posthumous recognition is thus commonly associated in Romantic discourse with the idea that an author’s enduring value, or true fame, transcends the immediate context of his/her reception, even to the point at which ‘fame’ and ‘reputation’ (or ‘celebrity’, a somewhat later nineteenth-century neologism) are deemed mutually exclusive

Introduction

7

states.22 William Hazlitt, whom Leo Braudy heralds as the ‘first great fame theorist of the modern age’, is again a seminal figure in the formulation of this cultural discourse.23 Though Hazlitt values the ‘contemporary’ as a site of historical struggle and temporal flux to which the leading ‘Spirits of the Age’ are bound in dialectical tension, he insists elsewhere on the importance of posterity as the perspective from which the achievement of biographical subjects can be fully judged. In his essay ‘On Different Sorts of Fame’ (1817) Hazlitt privileges posthumous fame on the basis of its greater capacity for ‘disinterested’ judgement. Although the principle underlying all love of fame is a desire for ‘sympathy with the feelings of others’, from which the subject expects to receive personal gratification, the approbation of posterity has the virtue of purging this desire of its vanity so that it becomes an ‘ambition to attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by the highest authority, that of time’.24 This ‘true love of fame’ renounces the ‘impatient’ or premature desire to experience fame through popularity, which serves only to ‘mimic the voice of fame, and to convert a prize-medal or a newspaper puff into a passport to immortality’.25 As his reference to the promotional mechanisms of the newspaper press indicates, however, Hazlitt fears that the aspiration for posthumous acclaim may be ‘superseded’ by the temporal horizons of modern print culture: ‘instead of waiting for the award of distant ages, the poet or prose-writer receives his final doom from the next number of the Edinburgh or Quarterly Review’.26 The material conditions of the periodical press are conducive not to a culture of posterity, or deferred gratification, but one characterized by an accelerating rhythm of demands and rewards. In ‘The Periodical Press’ (1823), an article first published in one of the aforementioned Reviews, he observes that ‘[l]iterary immortality is now let on short leases, and must be contented to succeed by rotation’.27 What is striking about Hazlitt’s theory of fame, then, is not so much the intrinsic value that it places on the concept of posterity as the underlying apprehension of cultural friction from which the need for posterity emerges. This analysis was to prove influential on later writers such as Thomas Carlyle, Bulwer-Lytton, and John Stuart Mill, who saw the ‘ephemeral’ nature of modern authorship as an obstacle to the elevation of the literary profession.28 While the Romantic ‘culture of posterity’ may appear under threat from this rival culture of journalism and celebrity, it is more accurate to view these two simultaneous developments as mutually constitutive.29 It was precisely because modern conditions of production appeared to challenge the value of literary fame that the appeal to posterity began to make sense as a strategy for demarcating professional achievement against the ephemeral activities

8

The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession

of amateur writers and literary hacks. Hazlitt’s association of posterity with disinterest, for example, can be linked to the development of nineteenthcentury professional discourse, in which, as both Claire Pettitt and Jennifer Ruth have shown, notions of deferred gratification and future-oriented value played a crucial role.30 The familiar idea that time is the test of true genius correlates, in ideological terms, to the extended development of professional authority over the course of a lifetime and to the posthumous value inscribed through legal copyright in the products of literary labour, notwithstanding the difference between popular cultural images of the genius and the professional. Coleridge’s figuration of Wordsworth’s poetic achievement as a ‘sacred Roll . . . placed . . . with gradual fame/Among the archives of mankind’ can be seen as one of many examples of the Romantic dichotomy between permanent and transient fame, but is also prescient of the rhetoric surrounding mid-century professional reform.31 In the context of this spatialized conceit of posterity, the word ‘gradual’ is used principally to signify the hierarchical ranking of poets after death, but also connotes the more familiar modern sense of incremental development over time. Towards the end of his life, as Catherine Seville has shown, Wordsworth played an important role in supporting Thomas Talfourd’s campaign for copyright reform, which culminated in the passage of the 1842 Copyright Act. Like Talfourd, Wordsworth argued for the extension of copyright term on the basis of protecting those authors whose literary achievement was of ‘slow growth’ and ‘enduring character’ rather than a matter of transient popularity.32

Consecration and disenchantment The historical period examined in this book has traditionally been viewed as one which marks the transition from Romantic to Victorian paradigms of literary culture. The decade from the mid 1820s through to the mid 1830s, in particular, has been seen as an indeterminate borderland between disciplinary frontiers, resisting incorporation into either of the adjacent territories. But whilst recent scholars, such as Richard Cronin, have expressed dissatisfaction over the ‘lumbering reifications’ of ‘Romanticism’ and ‘Victorianism’, they continue to use these terms, acknowledging their stubborn efficacy as cultural short-hand.33 The discourse of authorship commonly construed as ‘Romantic’ is that which is described by the historian of French Romanticism, Paul B´enichou, under the heading of ‘the consecration of the writer’. According to B´enichou, the years 1800 to 1820 (the period of the Counter-revolution in France) saw the emergence of the ‘idea

Introduction

9

of a spiritual ministry of the poet’ in reaction against the ‘materialism’ of eighteenth-century thought.34 This corresponds in chronology with the establishment of the broader, but related, idea of the ‘secular immortality of great spirits’, which Ben Knights suggests had also become ‘commonplace’ by the 1820s.35 The most celebrated exponents of these ideas were Goethe, in Germany, and Coleridge, in England: both the heroic example offered by the former and the conception of the ‘clerisy’ as a quasi-institutional intellectual elite outlined by the latter informed Carlyle’s later doctrine of the sacerdotal character of the ‘man of letters’, organized, by preference, within the collective body of a ‘Literary Guild’.36 By contrast, the representations of authorship most commonly associated with Victorian culture are those described by Cronin as ‘worldly’ in nature. What distinguishes early Victorian accounts of writing from their Romantic predecessors, he argues, is that ‘[w]riting for them does not have a secret, inexplicable origin enclosed in the mind of the poet, rather it originates from the world that we all share; a world of books and of book publishers, and a world in which writers, like the rest of us, need to eat and sleep, look after their children, and earn the money to do these things’.37 The term which I employ in this book to convey the worldliness of Victorian authorship is ‘disenchantment’, a word used by many of the nineteenth-century writers who I will be discussing, but also derived from the work of later critical theorists for whom it is synonymous with the experience of cultural modernity and the processes of rationalized and secularized thought.38 Pierre Bourdieu, for example, has discussed the professionalization of art and literature in the nineteenth century as a mechanism of ‘defence against the disenchantment produced by the progress of the division of labour’ [original emphasis]; professional recognition, he suggests, was conferred through various institutional and informal ‘agents of consecration’, such as academies, salons, and periodicals, which sought to dispel the ‘disenchanted’ image of authorship as a ‘job like any other’.39 It would be reductive, then, to conceive of the disenchantment of the author simply as a Victorian response to the Romantic discourse of consecration. In accordance with Cronin, this study questions the fixity of period boundaries between Romantic and Victorian models of authorship, even while it accepts the convenience of using such polarized categories. It is certainly true that during the early Victorian period a reaction against some of the most prominent literary figures and cultural attitudes of the first two decades of the century began to set in, albeit within the context of a still pervasive influence. The best known example of this is the anti-Byronic turn dating from the 1830s, which received its most

10

The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession

memorable expression in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–4). Just as Carlyle’s Teufelsdr¨ockh exhorts his reader to ‘Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe’, so Charles Kingsley later dismissed the English Romantic poets as an ‘immature’ version of German Romanticism, his primary culprit being Shelley.40 The language of organic development is often used by early Victorian writers to suggest a process of cultural maturation from the preceding generation to the present, ironically at the expense of writers more commonly associated with the ‘natural’ (Byron perhaps excepted). However, the relationship between the Romantic figure of creative genius and the worldly Victorian professional does not afford a neat historical antinomy; as Pettitt has suggested, both ‘stereotypes’ coexist with ‘irreconcilable tensions’ for much of the century.41 This is partly because the transition from ‘genius’ to ‘professional’ describes an underlying continuum and symbiosis of characteristics at the same time as exhibiting a marked contrast. Common to both formulations is the postulate of the ‘proprietary author’, to use Mark Rose’s term, which emerges from the convergence of legal and aesthetic discourse during the course of the eighteenth century.42 Just as much as the legal-juridical definitions of ‘literary property’ that paved the way for the concerted professionalization of the mid nineteenth century, aesthetic definitions of genius were predicated on the assumption of a primal ownership of the fruits of mental labour – the literary work as an ‘objectification of a personality’, not merely words on a page.43 As indicated above, recent scholarship has traced the development of professional ideology back into the Romantic period, especially as regards Wordsworth.44 Both the terms ‘genius’ and ‘professional’ were fluid and contestable throughout the period covered by this study: at times used as antonyms, elsewhere they become virtually synonymous. The voluminous writings of Isaac D’Israeli over the first three decades of the century offer an illuminating example of this conceptual indeterminacy. In some ways, D’Israeli’s tireless cataloguing of the misfortunes and injustices of authorship can be seen as a form of proto-professional advocacy on behalf of the collective literary class, yet he himself characterized the ‘profession’ of authorship as one of its ‘calamities’, contrary in spirit to ‘[t]he title of Author [which] still retains its seduction among our youth, and is consecrated by ages’. For D’Israeli, the term ‘Authors by Profession’ continues to evoke the mid-eighteenth-century world of ‘grub street’ (he attributes its first usage to Guthrie in 1762): ‘to become an “Author by Profession”, is to have no other means of subsistence than such as are extracted from the quill; and no one believes these to be so precarious as they really are, until disappointed, distressed, and thrown

Introduction

11

out of every pursuit which can maintain independence, the noblest mind is cast into the lot of a doomed labourer’. By this token, professional authorship equates to a loss of creative autonomy redolent of the ‘literary taskwork’ of a hired hack. As in the previous century, the ‘profession’ is ‘only a trade’, and by a seemingly inexorable process of reduction the ‘Author by Profession’ turns out to be no more than a ‘doomed labourer’.45 Defined against the eighteenth-century professional writer is the figure of the modern ‘man of genius’ whose supreme exponent, for D’Israeli, is Byron. D’Israeli’s extensively revised study, The Literary Character; or the History of Men of Genius, Drawn from their own feelings and Confessions (1795, 1818, 1840), was famously both inspired by and an inspiration for the Romantic accounts of literary genius which it sought to record.46 His primary interest in the ‘psychological character’ of the man of genius makes for an essentially static depiction of the social relationships by and against which he is defined [original emphasis].47 According to D’Israeli, genius is an innate faculty or ‘predisposition’ of the literary character, which inevitably places the subject in an antagonistic relation to society: ‘The modes of life of a man of genius, often tinctured by eccentricity and enthusiasm, maintain an eternal conflict with the monotonous and imitative habits of society, as society is carried on in a great metropolis, where men are necessarily alike, and where, in perpetual intercourse, they shape themselves to one another.’48 This account provides little narrative scope for the development or education of genius in contact with the given constraints of social environment. Individual genius appears to emerge fully formed as an abstract negation of the principle of collective aggregation. While the D’Israelian man of genius is far from indifferent to the external reception of his work, this is again measured within the temporal framework of posterity rather than by immediate acclaim. Like Hazlitt, D’Israeli privileges the deferred gratification of ‘posthumous fame’ over more ephemeral applause, though his concern extends not just to ‘fugitive’ forms of writing but also to the oral medium of ‘coterie-celebrity’. The man of genius who is ‘seduced’ by ‘mere fashionable society’ risks a kind of textual emasculation: ‘so many of our contemporaries, whose card-racks are crowded, have produced only flashy fragments’.49 Thus, whilst D’Israeli writes polemically on behalf of a persecuted literary class, the conception of authorship on which his illustrations of martyred genius rest is fundamentally asocial and solipsistic. By the late-1840s, ‘author[s] by profession’ had come to mean something altogether different – even the very opposite – for those who continued to share D’Israeli’s concern for their welfare. For Dickens, as is

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well known, professional authorship signified a liberating independence from booksellers and patrons, although it is far from clear that he successfully banished the spectre of the ‘doomed labourer’. While D’Israeli equated ‘profession’ with ‘trade’, and Hazlitt characterized ‘Professional Art’ as a ‘contradiction in terms’, Dickens and other writers of the 1840s and 1850s sought to define Literature as a profession precisely in terms of its relative distance and insulation from the market.50 G. H. Lewes declared confidently in a Fraser’s Magazine article, ‘The Condition of Authors in England, Germany, and France’ (1847), that ‘literature should be a profession, not a trade. It should be a profession, just lucrative enough to furnish a decent subsistence to its members, but in no way lucrative enough to tempt speculators.’51 It is important to note that Lewes does not dismiss the question of authors’ remuneration as beneath the dignity of the profession. Like Dickens, he accepts the legitimacy of the market principle as a mechanism for rewarding professional labour, subscribing to a broadly ‘progressivist narrative’ of the emancipation of authors from patronage rather than seeking to conceal their complicity with commerce.52 At the same time, for these writers, the prosaic routine of the professional author should not be viewed as reducible to monetary concerns or material selfinterest. Representative of this balanced approach are two articles written by John Chapman for The Westminster Review in 1852 on ‘The Commerce of Literature’ and ‘The Profession of Literature’, topics which prove both separable and interrelated.53 The latter is a review of The Autobiography of William Jerdan, published in the same year, which condemns both the representation of authors as ‘improvident’ figures who mistakenly believe ‘writing to be a matter of inspiration’ as outmoded and the absence of a ‘solitary elevating or ennobling aspiration welling up out of his long life of literary labour’. For Chapman, it seems, the Romantic stereotype of the man of genius is complicit with Jerdan’s ‘continuous wail about pay and poverty’, whereas it is the professional writer’s acceptance of ‘diligence and system’ that confirms his exalted self-respect.54 Writers of the mid century, in other words, began to fashion a relationship between profession and trade which bears a closer resemblance to modern sociological definitions of professional ideology. Throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, professionalizing groups sought to define their collective autonomy and expertise in relation to the broader sphere of the market economy. In Magali Sarfatti Larson’s account, the ideology of professionalism steers a median, but often precarious and ambivalent, path between the relatively closed structures of earlier craft guilds and the unrestricted mobility of modern capitalist exchange. While, on the

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one hand, professions extend the market principles of ‘rationalization and standardization’ to occupational identities, thus opening up previously guarded domains of knowledge, on the other hand, they seek to regulate the market according to their own interests and normative values. In attempting to secure a ‘monopoly of competence’ within their particular market fields, professions cohere around ideals of collective solidarity that paradoxically appear to ‘espouse anti-market principles’.55 In this sense, modern professional ideology participates simultaneously in the disenchantment of inherited forms of vocational prestige (the mysteries of the priesthood or medicine) and the consecration of a new form of cultural authority. To be sure, some sociologists and historians have questioned how far the literary profession fits this conceptual model. Authorship differs from the classic nineteenth-century middle-class professions – medicine and the law – by its lack of strong institutionalized regulation and corresponding openness to market competition; as Bourdieu observes, ‘The “profession” of writer or artist is one of the least professionalized there is, despite all the efforts of “writers’ associations”, “Pen Clubs”, etc.’56 The inability of the literary profession to restrict its membership according to any higher threshold than the ownership of pen and paper became a truism of mid-Victorian commentaries on the subject, expressed from both positive and negative perspectives. In addition, as Gaye Tuchman points out, the profession was unable to establish approved standards of workmanship or to negotiate minimum rates of pay.57 Proponents of professional reform during the 1840s and 1850s were certainly aware of, and sometimes anxious about, such issues, but do not appear to have felt fatally compromised. Arguably, it was not until the late nineteenth century that the inherent tensions between professionalism and the marketplace were fully exposed; prior to this period, as Harold Perkin notes, ‘professional and entrepreneurial ideals’ coexisted under the familiar mid-Victorian ideological umbrella of the ‘gospel of work’.58 The nature of literary labour, however, was a crucial question of contemporary debates on the meaning of professional authorship. What distinguished authors from more recognized professionals was, in large part, their occupation as producers of alienable commodities as well as the putative owners of intellectual capital. Authors do not merely offer to exchange services (of knowledge and expertise), but also, by the same token, the concrete fruits of their labour. Following Mary Poovey, recent critics have recognized that this anomaly places nineteenth-century authors in a richly ambiguous position, capable of being aligned either with the ‘non-alienated’ work of middle-class professionals, a form of mental labour deemed inseparable from the self, or with the alienated labour of

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The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession

the working classes, a base material practice to which it is always in danger of being reduced.59 It is in this context that the significance of copyright reform to early Victorian professional development can best be appreciated. According to most commentators, the modern legal conception of copyright that emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries established a definition of ‘literary property’ in which authorial labour is invested with a ‘personality’ from which it cannot be wholly detached. Though David Saunders points out that, in terms of positive law, copyright was routinely treated as a disposable commodity in contractual agreements between authors and publishers throughout the period, much of the discourse surrounding legal reform supports Rose’s view that copyright came to be seen by many as an expression of the author’s inalienable ‘proprietorship’ of his work.60 This was especially the case with the campaign for copyright extension led by Talfourd from 1837 to 1842, the result of which, Seville argues, ‘formed the basis of modern copyright law’. A key principle of the 1842 Copyright Act was the provision of a posthumous or ‘life-plus’ element of protection, which allowed authors, for the first time, to transmit ownership of copyright as a form of inherited personal property to their immediate descendants, albeit for a fixed term of seven years (considerably less than campaigners had sought).61 Copyright reform was, in this sense, a practical corollary of the ideological distinction between the transience of commercial success and the ‘permanent influence’ of great writers, which Wordsworth had famously expressed in his ‘Essay Supplementary to the Preface’ of 1815.62 Wordsworth’s Victorian contemporaries readily adopted his analogy between aesthetic and socio-economic definitions of what Pettitt terms ‘future value’.63 Harriet Martineau, Bulwer-Lytton, and Carlyle were also prominent supporters of the parliamentary campaign, while Dickens was a close associate of Talfourd’s who, as Bradley Deane notes, espoused a similarly ‘personalized’ model of authorship.64 Seville suggests that the protracted debate surrounding Talfourd’s Bill was ‘perhaps the inaugural dispute of the profession of authorship’ because of the way in which it united authors in unprecedented numbers, pitting their collective interests against those of other workers within the book trade.65 While the copyright reform movement of the mid nineteenth century can thus be seen to adopt a canonically ‘Romantic’ understanding of the value of creative labour, in other respects it remained visibly preoccupied with an earlier eighteenth-century literary past. Both Pettitt and Daniel Hack have shown the persistence of eighteenth-century

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paradigms of authorship in polemical Victorian interventions on copyright and professional reform: notable examples of this historical preoccupation include Carlyle’s lecture ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ (1840), BulwerLytton’s play Not So Bad as We Seem (1851), and Thackeray’s lecture series The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century (1852).66 Whereas the Romantic genealogy of professional authorship tends to foreground its heroic commitment to the autonomy of genius, this earlier eighteenthcentury genealogy generally reveals a more prosaic history of compromise with the material exigencies of the literary marketplace (the two narratives, of course, are frequently spliced together, with the former typically emerging out of the latter). Victorian commentators like to recall the Grub Street origins of ‘authors by profession’, but not solely with the intention of conjuring the ghosts of a degraded past in order to contrast the respectability and prestige of the professional future. Rather, the eighteenth-century man of letters is a polysemic figure, called to stand simultaneously for the degradation of authorial labour and its heroic consecration: Carlyle’s ‘Heroic Soul . . . with his copy-rights and copy-wrongs, in his squalid garret, in his rusty coat’, modelled on Samuel Johnson, being a particularly influential case in point.67 This ambivalent depiction of the eighteenth-century past suggests how early Victorian attitudes towards professional labour differ subtly from the Romantic ideology on which they draw. Whereas in literary criticism of the 1980s and 1990s (the work of Poovey and Clifford Siskin, most prominently) the professional development of nineteenth-century authorship was viewed primarily as an ideological ‘mystification’ of the material labour of writing – extending a critique of Romantic genius – it is increasingly recognized that many Victorian writers openly embraced the ‘truth’ of authorship’s function as a mode of productive labour, while, at the same time, campaigning to elevate its professional status. As Hack aptly observes, ‘it is striking how rarely Victorian writers reject authorship as a legitimate means of obtaining one’s livelihood’, even when (as in the case of Carlyle) seeking to moderate the influence of the literary market.68 In Victorian accounts of the literary profession the doctrine of ‘genius’ continued to exert significant pressure, but far from functioning as a uniform paradigm of ‘non-alienated labour’ by contrast with ‘other forms of labour in an industrial culture’,69 it was often directly assimilated into the broader sphere of social production. For example, in his volume of collective biography, The Literature of Labour: Illustrious Instances of the Education of Poetry in Poverty (1851), Edwin Paxton Hood called for the inclusion of literary and other forms of ‘genius’ within the category of the

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The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession

‘Producing Classes’, arguing that the term ‘Labour’ should be ‘widen[ed] and liberalise[d]’ to encompass professional workers, such as authors and surgeons. Hood provocatively cites Wordsworth, Scott, and Dickens as examples of ‘Productive Labourers’ to be ranked alongside ‘lucifer-match maker[s]’, ‘street sweeper[s]’, ‘carpenters’, and ‘masons’.70 Of course, this radically democratic interpretation of genius was not shared by all of Hood’s contemporaries, nor was it free of tension in those with whom it did find sympathy, but his underlying interrogation of the conventional boundaries between ‘mental labour’ and manual labour became widespread during the 1850s.71 By the mid nineteenth century, as Hack points out, the rhetoric of literary professionalism was more concerned not to appear aloof from the broader debate on the nature of work within modern society than with exposing its affinity to more humble forms of occupation.72 While this study broadly supports the direction of recent reassessments of earlier ‘materialist’ critiques of professional ideology, however, its aims are significantly different to both. In the following chapters, my discussion of early Victorian debates on literary genius, labour, and professionalism is rooted in an examination of the generic forms of contemporary print culture through which the figure of the modern professional author was first mediated. This generic study is essentially twofold in character, as indicated by the two remaining sections of the Introduction. Firstly, I consider the iconographic modes of representation that emerged during the early decades of the nineteenth century within such popular genres as the literary portrait gallery and collective biography. Secondly, I examine the narrative modes of representation that were developed during the same period within the genre of the novel of literary apprenticeship, more commonly labelled as the Bildungsroman.

Literary icons The image of authorship that circulated from early in the nineteenth century was the product of a convergence between the separate forms of biography and portraiture. The 1820s saw the burgeoning of a genre of ‘collective biography’ which Wheeler Cafarelli traces back to the influence of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1781), as distinct from Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). Whereas the latter, now more familiar, model of biography ‘encouraged intimacy and iconoclastic detail’ in its treatment of a conventionally posthumous subject, the former was ‘interpretive, subjective, fragmentary, allusive, iconographic’, and typically (though not exclusively) focussed on the living.73 While this distinction is schematic it usefully

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represents the analogy of collective biography to a kind of verbalized visual representation. The mixed medium of the biographical portrait suggests an attempt, emphasized strongly in the work of Hazlitt, to render the subject of biographical narrative as a spatial image or icon. At the same time, this period saw a rapid expansion in the availability of visual images within print media, more specifically the reproduction of engraved portraiture within periodical and book publications from the 1820s and 1830s.74 The ‘competition of images’ which Braudy describes as a condition of the early modern dissemination of individual fame can be applied literally to the proliferation of portraits of writers which came to adorn the frontispieces of volumes of poetry and biography and countless magazine serials during this period.75 In the most familiar example of Romantic celebrity culture, as documented by Tom Mole, a whole ‘secondary industry supplying pictures that circulated alongside Byron’s poems’ was constructed.76 The cultural visibility of authors within the public sphere was increasingly coded in visual, as well as verbal, media, a fact which no doubt intensified their apprehension of exposure to market conditions: as John Stuart Mill remarked in 1836, ‘[s]uccess, in so crowded a field, depends not upon what a person is, but upon what he seems’.77 The portrait of the living author was, potentially, an instrument of publicity and self-promotion, useful for enhancing professional recognition. The literary portrait gallery can be conceived as an example of what Peter Wagner has called an ‘iconotext’, an ‘artifact in which the verbal and the visual signs mingle to produce rhetoric that depends on the co-presence of words and images’.78 This composite form establishes an intra-textual dialogue between words and images, even when (as was quite often the case) portraiture was only a metaphorical dimension of the gallery and no actual illustrations were provided. The genre thus draws on the broader ekphrastic tradition of verbal commentary on visual images, whilst also inverting this convention; literary galleries comprise both ‘verbal representation of visual representation’79 and, by rendering authors as figures, icons of the word. In the ‘Preface’ to the first edition of Portraits of Illustrious Personages of Great Britain, Edmund Lodge explained the organizing principle of his work as a ‘combination of portraits and biography’ from which ‘we reap the utmost degree of utility and pleasure’, since each medium works to supplement the inherent deficiencies of the other. Verbal and visual modes are joined in an analogous attempt to satisfy the intellectual and emotional demands of the reader-viewer: ‘as in contemplating the portrait of an eminent person, we long to be instructed in his history; so, in considering his actions, we are anxious to behold his countenance’. By

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adding portraiture to biography, Lodge suggests, his gallery appeals to a pleasurable sense of curiosity; by adding biography to portraiture, it meets the demand for empirical knowledge. For this reason, Lodge defined his work against what he saw as ‘the errors and extravagances of the theory of physiognomy’: if it were possible to discern character purely from the interpretation of visual signs, biography as a narrative form would become redundant.80 In his sketch of Lodge for Fraser’s ‘Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, William Maginn cites the above passage as a precedent for, and justification of, his own contribution to the genre. Unlike Lodge’s Portraits, however, Fraser’s ‘Gallery’ sets out to make visible the ‘illustrious obscure’, a collective body of men and women who, in many cases, are not presented as objects of merited public recognition.81 Nigel Cross is one of a number of critics to have claimed that the series was the first to construct a broader professional recognition of the ‘literary character’ based on an inclusive survey of authors, amounting to a total of eighty one sketches over a period of eight years, not all of whom fit readily into the category of ‘men of genius’: ‘For the first time the reading public, or at least the 8,000 subscribers to Fraser’s . . . were presented with physical representations, as well as biographical notes of contemporary editors, antiquarians, lady novelists, critics, and others who made up the literary corps.’82 The idea that Fraser’s ‘Gallery’ exhibited an ideologically coherent image of the modern literary profession is harder to sustain. In the first place, Maginn’s often scathing satirical sketches are not always seamlessly matched with Maclise’s informal, but not unflattering, style of visual portraiture. Though Maginn claims to have been inspired by Lodge’s complementary ideal of biographical portraiture, in fact his collaboration with Maclise often creates an unsettling ambiguity of tone.83 Furthermore, while it is not difficult to discern Fraser’s politically motivated prejudice against the Whig ‘dandies’ of rival magazines, nor its patronizing pseudo-chivalric posture towards women writers, it is worth noting that Maginn’s irreverence extends to more conservative figures such as Scott and his own contributor Carlyle, whom he might be expected to dignify on ideological grounds.84 Even those authors who emerge relatively unscathed from Maginn’s biographical treatment are not approached in the panegyric mode that became customary for the genre. This deflationary, iconoclastic tone may reflect the transitional, post-Romantic moment of the 1830s, or, alternatively, a more ‘amateurish’ pre-modern understanding of the literary field.85 Either way, though, what distinguishes Fraser’s ‘Gallery’ from other examples of the genre is its playful self-consciousness as a mediation of cultural

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visibility. The sketch of Sir Walter Scott, published in November 1830, is probably the clearest illustration of this point. Maginn begins his text by locating Maclise’s accompanying portrait within the broader field of visual representations of its subject [Figure 1]: On the opposite page is old Sir Peveril! Many a time has he figured on canvas or paper, in stone, bronze, or plaster, in oil or water-colours, lithographed, copper-plated, mezzotinted, in all the variety of manner that the art of the sculptor, the founder, the modeller, the painter, the etcher, the engraver, the whole tribe of the imitators of the face divine, could display him. He has hung in the chamber of kings, and decorated the door of the ale-house – has graced the boudoir of beauty, and perambulated the streets borne upon the head of a swarthy Italian pedlar. He has been depicted in all moods and all postures; but we venture to say, that the Baronet, as he really looks, was never so exactly put before the public as we now see him.86

Rather than using the verbal sketch to comment directly on the naturalistic style of Maclise’s portrait, in a conventional ekphrastic manner, Maginn thus positions ‘Scott’ at the centre of a burgeoning industry of visual figuration, to which his own text, and that of Maclise, is only a belated reinforcement. The sheer cumulative density of the various media and sites of representation itemized here serves ironically to undermine the claim of unmediated authenticity with which the paragraph ends. While Maginn proceeds to celebrate Scott’s inventive genius by providing an equally exorbitant list of the fictional characters which have sprung ‘from the head depicted upon the opposite leaf’, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Scott’s authorship is in danger of being reduced to the level of a mass-produced visual icon. Maginn’s reference to ‘the unprecedented sale’ of Scott’s books, as well as to his financial ‘difficulties’, implicitly places his visual mediation within the context of commercial exchange. In this way, the sketch clearly anticipates Carlyle’s later dismissive judgement of Scott as a ‘noted man’ rather than a ‘great’ one – a figure whose significance lies in the very fact (and scale) of his cultural visibility.87 Elsewhere, Maginn’s awareness of the construction of an author’s public image through visual display is more directly iconoclastic. The sketch of Edward Bulwer-Lytton published in August 1832 marks an open attack on his subject’s supposed dandyism and narcissism. Maclise’s portrait depicts Bulwer in what Maginn terms ‘an appropriate position’, shaving himself in front of a full-length mirror (‘viewing his face, and reviewing his beard’), presumably before entering a public arena [Figure 2]. Maginn, however,

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The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession

Figure 1 Daniel Maclise, ‘Sir Walter Scott’, No. vi of ‘The Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, Fraser’s Magazine, Vol. 2 (10), November 1830.

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Figure 2 Daniel Maclise, ‘Edward Lytton Bulwer, ESQ’, No. xxvii of ‘The Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, Fraser’s Magazine, Vol. 6 (31), August 1832.

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The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession

interprets this private scene of self-exhibition as analogous to the public exposure of Bulwer’s authorial persona: With razor far keener than the edge of his Siamese Twins, is he delicately mowing his chin; and, clothed in a robe de nuit far more flowing than the numbers of his Milton, a Poem, looks with charmed eyes upon the scene before him, and exclaims, with all the rapture of a satisfied editor, ‘What a charming article! Worth any thing per sheet!’ We have taken him just on the eve of publication, revising his last proof the moment before coming out.88

Initially presenting Bulwer’s iconic figure in contrast to his (inferior) literary works, Maginn moves swiftly to conflate the two: in reviewing his authorial mirror-image, Bulwer is simultaneously editing his work prior to publication. The ironic sub-text of the sketch again points to the visual commodification of authorship and the economic value of literary celebrity, at the same time that it replicates these tendencies by providing a further layer of visual mediation. This immanent, self-reflexive critique of literary icons is in sharp contrast to the more dignified version of the literary portrait gallery published at the same period by The New Monthly Magazine, a journal with which Bulwer himself was associated. Where Fraser’s ‘Gallery’ exhibits the contemporary arena of professional authorship as an intimate world of rival commercial and political interests fuelling scurrilous personal criticism, The New Monthly’s short-lived series ‘Living Literary Characters’ (1831–2) takes a more distanced, respectful approach to the subject. As critics have noted, the ideological opposition between the two galleries is embodied in their starkly different visual idioms.89 Unlike Maclise’s full-length portraits of authors in relaxed, naturalistic postures, The New Monthly illustrated its biographical sketches with a uniform code of halflength classical busts. This formal style of portraiture evidently attempts to monumentalize its subjects, possibly in direct response to Fraser’s irreverence. Although the title of the series indicates a focus on contemporary writers, its visual rhetoric strikes a commemorative appeal to posterity, conveying the impression that figures such as Scott will live, not that they are ephemeral representatives of the present [Figure 3]. In the case of BulwerLytton, The New Monthly offers an equally strident panegyric alternative to Maginn’s satire, claiming of ‘this extraordinary writer’: ‘His appearance is distinguished, his features chiselled and regular, and the whole expression of his face highly intellectual as well as handsome.’90 Both of these literary galleries, then, can be seen to participate in the ‘competition of images’ surrounding the cultural construction of professional authorship during

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Figure 3 ‘The Author of Waverley’, ‘Living Literary Characters’, New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 31 (121), January 1831.

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The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession

the first half of the century; only in Fraser’s case the reader is ironically alerted to the fact. This competition extended to many other literary portrait galleries (and galleries of other celebrated persons) which appeared during the 1830s and 1840s, and beyond. Though highly distinctive in character, Fraser’s ‘Gallery’ was far from unique or entirely original in its generic format, as I have already suggested. The genre grew to encompass both ‘high’ and ‘low’ variants, as well as spanning historical and contemporary subjects, each of which encoded in iconotextual form broader perspectives on the contested formation of professional authorship and literary celebrity. Chorley’s 1838 volume The Authors of England, for example, adopts a commemorative strategy similar to The New Monthly Magazine’s, and, given the technical quality as well as the classical style of Achille Collas’s engraved portraits, was presumably aimed at the luxury end of the print market [Figure 4]. In rhetorical terms The Authors of England comes closer than most other literary galleries of the period to offering a quasi-religious consecration of the modern author as cultural icon; not coincidentally, Chorley used several of his biographical sketches (including one on Bulwer) to express support for the elevation of professional status, specifically including Talfourd’s campaign for copyright reform.91 At the other extreme, portrait galleries featuring authors amongst other categories of fame were considered suitable for popular consumption, far beyond the socially exclusive sphere of Lodge’s original template. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge issued The Gallery of Portraits; with Memoirs (1833–6) in serial form for a working-class readership, reflecting its publisher, Charles Knight’s, belief in the educational value of making printed pictures widely accessible.92 The proliferation of such competing icons, however, could only intensify the sense of transience which was felt even in those galleries which aspired to become permanent records. Chorley, for instance, remarks of Byron’s waning reputation that ‘[i]conoclasm must always succeed to idol-worship’, and hints at a similar fate for Wordsworth, a subject of ‘idol-worship, extreme and trenching upon superstition’.93 There remains an anxiety that the icons selected for inclusion in portrait galleries may be subject to future erasure, or that (perhaps for this very reason) the reverence with which they are treated is misplaced. Through its circulation of visual signs the format of the literary gallery enables a ceaseless dialectic of idolatry and iconoclasm, of consecration and disenchantment. Thomas Carlyle was a writer acutely conscious of the difficulties of discriminating between true and false objects of reverence within the increasingly crowded market for literary icons. As I argue in Chapter 2,

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Figure 4 ‘Edward Lytton Bulwer’ in The Authors of England: A Series of Medallion Portraits of Modern Literary Characters, Engraved from the Works of British Artists, by Achille Collas. With Illustrative Notices by Henry F. Chorley (London: Charles Tilt, 1838).

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Carlyle was not only an influential exponent of the doctrine of ‘heroworship’ but also an iconoclastic cultural critic, whose writings intensely negotiate the relationship between these conflicting impulses. What is less commonly known is Carlyle’s influential involvement in the genre of the literary portrait gallery, and its significance to the development of his own thought. Carlyle was one of only three original verbal contributors to Fraser’s ‘Gallery’, writing a sketch of Goethe for March 1832, as well as featuring as one of Maginn’s subjects in the following year.94 Written in a radically different style from the rest of the ‘Gallery’, Carlyle’s anomalous contribution is an early example of his conception of the visual nature of hero worship and its foundation within a secularized practice of idolatry. By the 1840s Carlylean hero-worship had come to inform the intellectual framing of a number of portrait galleries, just as Carlyle himself was increasingly exhibited in such texts. George Gilfillan, for example, advertised his Gallery of Literary Portraits (1845) as the work of an enthusiastic ‘Hero Worshipper’ and disciple of Carlyle, although his discernible embarrassment over the questionable masculinity of this stance runs counter to Carlyle’s intended effect. Conceived as a ‘Gallery of Contemporary Genius’, the self-consciously ‘panegyric’ style of Gilfillan’s collection, which incorporates Carlyle as both mentor and subject, definitively rejects the satirical mode of earlier corresponding series.95 Another Scotsman, James Grant, went even further by figuring Carlyle as an exemplar of the struggles of the heroic man of letters, derived from first-hand acquaintance with the recent lecture series On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, within his own work of collective biography, Portraits of Public Characters (1841). Grant’s account of Carlyle in a chapter on ‘Distinguished Literary Men’ is notable less for biographical accuracy than its attention to his subject’s public persona, constructed largely through lecture performance. The very fact that authors are included within Grant’s definition of ‘public characters’ is telling, but equally his assertion of Carlyle’s ‘decided aversion to appearing in public’ hints at an ambivalence towards this position.96 Carlyle is presented by Grant as a reluctant literary icon, a public character who resists publicity, but in the process claims a particular kind of professional authority. Contrary to Lodge, Carlyle’s conception of the printed portrait gallery was distinctly physiognomic. Not only did Carlyle’s account of heroworship invest symbolic meaning in visual form, rather than viewing it as supplementary to the written text, but it gave credence to the value of portraiture as a direct heuristic aid to the biographer.97 Not surprisingly, perhaps, biographical sketches of Carlyle by the likes of Grant and

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Gilfillan often dwell on the physiognomic details of his ‘personal appearance’.98 There was, in fact, an entire genre of physiognomic sketch writing that developed independently of Carlyle during the 1830s and 1840s, as Martina Lauster has shown. Most commonly associated with the comic style of Punch in Britain, the physiognomic sketch collection warrants brief consideration in this context for its depiction of stereotypical literary figures of the early Victorian period: generic portraits of the modern author that serve an underlying physiological purpose as objects of social satire.99 The foremost example of this genre is the collection Heads of the People, edited by Douglas Jerrold and illustrated by Kenny Meadows, which was originally serialized over twenty-six parts in 1838–9 and reissued in two volumes in 1840–1. As Lauster points out, the title of this publication has a dual reference, ‘not only to the paradigm of social physiognomy, but also to the standard format of the work’s graphic sketches’.100 Alongside such characteristic national types as ‘The Factory-Child’, ‘The Family Governess’, and ‘The Capitalist’, Meadows sketched two specifically literary physiognomies for Heads of the People: ‘The “Lion” of a Party’, accompanying a fictional sketch by Jerrold, and ‘The Fashionable Authoress’, printed alongside a similar piece by William Thackeray.101 Both of these images reflect, in iconoclastic terms, on the ephemeral condition of modern authorship. The figure of the literary ‘lion’, drawn by Meadows as a flagrantly narcissistic and prematurely ageing male dandy, emerged during the 1830s as a symptomatic expression of the celebrity culture which had produced and enveloped popular authors such as Byron.102 Addressing this figure, Jerrold frames his narrative of the ‘growth and death’ of a fictive writer, John Nokes, retrospectively, insinuating that the existence of the ‘lion’ is fleeting to the extent of being always already in the past: ‘They are whelped every season; and, frail and evanescent as buttercups, they every season die.’103 In a review-essay for the London and Westminster Review, published under the heading ‘Literary Lionism’ in April 1839, Harriet Martineau was similarly struck by the transient nature of literary reputation inscribed in Meadows’s image: ‘As he stands with eye-glass self-supported, hair sentimentally arranged, and chin and right hand in an attitude of asseveration, he is evidently the person whose greatness must be all spent in a single season.’104 For both writers, the cultural practice of lionism signals the fungible status of modern authors, each successive ‘lion’ replacing the temporary renown of his predecessor. The name of Jerrold’s fictive writer, a generic signifier for ‘any individual person’ derived from contemporary legal practice, mockingly suggests the serial anonymity of literary celebrities: while aspiring to

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‘greatness’ John Nokes is literally anybody and nobody.105 In this respect, the physiognomic portrait of the ‘lion’ reveals the negative side of the attention to living authors, a figural equivalent to the ephemeral print medium of journalism. Martineau, an active proponent of copyright reform who in 1836 had organized a petition to the US Houses of Congress on behalf of the ‘Living Authors of England’, was fiercely critical of the culture of literary lionism, which she saw as undermining the dedication of authors to their professional vocation.106 Her review-essay counters the modern fashionable author lampooned by Jerrold and Meadows with the Emersonian ideal of the life of the scholar, which appeals to the enduring legacy of posthumous fame rather than satisfying an immediate ‘desire of applause’.107 Such was the depth of Martineau’s personal feeling on this subject that she chose to reprint the text of ‘Literary Lionism’ in its entirety in her Autobiography, compiled some fifteen years later, when recounting her early professional life in London and its ‘accompanying siege of lion-hunting strangers’.108 The gendered dynamic of literary lionism imagined by most contemporary commentators divided male ‘lions’ from female acolytes, a scenario which is clearly invoked in Martineau’s commentary on Meadows’ portrait.109 Yet her own case demonstrates that women writers of the period were also potentially subject to lionism, despite being excluded from the role of masculine display with which the generic figure of the ‘lion’ was commonly associated. Meadows’ portrait of ‘The Fashionable Authoress’ [Figure 5], and Thackeray’s corresponding sketch, would seem to represent a more conventional female counterpart to the dandified figure of the literary lion. Far from providing a schematic antitype to the Lion, the Authoress exhibits many of the same personality flaws, and exposes similar concerns about the effects of rapid professional development. For Thackeray, the figure of Lady Fanny Flummery embodies the same commercial culture of puffery and self-advertisement, whilst also fulfilling a misogynist stereotype of exorbitant ‘literary fecundity’. The Authoress exercises the ‘readiest of ready pen[s]’, a ‘Pegasus’ that ‘gallops over hotpressed satin so as to distance all gentleman riders’, implicitly excluding her from the disciplined body of professional authors envisaged by Lewes as a ‘Macedonian phalanx’.110 Although gender is evidently the primary determining factor in Thackeray’s denigration of the Authoress, her lack of professional diligence also derives from the ephemeral, fashionable status which she shares with ‘The “Lion” of a Party’. When Thackeray ironically exalts the Authoress as proof that for authorship ‘[n]o apprenticeship is required’, the supposed benefit to literature from being an open profession is clearly thrown into question.111 Indeed, even Thackeray, a writer notoriously sceptical about

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Figure 5 Kenny Meadows, ‘The Fashionable Authoress’ in Heads of the People: or, Portraits of the English [Vol. ii] (London: Robert Tyas, 1841).

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The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession

the contemporary movement for professional reform, believed that some form of literary ‘apprenticeship’ was necessary if authors were to achieve a status beyond that of transient public acclaim.

Literary apprentices The popular dissemination of printed images of authors was an important step in the development of a cultural iconography of authorship, which led to increasing professional recognition over the first half of the nineteenth century; but it was not in itself sufficient to secure the cultural authority desired by many writers of the time. Professionalization was not only a matter of visual representation within the public sphere, but also required a change of consciousness, of internal ‘self-definition’, amongst authors, which could be mediated as a higher level of professional authority.112 Narrative forms, such as biography and autobiography, were best-suited to inculcate and exhibit this process of authorial self-reflection, particularly the developmental narrative that came to be associated with the novelistic genre of the Bildungsroman. Clifford Siskin has been particularly influential in demonstrating the ‘historicity of development’ as a rhetorical strategy that effectively redefined the ‘self’ of the creative writer in narrative terms as a ‘mind that grows’. Such now familiar, commonsensical notions as the writer’s ‘creative development’ or ‘intellectual growth’ are, for Siskin, determinate historical products of a ‘Romantic discourse’ that emerged from the late eighteenth century – a discourse that produced, above all, the assumption of a ‘deep self’ unfolding organically through time.113 Friedrich Kittler shares a similar understanding of the ‘discourse network’ of Romanticism and the narrative function of its ‘key word’ Bildung: the ‘biographicalorganic continuity of the educated individual’ reflects the certification of the ‘Author’ as the transcendental signified of writing, binding texts to their supposed primal origin.114 In his later work, Siskin directly associates this aesthetic discourse of ‘development’ with the emergence of strategies of professional self-representation during the Romantic period. The historical construction of the ‘artist as hero’ is also the ‘historical moment of professional behaviour in Britain’: a prime example of this nexus being Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805), a narrative of self-revision and creative maturation in which the poet redefines the nature of literary ‘work’ as an amalgamation of, or oscillation between, labour and leisure (the georgic and pastoral modes).115 As a record of Wordsworth’s poetic apprenticeship, which dramatizes what Mary Jean Corbett describes as his accommodation to the ‘work-discipline’ that ‘writing demands’, The Prelude prefigures

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many of the narrative tropes that characterize the early Victorian literary Bildungsroman, even though it was not a direct source for these novels as its famously deferred publication indicates.116 These recurrent motifs refract the broader ideological struggle for professional authority which is encoded in the narrative form of minds that grow. Indeed, it can be argued that such fictional representations of literary apprenticeship performed a crucial role in consolidating the professional identity of mid-nineteenthcentury writers in the absence of institutionalized entry requirements for the profession. A more immediate influence on the developmental discourse of Victorian literary professionalism than The Prelude was Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship [Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre], originally published in 1794 and translated into English by Carlyle in 1824. As Rosemary Ashton points out, a whole generation of Victorian intellectuals, including BulwerLytton, Benjamin Disraeli, J. A. Froude, Lewes, and later George Eliot, were profoundly absorbed by Wilhelm Meister, whether in its original form or through Carlyle’s translation, and numerous ‘novels of “apprenticeship”’ were written in more or less explicit imitation of Goethe’s model from the 1830s to the 1850s (including, to some extent, Sartor Resartus).117 As in the development of the literary portrait gallery, then, Carlyle played a pivotal role in interpreting and disseminating a ‘Romantic’ genre for a later Victorian audience. Looking back from the 1890s,Wilhelm Dilthey, one of the first critics to define the Bildungsroman as a distinct novelistic genre, was convinced that ‘Carlyle’s translation of Wilhelm Meister, his Essays, but especially this novel [Sartor Resartus], were effective in transplanting the German Bildungsroman into English soil’.118 What is less commonly recognized, however, is the extent to which the advocacy of Goethe by prominent British authors during the 1830s and 1840s was linked to their simultaneous advocacy of professional reform. This was true not only of Carlyle himself but also of Bulwer and Lewes, both active supporters of the new literary professionalism and disciples of Goethe: Bulwer’s Ernest Maltravers (1837) and Lewes’s Ranthorpe (1847) are just two examples of a type of apprenticeship novel which combined explicit recourse to the Goethean paradigm of aesthetic education with polemical engagement in literary debates of the period. One explanation for this link is that the Goethe of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship was perceived by Carlyle and others as having successfully transcended the immature ‘Werterism’ of his earlier writings, moving beyond a poetics of sensibility and self-expression to a reflective wisdom. In Sartor Resartus Carlyle famously fictionalized this narrative of professional

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development based on an interpretation of the trajectory of Goethe’s own life, re-enacting the ‘Sorrows of Teufelsdr¨ockh’ and the completion of his hero’s apprenticeship in a commitment to practical vocation.119 Carlyle strenuously attempts to dissociate Goethe from what would now be seen as a Romantic model of genius, positioning him instead as a new type of self-disciplined author, capable of reaching intellectual maturity through organic growth: a ‘Romantic professional’ in the broader sense of Siskin’s usage. The figure of Goethe thus serves a particularly useful function for Victorian writers in bridging ideas of genius and professionalism, the former being sublated by the latter. From a Carlylean perspective Wilhelm Meister can itself be read as an illustration of this model of professional development. This is not to suggest that the novel leads to a conscious assumption of professional identity on the part of its protagonist. Rather, Wilhelm Meister represents the paradigmatic narrative of vocational choice filtered through the disenchantment of youthful illusions, a process which remains incomplete and even potentially unrealizable at the end of the novel. Like many of his English successors, Wilhelm is ‘formed’ partly through an indispensably negative realization that the external world does not conform to his illusory preconceptions, as seen, for example, in his early experience of the ‘enchantment’ of the puppet theatre.120 At the same time, Goethe presents in the hieratic ‘Society of the Tower’ a model of collective homosocial identity which has the potential to mould Wilhelm’s disillusioned consciousness to more constructive ends. Wilhelm’s pursuit of individual self-cultivation culminates, however obscurely, in his accession to a quasi-professional organization: ‘a corporate trade whose business was the arts’.121 The seemingly anachronistic framework of the Society, resembling that of a medieval guild, highlights the formal narrative structure of the novel – the hero’s passage from apprentice to master – and is often read as a mechanism for tempering self-cultivation with a recognition of the value of ‘social discipline’ characteristic of the classical German Bildungsroman.122 For some of Goethe’s British followers, though, the Society of the Tower may have carried more specific institutional connotations: it calls to mind the ideal of a ‘Literary Guild’ or ‘Union’ of professional authors espoused by writers such as Carlyle, Bulwer, and Mill in the decades following Carlyle’s translation.123 At the climactic moment of Goethe’s narrative of self-formation, Wilhelm is handed a ‘Roll of Apprenticeship’ from the Society, signifying his successful attainment of maturity, which is likened to a ‘figure’ of his past life up to the present time. The episode is suggestive of a link between the iconic (spatial) and narrative (temporal) strands of professional

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discourse which are explored in this study. Wilhelm’s scroll is characterized (in Carlyle’s translation) as ‘a portrait, another self’, both in the figural sense of providing a representational image of the subject and in the developmental sense of demarcating an earlier stage of his biography.124 Such a link is, in fact, inscribed in the etymology of the German word Bildung, which, as several commentators note, combines the root word Bild, meaning ‘image’ or ‘copy’, with the idea of ‘formation’ or ‘culture’. Marc Redfield deduces from this that the conceptual basis of the Bildungsroman generates ‘an interplay of representation (Bild) and formation (Bildung), and thus the whisper of a profound homology between pedagogy and aesthetics, the education of a subject and the figuration of a text’.125 Similarly, I argue that the literary Bildungsroman (or novel of apprenticeship) performs the composite ideological function of reproducing the image formation of the professional author by mobilizing the iconic figures of literary portraiture within the narrative framework of developmental subjectivity. To employ the terms Bildung and Bildungsroman in this context seems appropriate, then, even though most of the writers discussed in the following chapters would not have been familiar with them. While it is true that the word Bildungsroman was not commonly used to identify a distinct category of novelistic form in English prior to the end of the nineteenth century, neither is it simply anachronistic to the earlier period: recent studies of German literature attribute the coinage to Karl von Morgenstern, writing in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, rather than to the later Dilthey, as previously thought.126 Moreover, given that early Victorian novels of apprenticeship borrowed so transparently from the model of Wilhelm Meister – a novel retrospectively viewed by Dilthey as the prototypical German Bildungsroman – the term aptly preserves a chain of cultural influence that was widely acknowledged at the time. Carlyle, for instance, described novels written after the pattern of Wilhelm Meister as ‘Art-novels’, an obvious translation of the German term K¨unstlerroman, and Henry Chorley used this expression in its original form when discussing his own fiction of the 1830s, novels such as Conti the Discarded (1835) and The Lion: A Tale of the Coteries (1839).127 The Bildungsroman has long been viewed as a genre defined by its relationship to time. Mikhail Bakhtin described its ‘assimilation of real historical time’ as a new way of apprehending the formation of human subjects in the context of their external environments, and thereby expressing a form of temporal experience which has, more recently, been associated with ‘modernity’.128 However, the temporality of the Bildungsroman may also be associated, more specifically, with the developmental self which emerges in

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accounts of the professional writer’s literary apprenticeship. Braudy argues that the modern concept of the literary ‘career’ dates from the early nineteenth century, when ‘an artist’s life was beginning . . . to be considered as a developing organic unity, akin to personal character’.129 Novels of apprenticeship modelled on the archetype of Wilhelm Meister tend to naturalize this assumption of unity within change, even when, as is often the case, their narratives speak of discontinuity and multiple selves. At the same time, the Bildungsroman does not typically seek to comprehend the personality of the artist-hero in its totality, as in a conventional biographical narrative, but rather limits itself to the transient period or developmental stage implied by the condition of apprenticeship. Often conceived as a novel of ‘youth’, the Bildungsroman is, in Randolph Shaffner’s words, a ‘sort of pre-novel or preamble’, which gestures towards a future moment of self-realization which it cannot, by definition, adequately represent.130 In this respect, the genre proved especially suitable for representing the vocational dilemmas incidental to the formation of a professional self. According to Hans-Georg Gadamer, Goethe’s contemporary, Hegel, considered the ‘choice of profession’ and development of a ‘working consciousness’ as essential elements of ‘practical Bildung’: ‘For every profession has something about it of fate, of external necessity; it demands that one give oneself to tasks that one would not seek out as a private aim.’131 By following a career, the professional individual voluntarily subjects his/her course of development to conditions which limit subjective freedom. In his Aesthetics (based on lectures written between 1818 and 1829), however, Hegel was seemingly more sceptical than Goethe about the successful integration of personal aspirations and socio-professional conditions: he famously remarked on the propensity of modern novels to dramatize a ‘conflict between the poetry of the heart and the opposing prose of circumstances’.132 This statement is often used specifically to characterize the Bildungsroman as a novel of disillusionment or disenchantment – a ‘prosaic’ (realistic) genre in which the ‘poetic’ (romantic) ideals of the protagonist are habitually dispelled.133 Thus, while Victorian novels of literary apprenticeship may, in some instances, seek to chart the positive construction of a coherent professional identity, there is no guarantee of success in this endeavour; following Hegel, the primary characteristic of the genre would seem to be its exhibition of a formative struggle. In Britain the mediation of Goethe’s influence by Carlyle led to a particularly acute emphasis on the requirements of ‘practical Bildung’, as was first shown in Susanne Howe’s pioneering study, Wilhelm Meister and his English Kinsmen (1930). In the early apprentice novels of Bulwer,

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Disraeli, and Lewes the characteristic problem of reconciling thought and action, subjective desires and objective material conditions, is resolved in a Carlylean direction by asserting (if not always demonstrating) the value of socially-beneficial ‘work’.134 Such novels present a fusion of the ideals of Goethe and Carlyle, for which Sartor Resartus and ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ provide the most obvious templates. The first of these texts has been described as both a ‘handbook of the Victorian Bildungsroman’ and a ‘central touchstone for understanding the place of the author in Victorian culture’, while the latter has recently been judged the ‘Victorian era’s best-known celebration of authorship’.135 Athough one might quibble at the precise wording of these claims, they testify sufficiently to Carlyle’s acknowledged position in the discourse of early Victorian professional authorship, a topic which I examine at length in Chapter 2. As a writer who contributed significantly both to the figural representation and the narrative development of the Victorian author, Carlyle’s work and cultural influence play a pivotal role in the argument of this book. In the novels which Carlyle helped to inspire, many of his concerns about the nature and status of literary ‘work’ are explicitly dramatized, from the recognition and treatment of literary ‘heroes’ to the loss of youthful ‘illusions’, and the disturbing effects of journalism and the literary market on professional writing. In the process of fictional mediation, however, the organicist model of literary authority to which Carlyle gave powerful support came under increasing strain. Chapter 3 traces the evolution of the novel of literary apprenticeship through the 1830s and 1840s, culminating in the heterodox narrative form and professional ideology of William Thackeray’s History of Pendennis (1848–50). Thackeray’s parodic appropriation of the legacy of Wilhelm Meister – a neglected feature of the novel’s inter-textual discourse – was channelled through his longstanding dispute with Bulwer-Lytton, based not only on differences of political affiliation but also the professional positions which these implied. In Pendennis Thackeray conducts a more radical disenchantment of the model of Romantic professionalism proposed by Carlyle’s reading of Goethe, though one that still operates within a field of dialectical tension: the ‘poetry of the heart’ versus the ‘prose of circumstances’. By the middle of the century the vogue for writing quasiautobiographical narratives charting the apprenticeship of professional writers reached such an extent that in the space of four months during 1850 The Athenaeum published reviews of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke, Dickens’s David Copperfield, and Thackeray’s Pendennis.136 This proliferation of competing versions of the same

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literary product is scarcely coincidental: nearly all of the first generation of prominent Victorian novelists, it seems, felt compelled to produce narratives of apprenticeship, which, in however displaced or oblique a fashion, bear reference to the construction of their own authorial identities.137 The immediate cultural context for works of professional self-fashioning conceived towards the end of the 1840s was the broader debate around the ‘Dignity of Literature’ which came to involve Thackeray and Dickens as central antagonists. Chapter 4 focuses on Dickens’s project of professional reform from 1849 to 1851, the period of his closest engagement with questions of authorial identity, both at the level of self-formation and collective development. Over the past decade Dickens’s proto-professional literary society, The Guild of Literature and Art, founded in 1851, has received fresh critical attention,138 but here it is considered specifically in relation to the ethos of professional labour figured in David Copperfield, a distinctive compromise between the conflicting demands of organic development and mechanical production that were increasingly felt as the century progressed. As ‘the autobiography of the self-made author’, discussions of David Copperfield have often rightly pointed to the occlusion of class and gender determinants on which the novel’s professional ideology seems to be built.139 Yet it would be misleading to suggest that the internalized, developmental self of the Bildungsroman was an exclusively male and middleclass construction of subjectivity, either simply withheld from or crudely imposed upon the experience of female and working-class writers. Patrick Joyce has shown how a shared discourse of Bildung was operative in the narratives of ‘self-improvement’ espoused by both middle-class and workingclass intellectuals during the first half of the century. Contrary to the assumption that the idea of self-culture is the property of bourgeois individualism and thus intrinsically at odds with collective identity, Joyce claims that during this period, ‘[c]ultivating the self meant affirming one’s solidarity with a common humanity’.140 Chapter 5 examines the spread of developmental discourses of the literary self amongst working-class and artisan writers from the 1830s to the 1850s, focusing in particular on the Chartist poet and lecturer, Thomas Cooper, and the remarkable upsurge in working-class autobiographies of the 1840s. Whilst it may be true, as Regenia Gagnier argues, that the normative model of middle-class autobiographical introspection held limited appeal for many contemporary working-class autobiographers, and should not be viewed as ‘constitutive of autobiography as such’, one should equally avoid segregating workingclass participants from the discourses of intellectual self-improvement and

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literary professionalism.141 I conclude this chapter by examining the case of Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850), a text in which the dividing line between the (fabricated) narrative form of working-class autobiography and the iconic figure of the working-class intellectual is conspicuously blurred. Carlyle, once again, was a formative figure for both Kingsley and the ‘worker intellectuals’ whom he sought to represent: his well-known account of the tragically curtailed intellectual development of Robert Burns in ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ represents one of the key Victorian paradigms (or myths) of working-class authorship.142 In the final chapter I consider the equally complex relationship of early Victorian women writers to the dominant cultural forms of literary professionalism. Critics of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman have insisted that the conceptual foundation of the genre is peculiarly resistant to appropriation by women, but yet, at the same time, it sustained a long and visible ‘alternative tradition of female novels of development’, most prominently in the fiction of Charlotte Bront¨e and George Eliot.143 On the one hand, the notion of ‘female Bildung’ may be seen as ‘a contradiction in terms’, since the ethos of self-cultivation implies a ‘right to exist for one’s own sake’ which women could not unproblematically assume throughout most of the period, irrespective of class.144 Susan Fraiman argues forcefully that the narrative of ‘apprenticeship’ derived from Wilhelm Meister was particularly invidious for women as it presupposed a linear trajectory of development from ‘youth and inexperience’ to ‘eventual mastery’, and thus ‘helped to construct . . . a mythology of vocational choice’ only accessible to the autonomous male professional.145 Likewise, Marianne Hirsch observes that the traditional positioning of the feminine as ‘static’ and ‘ahistorical’ in figural terms is the ‘antithesis of Bildung’, viewed as a dynamic, masculine genre of narrative history.146 Again, however, it is important to acknowledge the extent of Victorian women writers’ engagement with the ideals of professional self-development, including the participation of Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in literary discourses associated with the broader social context. Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) provides a focal point for Chapter 6 as it provides further evidence of the link between developmental narratives of the literary subject and iconographic figures of the author: the latter, in this case, negotiates the gendered tradition of statuesque embodiment which pervades early nineteenth-century representations of female authorship. Too often, critics still unquestioningly accept the normative typology of the Bildungsroman constructed by Dilthey at the beginning of the twentieth century, in which it ‘examines a regular course of development in the

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life of the individual; each of its stages has its own value and each is at the same time the basis of a higher stage. The dissonances and conflicts of life appear as the necessary transit points of the individual on his way to maturity and harmony.’147 The simplified redaction of this definition which has entered common critical parlance is that the Bildungsroman epitomizes a fundamentally linear, progressivist, and teleological narrative form, which, for these reasons, is inherently conservative (or, more accurately, liberal) and bourgeois in ideological terms. Although Siskin is not specifically concerned with the Bildungsroman as a nineteenth-century genre, a similar set of assumptions lies behind his characterization of the Romantic ‘discourse of development’ as an ‘all-encompassing formal strategy underpinning middle-class culture’.148 In Dilthey’s dialectical schema the ‘dissonances’ and ‘conflicts’ of an individual’s life are seemingly presented as minor obstacles on an ascendant path to self-understanding – ‘the necessary transit points of the individual on his way to maturity and harmony’. Yet the capacity of the Victorian Bildungsroman for self-reflexive interrogation, I would argue, goes beyond a merely self-validating incorporation of ‘failure or loss’, allowing writers of the period to stage anxious and often unresolved debates on the formation of professional identity. The propensity to valorize self-reflexivity as a marker of the potential for maturation may well be a feature of the aesthetic ideology of the Bildungsroman, as Redfield claims, but this does not diminish the experience of disenchantment which early Victorian narratives of literary apprenticeship seek to record as both formative and obstructive moments in the emergence of the modern professional author.149 The following chapters examine the disenchantment of the author across a wide range of authors and texts from the 1820s to the 1850s, beginning with the work of Carlyle, a writer who did more than most to form and to figure the modern man of letters.

chapter t wo

Thomas Carlyle and the luminous author

In 1824, the year which saw the publication of his first major works – a biography of Schiller and an English translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister – Thomas Carlyle paid an extended visit to London where, for the first time, he encountered what he called the ‘Literary World’. The visit was, in part, an attempt to ascertain whether London (as opposed to Edinburgh) was a suitable environment in which to launch the professional literary career which he had begun to contemplate. Although, to some degree, the experience proved affirmative, as Carlyle witnessed the first distinct signs of his emerging critical reputation and made important literary contacts, in other respects it was a severely disillusioning episode. Indeed, such was the severity of his initial reaction to literary London that he spent most of the following decade living in an isolated Dumfriesshire farmhouse at Craigenputtoch before eventually settling in London on a permanent basis in 1834. In a letter dated 20 December 1824 to his wife Jane Baillie Welsh, Carlyle expressed his sense of the morally degenerate condition into which Literature had fallen, citing such notable contemporary figures as De Quincey, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Thomas Moore as examples of writers who had either succumbed to metropolitan corruption or were specifically in exile from it. A sweeping judgement on some, if not all, of the above names is implicitly included in the following outburst: Good Heavens! I often inwardly exclaim, and is this the Literary World? This rascal rout, this dirty rabble, destitute not only of high feeling or knowledge or intellect, but even of common honesty? The very best of them are ill-natured weaklings: they are not red-blooded men at all; they are only things for writing ‘articles’.1

It would be misleading to interpret these remarks as a definitive verdict on an entire literary generation. In his attempt to redefine the cultural role of the man of letters, Carlyle has often been viewed as a pivotal figure in the ‘general shift’ from Romantic to Victorian understandings of ‘literary 39

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authority’, most recently with specific regard to the gendering of that authority,2 but here the issue of concern is less a marker of generational shifts in opinion than testimony to the systemic conditions of the modern literary market. In particular, the attenuation of ‘red-blooded men’ into ‘things for writing “articles”’ is indicative of the disturbing effects of an expansion of periodical literature felt not only by Carlyle but also many of his contemporaries (including several of those listed above). Though hardly unique, Carlyle’s repugnance for the journalistic culture of the London ‘Literary World’ was peculiarly intense. His correspondence from the mid 1820s through to the end of the 1830s (by which point he could no longer be primarily defined as a writer of ‘articles’) is full of admonitions against the practice of writing for magazines: ‘I will not degenerate into the wretched thing which calls itself an Author in our Capitals, and scribbles for the sake of filthy lucre in the periodicals of the day’, a declaration made in January 1825, sums up the general tenor of this response.3 Well into the 1830s Carlyle privately presented his loathing for the sordid transactions of periodical literature as a serious obstacle to his continuation as a professional author. Despite such expressions of contempt and aloofness, however, he recognized the difficulties of disentangling his own authorial practice from the exigencies of this world, even during his self-imposed exile. In the letter to Jane from December 1824 Carlyle checks his outburst against the ‘dirty rabble’ with the rueful confession: In railing at them, let me not forget that if they are bad and worthless, I as yet am nothing; and that he who putteth on his harness should not boast himself as he that putteth it off. Unhappy souls! perhaps they are more to be pitied than blamed: I do not hate them; I would only that stone-walls and iron-bars were constantly between us.4

At this inaugural moment of his career, then, Carlyle is aware that in putting ‘on his harness’ as a periodical contributor he risks compromising himself in relation to the targets of his disdain. This realization might, as in Thackeray, have prompted a moment of sympathetic identification with the figure of the Grub Street hack: ‘all the spotted fry that “report” and “get-up” for the “Public Press”’. Carlyle’s acknowledgement of complicity, however, cannot bridge the chasm of disapproval figured by the desired interposition of physical barriers between them. Instead, his depiction of an ignominious Grub Street London is interrupted by news of an altogether different Literary World, the receipt of his first correspondence from Goethe: ‘Conceive my satisfaction: it was almost like a message from Fairy Land; I could scarcely think that this was the real hand and signature

Thomas Carlyle and the luminous author

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of that mysterious personage, whose name had floated thro’ my fancy, like a sort of spell, since boyhood.’5 It is as if Carlyle’s realistic apprehension of his prospective literary career is suddenly juxtaposed with its absolute antithesis, a vision of ‘Fairy Land’ or the literary Ideal. The enchantment cast by the ‘spell’ of Goethe’s charismatic authorship counters the palpable disenchantment of Carlyle’s first encounter with the material conditions of the literary profession, without apparently diminishing the force of the latter. These two representations of Literature appear to have no point of contact with each other apart from their conjoined presence within the same letter. Standing at the commencement of his professional life, the unmediated contrast between Goethe and Grub Street gives a clear example of the deep-rooted ambivalence with which Carlyle approached his vocation as man of letters.

The ‘shoe-black-seraph Army’ Carlyle’s early apprehension of the equivocal status of the man of letters is perhaps most strikingly revealed in an 1832 review-essay on ‘Boswell’s Life of Johnson’, which positions his eighteenth-century predecessor as representative of a new composite collective entity, the ‘unspeakable shoeblack-seraph Army of Authors’.6 Like the incongruous conjunction of literary models encountered in December 1824, this oxymoronic figure, through which Carlyle represents an earlier phase in the emergence of Grub Street, combines the high and low potentialities of professional authorship in startling juxtaposition. Samuel Johnson offers a significant case study, since, by the early Victorian period, he was widely viewed as the first major professional author. Carlyle perceived him as being ‘[a]mong the first Authors, the very first of any significance, who lived by the day’s wages of his craft, and composedly faced the world on that basis’, and thus as an important ‘transitional’ figure in the genealogy of the modern man of letters (iii, 79). The heroic struggle of Johnson’s life (he was later to feature as one of the three central exempla of ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’) arises primarily from the ‘difficulty [which] lies always in the transition from one method to another’: in this case, the re-orientation of Literature from ‘Patron’ to ‘Public’ and ‘Booksellers’ (iii, 77–8). Johnson’s personal experience becomes paradigmatic of modern authorship in general, both for better and worse: while, on the one hand, he embodies the newfound bourgeois autonomy of the professional writer liberated from servile dependence on aristocratic patronage, on the other hand, he is forced to survive through the chance mechanisms of the literary market,

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‘the wondrous chaos of “Author by trade”’ (iii, 80). Johnson’s achievement is to have become ‘a Man of Letters, and Ruler of the British Nation for some time’, despite enduring the severe material and spiritual constrictions of his historical circumstances, having entered the profession at a moment when ‘[t]he trade of Author was at about one of its lowest ebbs’ (iii, 75–6). The implication of this essay is that Carlyle placed himself within a parallel historical predicament. Just as the mid eighteenth century experienced the shift from Patrons to Public, so the mid nineteenth century, he predicts, will witness the demise of the ‘Bookseller-System’ and its replacement by some as yet indeterminate ‘third method’ of distribution, one which must impose order on the ‘chaos’ of laissez-faire literary commerce (iii, 78). Carlyle’s attachment to Johnson derives from the recognition of a shared and analogous cultural condition, an identification which also entails an aspiration to exit the historical era first entered by his predecessor. Johnson represents for Carlyle not only the first but also hopefully the last major author of his kind: in an obituary article on Goethe written in the same year, Carlyle hailed the German writer as having inaugurated a ‘New Era in Literature’, by which he indicates not merely chronological but also cultural progress beyond the eighteenth century and the subsequent period of Byronic Romanticism (iii, 107). Carlyle construes Goethe as a figure in advance of the modern predicament endured by Johnson, as his seemingly anachronistic use of Johnson as an example of the iniquities of the ‘cash-nexus’ in Chartism (1839) bears witness.7 Lee Erickson has identified Carlyle as ‘the first English [sic] writer to observe that industrialization had affected publishing and the literary marketplace’, and it is clear that by the end of the 1820s he had already reflected on the relationship between processes of mechanization and commodification within the Literary World and within industrial society at large, most notably in ‘Signs of the Times’ (1829).8 In ‘The State of German Literature’ (1827) Carlyle concludes that the ‘relation of entire dependence’ of the ‘votary of literature’ on the ‘merchants of literature’ is ‘highly questionable’, despite its apparent material benefits for the author, as ‘[i]t tempts him daily and hourly to sink from an artist into a manufacturer’ (i, 33). The reduction of literature as art to a species of merchandise or manufacture, produced by the ‘mechanical’ exercise of ‘hand’, ‘head’, and ‘heart’ (ii, 103), is essentially what Carlyle means by the ‘Bookseller-System’ which he sought to transcend. Carlyle’s writings of the early 1830s contain several abortive attempts to imagine alternative systems to that which had, from the time of Johnson, become the prevailing mode of literary-industrial production, some residues of which can still be found in later and more familiar texts. An

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entry in his private notebook for 1831, for example, contains the germ of an idea to which he would return frequently over the next decade: Authors must unite; must form themselves into a Corporation, into a Church. It is one of my prophecies that they one day will. In this present race there is not virtue enough to form a Drinking Club.9

The forging of a new, more cohesive collective identity for authors, over and above the motley, miscellaneous rabble of Johnson’s ‘shoe-black-seraph Army’, is the paramount requirement of Carlyle’s desire to transform the social relations of literary production, and also important in elevating the ideological function of the man of letters. Carlyle was by no means unique in calling for a ‘Literary Union’ of professional authors during this decade; Bulwer-Lytton being another prominent advocate.10 Of particular interest in Carlyle’s formulation of the idea, though, are the variety and combination of figures used to represent this collective body: ‘Corporation’, ‘Church’, and, elsewhere in the notebook, ‘Guild’. Such tropes invoke traditional models of both spiritual and secular authority in rethinking the nature of literary authority, and, on occasion, Carlyle directly conflates the two: ‘The grand Pulpit is now the Press; the true Church . . . is the Guild of Authors’, he declares in 1832.11 As David Riede and others have argued, Carlyle’s vision of the ‘Church of Literature’ was an attempt to endow the man of letters with a sacerdotal aura, but equally significant is the equivalence given to priestly and artisanal functions in the union of Church and Guild, suggesting a correspondent vision of the re-organization of social labour. Another issue at stake here is the question of how to reconcile traditional religious institutions with the new spiritual authority attributed by Carlyle (and Romantic precursors such as Coleridge) to the secular literary intellectual.12 Carlyle intended to develop these ideas further in an ‘Essay on Authors’ repeatedly touted in his notebooks and correspondence of 1831–2, which was unfortunately never written. The clearest description that we have of its planned content comes in a letter to Macvey Napier, editor of The Edinburgh Review, proposing an article on ‘the State of Authors at this epoch; the duties, performances, and marvellous position of the Author in our System of Society; matters which, as I believe, will one day force themselves on the universal attention’.13 It is most probable that this essay would have elaborated Carlyle’s conception of the ‘Church’ or ‘Guild’ of Literature and promoted the ‘Union’ of Authors, thus surpassing ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ as a sustained interrogation of the social and spiritual condition of modern authorship in the post-Romantic period. It is significant that

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Carlyle conceived the ‘Essay on Authors’ during a second period of temporary residence in London whilst unsuccessfully attempting to secure book publication for the manuscript of Sartor Resartus; immersed once again in the ‘reptile world of Authors’, he became convinced that while periodicals thrived the book trade was in terminal decline, and ‘Bookselling’ must therefore ‘work itself into a quite new form’.14 Also of this period is Carlyle’s unfinished History of German Literature, into which he siphoned a series of related speculations on the genealogy of modern ‘Literature’, perhaps the closest he came to articulating the unwritten Essay. In the introductory chapter of the History Carlyle notes the lack of institutional structures supporting Literature in its modern forms (including the ‘Newspaper Press’); there are no current equivalents to the medieval Church and Guild for regulating ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’ production. In recent times, he points out, Literature has become established as a distinct sphere of labour, yet without achieving legal definition as a recognized profession: Literature, the strange, composite set of Agencies which men designate by that word, has in late times, as we see, obtained a specific name; so that we can now say an Author, as we say a Carpenter or Smith, and talk of the Literary world, as we do of the Clerical, Medical, Legal: but this is nearly all the length we have got. Not for the Writer of Books, whatever it might do for the Binder of Books, has Government, or Custom, hitherto passed any enactment, appointed any guidance or furtherance, better or worse; not so much as bound him to serve an apprenticeship.15

Of historical significance here is the palpable sense of unfamiliarity accompanying the emergence of ‘Literature’ as an autonomous cultural field. Carlyle observes the coming into existence of the identity of ‘Author’ on a par with more established trades and professions (the inclusion of both is suggestively indefinite), but is unable to press the comparison with carpenters or doctors as far as he would like; authorship lacks the infrastructure of professional or artisanal training through which ‘guidance or furtherance’ in the development of requisite knowledge and skills can be transmitted. The suggestion that Authors might usefully ‘serve an apprenticeship’, but are without institutional mechanisms for doing so, is of particular resonance for Carlyle, as I argue later in this chapter. In the History of German Literature the unregulated, chaotic provision of modern authorship is again symptomatic of the political-economic system of laissez-faire: Literature has been left to fight or fail for itself; to spring up spontaneously, in such shape as the transient requisitions of Mode, or the accidental characters

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of individuals might direct. The Author takes up his craft, exercises it, finds payment for it, does incalculable good or incalculable mischief with it, where, when, and how seems him fit.16

Critics of Carlyle have tended to read such passages as implying (if not directly exhorting) a desire to impose order on chaos: invoking disciplinary institutions like the Church as a means of curtailing individual freedom of speech.17 Whilst this reading obviously contains a measure of truth, in the present context it would misleadingly solidify his position. It is by no means certain that Carlyle has a settled opinion on the advisability of institutional regulation in the History of German Literature: despite lamenting the destructive consequences of laissez-faire, he acknowledges that ‘Literature cannot well be legislated for’ as the state has neither the capacity nor the desire to understand the needs of Authors. Eschewing governmental intervention, Carlyle calls instead for a ‘Utopian community’ or some ‘more than Radical Reform’ through which the necessary organization might be established. Furthermore, he undermines the argument in favour of state regulation by conceding that, in one form or other, Literature has existed without such intervention throughout history. In the one instance of practical government regulation cited in the History – that of copyright legislation – Carlyle appears ambivalent at best. Although he petitioned parliament in support of Talfourd’s Bill for copyright reform in 1839, from Carlyle’s viewpoint the investiture of a ‘certain right of property in his own Thoughts, which he has only created, not manufactured’, risks conflating the material and spiritual value of the Author’s labour.18 On similar grounds, he expressed concern that, in seeking to alleviate the economic hardships caused by laissez-faire, professional organizations might suppress the moral benefits of individual poverty and struggle. In other words, Carlyle was by no means sure that economic individualism was not productive of the moral discipline which he wanted to associate, conversely, with communitarian orders such as the monastic. In ‘Boswell’s Life of Johnson’ he pointedly remarks: ‘The first Writers, being Monks, were sworn to a vow of Poverty; the modern Authors had no need to swear to it’ (iii, 76). Carlyle thus remained ambivalently torn between the desire to redeem the Author from the indignity of engaging in a sordid ‘fight’ for material resources and to celebrate the heroic attributes gained from subjection to precisely that process. It is largely for this reason that Carlyle’s speculative proposals for a fundamental re-organization of the ‘Bookselling-System’ – his calls to establish a new ‘Church of Literature’, ‘Literary Union’, or Authors’ ‘Guild’ – seem

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tentative and vague, and not simply because he was prevented from developing these ideas to their full extent in published form. In contrast to Coleridge’s idea of the ‘clerisy’, with which it bears an obvious similarity, Carlyle’s notion of Literature as a ‘Church’ was never articulated with any attention to the practical details of its realization within society. Ultimately, this is because Carlyle himself had not fully resolved whether the existence of such an institution would genuinely benefit Authors, and through them society. Although the general tenor of sporadic passages and phrases in Carlyle’s writings was clearly influential on subsequent writers’ attempts to organize authors into a professional body – most notably, Dickens’s ‘Guild of Literature and Art’ – Carlyle himself remained uneasy with the social dimensions of professionalization.19 Towards the end of the 1830s he began to look elsewhere for a possible remedy to his personal difficulties in the Literary World. The sequence of annual lecture courses which he delivered from 1837 to 1840, culminating in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840–1), was the result of a self-conscious decision to move away from his dependence on periodical writing in the absence of a reliable method of book publication. Lecturing provided Carlyle with a steady and lucrative source of income relative to the amount of time and labour expended on the courses, and the social prestige which it both reflected and incurred was, initially at least, preferable to the Grub Street miasma of the periodicals. Although eventually he became equally dissatisfied with the cultural milieu of the lecture hall, and by the 1840s was sufficiently secure financially to relinquish lecturing in order to concentrate on writing books, it is worth considering the formal context of the lecture in terms of the development of Carlyle’s own professional career in our subsequent reading of ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’: a text which may be interpreted reflexively in light of the professional concerns outlined above.20 Before addressing this text in detail, however, I examine Carlyle’s hopes for redeeming the degraded condition of the contemporary Literary World through the visual language of symbolic representation on which the heroic potential of the Author rests.

The luminous author In Thomas Anstey’s transcription of his 1838 lecture course on The History of Literature Carlyle makes a significant distinction between the figure of the Author and more conventional types of the hero when discussing the posthumous influence of books: ‘Authors unlike heroes do not need to be illuminated by others; they are of themselves luminous.’21 For Carlyle,

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the trope of the ‘luminous’ author represents a specific modality of visual form which corresponds with the autotelic nature of symbols in general.22 Authors, this statement seems to suggest, do not need to be made visible by external imposition as they are already so in and of themselves; their luminosity is immanent, rather than an illumination cast by, or upon, some other agency. Authors can be viewed as both subject and object of the process of visual representation, hence their difference from ‘heroes’ who rely upon others to mediate their actions; or at least from other categories of the heroic since Carlyle, of course, included authors, both as poets and men of letters, in his subsequent lecture series On Heroes. Other kinds of heroes depend upon author-heroes, then, for illumination, a point emphasized in Leo Braudy’s cultural history of the concept of fame.23 Carlyle coined a neologism to express this quality of immanent or non-sensible visibility embodied by the symbolic figure of the Author: the word ‘visuality’ and its derivative form ‘visualize’, which the OED defines as a mental or imagined image. Recognizing Carlyle’s place in the genealogy of the modern discourse of visuality (both within popular culture and critical theory), Nicholas Mirzoeff has characterized his rhetorical style of ‘visualized heroism’ as an essentially conservative, anti-emancipatory intervention within the realm of historical representation. By contrast, I see Carlyle’s deployment of a visual language of the heroic, centred upon the figure of the luminous author, in relation to the broader contexts of early nineteenth-century print culture; more specifically, as a response to the development of a mass-produced visual iconography of professional authorship during this period. It was the dissemination of the printed image, rather than the ‘impact’ of Chartism or the French Revolution, which first led Carlyle to devise a ‘theory of visualized heroism’.24 Goethe, not surprisingly, furnishes the best example of a ‘luminous’ author in Carlyle’s heroic canon. It was Goethe, as we have seen, whose correspondence relieved the sordid reality of literary London in 1824, and it would not be an empty metaphor to describe Goethe’s presence for Carlyle as an experience of illumination. Throughout the early part of his career, in fact, Carlyle consistently depicted Goethe in terms of visual representation and its effects, most explicitly in his contribution to Fraser’s Magazine’s ‘Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, published in March 1832. Markedly different in tone from the satirical mode of characterization employed by William Maginn, Carlyle’s brief biographical sketch, written to accompany an engraved portrait of Goethe by Daniel Maclise [Figure 6], seems at odds with the rest of the series. Where Maginn subverts the prevailing reverential idiom of biographical portraiture, Carlyle’s point of entry

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Figure 6 Daniel Maclise, ‘Baron Von Goethe’, No. XXII of ‘The Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, Fraser’s Magazine, Vol. 5 (26), March 1832.

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into the ‘Gallery’ is as an enthusiastic supporter of the sacralizing function of biography and incipient exponent of the doctrine of hero-worship.25 The allocation (or choice) of subject alone guarantees the seriousness with which Carlyle approached his contribution, given his existing reputation as Goethe’s translator. Yet his palpable awareness of the dissonant context in which the essay is to appear does not reflect an outright rejection of the visual conceit of Fraser’s literary gallery. Carlyle begins, in fact, by adapting Maginn’s humorous ekphrastic style to his own more sober objective: Reader! thou here beholdest the Eidolon of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. So looks and lives, now in his eighty-third year, afar in the bright little friendly circle of Weimar, ‘the clearest, most universal man of his time’. Strange enough is the cunning that resides in the ten fingers, especially what they bring to pass by pencil and pen! Him who never saw England, England now sees: from Fraser’s ‘Gallery’ he looks forth here, wondering, doubtless, how he came into such a Lichtstrasse (‘light-street’, or galaxy); yet with kind recognition of all neighbours, even as the moon looks kindly on lesser lights, and were they but fish-oil cressets, or terrestrial Vauxhall stars (of clipped tin), forbids not their shining.26

In Carlylean etymology the Greek word ‘Eidolon’ may be translated as both ‘symbol’ and ‘thing seen’; it is defined in this dual sense within the lectures of On Heroes.27 The term is thus, on the one hand, commensurate with the discourse of secular idolatry and iconoclasm in which Fraser’s ‘Gallery’ self-consciously participates, yet, on the other hand, suggestive of a relationship with the represented object in excess of that discourse. For Carlyle, Maclise’s portrait of Goethe is not merely an extraneous visual artefact – a ‘thing seen’ – on the same level as the omnipresent cultural visibility of Walter Scott’s image, remarked by Maginn earlier in the same series, but, rather, is animated by an immanent symbolic capacity.28 Hence, the strange reciprocity of the visual encounter which this portrait supposedly enables: not only does it allow England to see Goethe, but Goethe to see England, as though he is peering out from the pages of Fraser’s Magazine. The usefulness of this example is that it situates Carlyle’s figure of the heroic symbol (or idol) in direct proximity to the surrounding discourse of cultural visibility by which it is informed, and against which it protests, revealing a material context for his transcendental thought. Carlyle’s insinuation here is that Goethe does not really belong in the low company of Fraser’s ‘Gallery’, a medium of artificial illumination which he terms a ‘Lichtstrasse’ or ‘light-street’, and compares both to the gaudiness of ‘Vauxhall stars’ and the weakness of ‘fish-oil cressets’.29 Goethe’s luminosity, by contrast, is of a natural source, akin to the moon which ‘looks kindly on

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lesser lights’ and does not need to draw attention to itself: a ‘mild-shining, inaudible light’, as Carlyle synaesthetically conceives it.30 Goethe thus illustrates the self-sustaining form of the Carlylean symbol in contradistinction from the ‘heterotelic’ illumination of modern print media.31 At the same time, Carlyle suggests an accommodation between Goethe and Fraser’s ‘Gallery’, for even the true idol must assume a visible form within given material conditions. Although, initially, the sketch juxtaposes a reading of Goethe’s physical body, as represented metonymically by Maclise’s portrait, against a knowledge of his ‘soul’ to be gained from studying the author’s works, it soon becomes apparent that the soul too is accessible through the visual medium of the symbol: ‘Nay, the very soul of the man thou canst likewise behold’, ‘look well in those forty volumes’, ‘greater sight, or more profitable, thou wilt not meet with in this generation’ are some of the pervasive visual metaphors to which the text resorts.32 Rather than dismissing Maclise’s visual icon as a superficial material delineation of its referent, Carlyle uses the bodily portrait to prompt reflection on the ‘interior’ realm of symbolic meaning, allowing it to provide a proverbial gateway to the soul. The textual space of the ‘Gallery’ may be construed as a ‘galaxy’ of cheap and tawdry ‘stars’, with which the natural lustre of Goethe oddly consorts, but, notwithstanding his discomfort with the medium, Carlyle’s ‘Eidolon’ still enters the same field of visual representation. As Paul Barlow has noted, Carlyle ascribed considerable value to portraits as aids to his work as a biographer and historian, declaring in a letter written in support of the establishment of a permanent National Exhibition of Scottish Portraits in 1854, that ‘to procure a bodily likeness of the personage inquired after’ was one of the ‘primary wants’ of his research (iv, 330). The portrait, Barlow concludes, ‘stands as a “symbol”, a resistance to articulation by narrative’, and indeed the assumption that heroes can be embodied in images, as well as, or better than, in narrative form, is a vital aspect of Carlyle’s thinking in relation to both history and Literature.33 Yet Carlyle’s enthusiasm for the establishment of portrait galleries as public institutions – he endorsed both Scottish and English versions of the National Portrait Gallery – should also be viewed in relation to the antecedent growth of print-media forms of the genre. It could be argued that, in Carlyle’s case, support for the actual National Portrait Galleries established during the second half of the century was directly influenced by, or modelled on, his engagement with the putatively secondary, figurative space of the ‘portrait gallery’ constructed within early nineteenth-century books and magazines.34 The significance of the genre of the portrait gallery for Carlyle’s career can be discussed on several levels. As

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noted in the previous chapter, Carlyle himself frequently featured in such texts, which may be taken as both a measure of his own literary celebrity and the specific forms of cultural representation which this entailed.35 Maginn, for example, took the opportunity of responding to Carlyle’s challenge to his satirical authority in a subsequent entry for Fraser’s ‘Gallery’ which humorously parodies the linguistic style of the Goethe sketch: ‘Here hast thou, O Reader! the-from stone-printed effigies of Thomas Carlyle, the thunderwordoversetter of Herr Johan Wolfgang von Goethe’.36 Interestingly, whilst exhibiting Carlyle as a contemporary literary icon, both verbal sketch and image caption place his authorship in a parasitic relationship to that of Goethe; the mocking tone of the address re-establishes iconoclasm as the prevailing mode of the series. Later in the period, it was more often Carlyle’s own biographical doctrine that informed the tenor of the literary galleries in which his portrait held a prized position. Carlyle’s presence within such texts is peculiarly apposite as he assimilated and re-interpreted the iconographic model on which the genre was based: most fundamentally, by adopting the combination of portraiture and biography – visualized icon and narrative text – prescribed by Edmund Lodge as its primary feature.37 Nineteenth-century readers of Carlyle were more liable to notice the visual context of his writing than subsequent commentators have been. When Harriet Martineau in her Autobiography (1877) praises Carlyle for ‘the fine gallery of portraits which he has given us’, or Richard Garnett, in his early posthumous biography of Carlyle (1887), characterizes On Heroes as both a ‘prophecy’ and a ‘gallery of biographical portraiture’, they have in mind the same form of print culture which I have been discussing.38 Garnett’s remark is especially apt as it recognizes the twofold nature of Carlyle’s self-conception as biographer and hero-worshipper: on the one hand, his aspiration to mediate the prophetic Word, commonly acknowledged in modern criticism; on the other hand, his desire to create and interpret images, an aspect of his work less frequently mentioned. Moreover, in describing On Heroes as a prophetic Carlylean version of the ‘gallery of biographical portraiture’, Garnett provides support for a reading of Carlyle’s most celebrated volume of lectures more attuned to its saturation in the contemporary discourse of visual culture. The composite format of On Heroes was, of course, partly determined by its oral context as a course of lectures, but it is not inaccurate to describe the ensuing volume (the only lecture series which Carlyle had, from the beginning, conceived as a published text) as a displaced version of the printed portrait gallery.39 Some nineteenth-century editions of On Heroes rendered this analogy more visible by incorporating a select number of

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illustrative plates depicting figures from the lectures, but the substance of the comparison goes deeper than this; in fact, whilst portraiture in the literal sense was obviously a staple feature of literary galleries, it was by no means a ubiquitous requirement, as previously noted. Throughout the text of the lectures Carlyle emphasizes the immanent ‘visuality’ of his subjects, fashioning images of heroes which do not require external supplementation. A recurrent preoccupation of the series, linked to the etymology of visual representation as I have indicated, concerns the relationship between heroworship and idolatry as twin manifestations of the supposedly ineradicable religious impulse within the history of human culture. On the one hand, the lectures adopt an aggressively iconoclastic stance, in keeping with many of their religious subjects (Mahomet, Luther, Knox, Cromwell, etc.). The Carlylean hero is distinguished by a capacity for transcendental insight, which enables him to ‘look through the shows of things into things’ in themselves – to uncover ‘something behind and beyond’ visual phenomena without which they are merely ‘Idolatries – “bits of black wood pretending to be God”’.40 On the other hand, Carlyle mounts a countervailing defence of idolatry, based on his understanding of the ‘Eidolon’ (or ‘eidol’) as a symbolic form of visual representation, which significantly qualifies his iconoclastic rhetoric. In ‘The Hero as Priest’, he concludes that all religious practices necessarily partake of idolatry, however iconoclastic they appear: All creeds, liturgies, religious forms, conceptions that fitly invest religious feelings, are in this sense eidola, things seen. All worship whatsoever must proceed by Symbols, by Idols: – we may say, all Idolatry is comparative, and the worst Idolatry is only more idolatrous. (121)

Carlyle thus finds himself in the somewhat paradoxical position of writing as a prophet who insists on the ineluctable truth of images. Whereas, throughout the history of Christian theology, iconoclasm sets the true immaterial ‘Word’ of God against adherence to false visual signs, in On Heroes Carlyle enunciates the necessity of worshipping heroes who break with the ‘idols’ of ossified religious institutions within a generic framework of biographical portraiture.41 Whilst this attempt to combine word and image in a new synthetic form may not be entirely free of tension, it points, nevertheless, to the truly icono-graphic nature of the series. Nowhere is this more evident than in the two lectures devoted specifically to literary icons: Lecture iii, ‘The Hero as Poet’ and Lecture v, ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’. In the former, whose chosen subjects are Dante and Shakespeare, Carlyle’s conception of the poet-prophet (or vates) is mapped through a complex parallel network of visual and auditory tropes. For the

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most part, he emphasizes the incapacity of visibility or speech to represent the true essence of the poet-hero: ‘How much in Shakespeare’, for example, ‘lies hid; his sorrows, his silent struggles known to himself; much that was not known at all, not speakable at all: like roots, like sap and forces working underground!’ (108). The measure of the poet’s greatness can be gauged only from the ‘depths’ that lie beneath the visible surface, the silence that precedes speech. Yet, lest this task appears futile, he goes on to suggest that the invisible ‘roots’ of the hero may be glimpsed through forms of symbolic representation in which the external medium of the senses proves ‘physiognomical of the whole man’. This is the case with Dante, whose ‘great power of vision’, embodied in the act of poetic ‘painting’, is ‘one of the outermost developments’ of his genius, yet ‘comes like all else from the essential faculty of him’. Through his poetry Dante is both the subjective mediator of a field of ‘clear visuality’ and the primary object illuminated within it (92–3). It is not accidental, then, that Carlyle should begin his account of Dante as a poet-hero by reflecting on an actual portrait of the subject attributed to Giotto, which ‘looking on it, you cannot help inclining to think genuine, whoever did it’ (86). As in his contribution to Fraser’s ‘Gallery’, the prophetic iconoclast, who considers language itself in danger of becoming ‘mere wooden noise’, treats this most extraneous visual representation of the poet as though it was a receptacle of self-illumination, ‘significant of the whole history of Dante’ (91). Carlyle, indeed, is content to use Giotto’s portrait as a substitute for biographical (verbal) knowledge of Dante, which he freely acknowledges as lacking. ‘The Hero as Poet’ thus oscillates confusingly between castigation of the tendency to ‘worship the shows of great men’, equation of ‘visuality’ with symbolic truth, and apprehension of the ultimate inadequacy of visual emblems in revealing inner substance (84). Similarly, in ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’, Carlyle approaches his exemplary figures – Rousseau, Johnson, and Burns – through a medium of visual cognition which collapses the distinction between portraiture and its external referents. This is perhaps most evident in his physiognomic reading of Rousseau’s ‘expressive’ face, which proceeds according to the same logic as Goethe’s and Dante’s Eidola, although it reveals, in this instance, the fallibility of a ‘sadly contracted Hero’ (185). In this lecture, however, the practice of reading portraits as luminous symbols of the author-hero is set against an alternative form of social visibility, that of the modern condition of literary celebrity or ‘lionism’, which Carlyle associates particularly with the case of Robert Burns. In its encounter with the culture of celebrity, Burns’s biography appears analogous to Goethe’s incongruous entry into the ‘Lichtstrasse’ of Fraser’s ‘Gallery’, but with far more damaging

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consequences. Burns is likened to a ‘sudden splendour of Heaven’ placed ‘in the artificial Vauxhall’; his problems arise from being figuratively cast in the wrong light, a misprision caused by confusion between the hero’s true symbolic character and his visual environment (188). In ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ Carlyle offers his most extended consideration of the negative or ambiguous effects of mediated print culture on the forms of hero-worship, whilst also, as is more often noted, declaring a positive prophetic role for professional writers.42

Heroism and lionism ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ occupies an especially significant position in On Heroes, in part because of the fact that it contains Carlyle’s reflections on his own acknowledged role within the social division of labour, but also because its subject represents the most distinctively modern manifestation of heroism examined within the series. The modernity of the man of letters, Carlyle suggests, is neither a wholly positive nor wholly negative condition, but, rather, a nexus of contradictory possibilities shaped by the progressive rationalization and disenchantment of the hero through history.43 At the most general level, the contradiction embodied by this new manifestation of the heroic derives from its location at the juncture between material and ideal realms, or mechanical and organic principles. Inhabiting both realms simultaneously, yet without alleviating the antagonism that is felt between them, the condition of the man of letters seems intrinsically paradoxical: whilst the ‘true Literary Man’ retains a fund of ‘sacredness’ of messianic proportions (‘he is the light of the world, the world’s Priest’), as a professional writer he is an offshoot from the mythical ‘Tree of Igdrasil’ grafted onto the modern ‘World-MACHINE’ (157, 171). From the outset of the lecture, Carlyle links this unprecedented situation to the historical development of print culture and the formation of a literary market: Never, till about a hundred years ago, was there seen any figure of a Great Soul living apart in that anomalous manner: endeavouring to speak-forth the inspiration that was in him by Printed Books, and find place and subsistence by what the world would please to give him for doing that. Much had been sold and bought, and left to make its own bargain in the marketplace; but the inspired wisdom of a Heroic Soul never till then, in that naked manner.(154)

The ‘mechanical’ principle of the market is a crucial factor in the rationalization of the hero exemplified by the man of letters. It is the literary

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marketplace that produces the ‘anomaly of a disorganic Literary Class’ left ‘at the mercy of blind Chance; a whirl of distracted atoms, one cancelling the other’ (167): a collective body prevented from developing its true organic form. One consequence of his ‘anomalous’ position is that the man of letters deviates, in several respects, from the paradigm established by the heroes of preceding lectures. Whereas in the case of older divinities and prophets, Carlyle does not dispute the suggestion that the human capacity for worship exceeds the intrinsic value of the objects on which it was projected, with Johnson, Burns, and Rousseau the disequilibrium operates in reverse. Although ‘the Man-of-Letters Hero must be regarded as our most important modern person’ he does not receive the tribute of worship which his status deserves (155); instead of unconditional reverence, the ‘Heroic Soul’ is forced to ‘bargain in the marketplace’ and subsist on what the ‘world’ is willing to exchange for ‘Printed Books’. Unsurprisingly, then, Carlyle’s choice of exempla for the lecture does not fully demonstrate the heroic potential of the modern man of letters. Neither Johnson nor Rousseau nor Burns emerge as unequivocally ‘heroic’ figures in Carlyle’s biographical sketches: ‘It is rather the Tombs of three Literary Heroes that I have to show you’, he professes (158). Rousseau and Burns are portrayed as representative victims of eighteenth-century ‘scepticism’ and its concomitant ‘spiritual paralysis’, whilst even Johnson, who represents a more heroic strain of conservative resistance to modernity, cannot escape its debilitating consequences without reducing his religious faith to ossified dogmatism. Despite this assessment of the inhospitable conditions presiding over the emergence and reception of heroes in the modern period, Carlyle continues to press the claim of the man of letters. As suggested earlier, Carlyle distinguishes the eighteenth-century Johnsonian man of letters – an emergent but still transitional type of professional authorship – from the luminous figure emerging at the turn of the nineteenth century, in Germany if not in Britain, of which Goethe was the concrete embodiment and Johann Fichte’s Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten [Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation] (1794) the theoretical manifesto.44 More generally, though, Carlyle’s confidence in the spiritual efficacy of the man of letters arises from a more dialectical interpretation of the effects of modernization on the field of print culture than is at first apparent. His argument that the man of letters (in which category he includes ‘writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books’) has supplanted all previous historical incarnations of the priestly class to become ‘the real working effective Church of a modern country’ is itself predicated upon the technological development of writing and printing, and the increasing ‘facility of getting Books’ (161–2).

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In other words, it is the emergence of a print culture that enables the dissemination of prophetic speech on a radically enlarged scale, mediating ‘with a wondrous new contiguity and perpetual closeness, the Past and Distant with the Present in time and place; all times and all places with this our actual Here and Now’ (160–1). To be sure, Carlyle makes little distinction between the historical invention of printing and the technology of writing itself; in his account, the former develops imperceptibly out of the latter, leaving us with a process of modernization which in origin predates most of the prophetic types which the man of letters is claimed to supersede.45 Yet the inexorable consequences of this undifferentiated process extend clearly into the contemporary historical moment: Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. Writing brings Printing; brings universal every-day extempore Printing, as we see at present.(164)

It is here that the contradictory character of the man of letters’s modernity becomes palpable. If the equation that writing=printing=democracy holds true, then the expansion of print culture into the domain of ‘universal, everyday’ experience, which characterizes the moment of Carlyle’s writing, is equivalent to a radical democratization. Democratization, though, belongs to a more extended analogical chain in Carlyle’s thought, linking it to rationalization, utilitarianism, and scepticism: the very sources of the corrosion of heroism and hero-worship in the modern period. Thus, on the one hand, democracy, engendered by the expansion of print culture, contributes to the disenchantment of the ‘sacred’ character of the Literary Man, whilst, on the other hand, it establishes a sphere of influence for writers which excites wonderment more appropriate to the experience of religion: ‘Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised . . . Do not Books still accomplish miracles, as Runes were fabled to do . . . With the art of Writing, of which Printing is a simple, an inevitable and comparatively insignificant corollary, the true reign of miracles for mankind commenced’ (160). Because of its capacity to transmit prophetic speech on a far wider scale than hitherto seen, the modern printed Book gives rise to the redemptive possibility of a re-enchantment of the disenchanted world – albeit one which, in theory, has existed since the origin of writing itself. An important, though still neglected, aspect of On Heroes, then, is what David Amigoni has termed its ‘reflexive strain on the technology of writing’.46 The Carlylean hero is more commonly associated with the

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prophetic medium of speech, an assumption reinforced by the oral context of the lecture form as well as by Carlyle’s canonical persona of Victorian ‘sage’, but closer reading reveals his concern with the mediation of speech through writing, a process which culminates historically in the figure of the hero as man of letters. The oracular charisma of Carlyle’s heroes cannot be accessed through oral immediacy, Amigoni argues, but is instead, more ambiguously, an ‘inscribed utterance, circulating in a print culture and in need of interpretation’.47 At its most rhetorically triumphal, ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ is not an affirmation of the essence of individual ‘greatness’ so much as a paean to the power of print mediation. However implausible we may find Carlyle’s attempt to elevate ‘parliamentary reporters to the status of prophets, priests and kings’, as Terry Eagleton avers, it is at least consistent with his attention to the mediated nature of modern secular authority.48 At the same time, the man-of-letters hero cannot fully be described in terms of his rhetorical textual function or affiliation to the bourgeois public sphere, since he also remains attached to the figured presence of a visual icon. Conceived as both printed word and iconic figure, the man of letters is a locus of unresolved tension, at once distanced from and intimately bound to the identity of the biographical subject. While portraits offer a means of visually embodying the hero’s authentic essence, writing has the potential to disperse and defer authorial presence. Writing may thus inflict damage on the symbolic aura of the hero, even as it enables unprecedented influence over his followers. Yet the image itself can become an object of print mediation and mass reproduction, as in the case of the literary portrait galleries. Though Carlyle sought material symbols to incarnate the distinctive character of his biographical subjects, he understood that the growing prevalence of the printed icon in modern culture problematized the question of access to visual truth. The fetishizing of visual embodiment within contemporary culture is broached towards the end of ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ in a discussion of the contemporary social practice of ‘Lionism’ (194). Despite having suggested that the subjects of the lecture suffered from neglect or irreverence in the manner of their reception, Carlyle acknowledges that even ‘these Men of Letters too were not without a kind of Hero-worship: but what a strange condition has that got into now!’ (193).Whereas Burns, for instance, is perceived as a victim of the ‘disorganic’ condition of the literary profession, which contributes to the indignity of his economic hardship, he is simultaneously lionized at the hands of the Edinburgh gentry. In Carlyle’s narrative, indeed, the attention received by Burns is worse than neglect:

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his treatment as a celebrity being more pernicious in its effects than the disregard of an impersonal market: And yet, alas . . . these Lion-hunters were the ruin and death of Burns. It was they that rendered it impossible for him to live! They gathered round him in his Farm; hindered his industry; no place was remote enough from them. He could not get his Lionism forgotten, honestly as he was disposed to do so. He falls into discontents, into miseries, faults; the world getting ever more desolate for him; health, character, peace of mind all gone; – solitary enough now. It is tragical to think of! These men came but to see him; it was out of no sympathy with him, nor no hatred to him. They came to get a little amusement: they got their amusement; – and the Hero’s life went for it! (194–5)

By drawing attention typographically to the word ‘see’, Carlyle emphasizes the visual medium that the practice of lionism holds in common with his own conception of hero-worship. The suggestion that Burns was effectively killed by an act of looking has disturbing implications for the doctrine that ‘Man is a born idol-worshipper, sight-worshipper’, just as the ‘Lichtstrasse’ of Fraser’s Magazine provided an uncomfortably suitable medium for the exhibition of Goethe’s ‘Eidolon’.49 Lionism is conceived by Carlyle as a form of visual representation which bears witness to the enduring anthropological foundations of idolatry, yet which fails to recognize its symbolic meaning. Burns is reduced by ‘Lion-hunters’ to the level of pure social visibility, the object of a detached spectatorial gaze bereft of symbolic capacity: a ‘thing seen’ without sympathy or hatred. By 1840 ‘literary lionism’ had become a topical subject of debate, most openly confronted in Harriet Martineau’s review-essay for The London and Westminster Review published in April of the previous year. Martineau’s diagnosis of this distinctively modern cultural phenomenon may well have been in Carlyle’s thoughts as he described its malign effects on the career of Burns, although any direct influence is likely to have been reciprocal. Martineau herself characterized ‘literary lionism’ in notably Carlylean terms, labelling it a ‘sign of the times’ and defining lions as the false ‘idols of society’, and indeed Carlyle had already discussed the practice in his published writings and correspondence dating back to the 1820s.50 Significantly, in Carlyle’s usage, the term ‘lion’ began as an expression for the reputation achieved by his translation of Wilhelm Meister in 1824 before becoming a figure for his public persona as a lecturer during the late 1830s, thus reflecting the broader genealogy of the word.51 By the time of On Heroes lionism had a strong autobiographical resonance for Carlyle, as it marked the cultural effects of his growing professional success, heightened by his

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conscious decision to focus on the medium of the lecture. In a letter written shortly before commencing the lecture series on 24 February 1840 he lamented the distractions of becoming lionized by fashionable society in a manner reminiscent of Martineau’s critique: ‘For my own share, I confess, there is no lionism nor looking at lions, nor late dining, nor trade of that kind at all, that suits me tenth-part as well as being left alone to try whether I can do any work or not.’ Here, lionism is presented as a shallow, gregarious spectacle lacking the ontological substance of solitary labour. The letter defines ‘lions’ as ‘those whom the world runs after, to see, as if they were lions in a show’, or as ‘individuals worth a look, and generally worth little more’, again emphasizing the term’s etymological derivation from visual culture. Such connotations of hollowness and inauthenticity are clearly implied by Carlyle’s observation on a social encounter with Bulwer-Lytton that the novelist is ‘the chief literary lion of this generation’.52 Yet despite his attempts to disavow the practice, Carlyle was evidently concerned over the extent of his own involvement in literary lionism during this period. In a letter written on 11 May 1840 (just over a week before delivering ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’) he makes an apparent allusion to the predicament of Burns amongst the Edinburgh gentry when recounting his own experience as a lecturer to fashionable London society. At the close of the lecture Carlyle represents Burns’s tragic fate through a familiar trope of visibility, suggesting that his organic luminosity, likened to that of an exotic firefly, has been forced to subserve an unnatural appetite for social spectacle. Similarly, when referring to the lecture series that he had performed in consecutive years since 1837, Carlyle exclaimed in the letter to Ballantyne: Four times spitted on the spear’s point like a Surinam fire-fly to give light to the fashionable classes: this is enough of times! I shall be right thankful to get through it without disgrace, and cease shining in that manner.53

Carlyle’s narrative of the degeneration of heroism into lionism within modern society can be read reflexively, then, in relation to the immediate circumstances of its production. In writing the representative biography of a modern man of letters Carlyle is also expressing anxieties about his own professional identity and its future direction. Yet the very medium in which he chooses to express these concerns is part of the problem which he identifies: the lecture critiques a culture of literary celebrity of which it is itself a manifestation. Aware of this contradiction, it is not surprising that Carlyle, soon afterwards, decided to abandon the mode of

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cultural visibility which lecturing provided, and to ‘cease shining in that manner’. Amongst his published writings Carlyle’s most sustained account of the phenomenon of lionism in relation to the doctrine of hero-worship can be found in his 1838 essay on Sir Walter Scott, also first published in the London and Westminster Review. The case of Scott is complementary to that of Burns but also, in some ways, its antithesis as a cultural paradigm for the modern man of letters. Whereas Burns, for instance, was unable to capitalize on the economic opportunities of his fame, Scott provides an example of successful accommodation to the rationalization of the literary market. Like Burns, however, Scott’s alleged moral weakness (which contributes to his ultimate financial failure) is exacerbated by the corrosive effects of modern celebrity culture. Carlyle begins this essay with a consideration of the anthropological basis of Fenimore Cooper’s observation on the ‘instinctive tendency in men to look at any man who has become distinguished’, testing its validity with examples taken from contemporary society. His principal example is ‘that crowning phenomenon, and summary of modern civilisation, a soir´ee of lions’, a phenomenon which is again characterized as a medium of visual spectacle. The ‘soir´ee of lions’ forms an exhibition of social distinction in which no ‘articulate utterance’ is exchanged between the spectator and the object of sight (iv, 135): For which reason it has been suggested, with an eye to sincerity and silence in such lion-soir´ees, Might not each lion be, for example, ticketed, as winedecanters are? Let him carry, slung round him, in such ornamental manner as seemed good, his silver label with name engraved; you lift his label, and read it, with what farther ocular survey you find useful, and speech is not needed at all.(iv, 135)

Here, the ritualized worship of the lion-soir´ee is envisaged as a site of commodity exchange in which the fetishizing of social visibility, both on the part of observer and observed, is transparently inscribed. Of all modern authors, Carlyle claims, Scott provides the most egregious example of this visual fetishism. The extent of Scott’s ‘popularity’ makes him the ‘observed of all observers’, which, in turn, causes still more to ‘look, where the world has already so long looked’, and finally produces in Scott himself the ‘desire’ of being ‘looked at’ (iv, 136–7).54 As a result of this circular process of visual recognition, it becomes difficult to determine whether Scott merits the title of ‘great man’, but ‘there can be no question . . . that he was a most noted and even notable man’ (iv, 137). The distinction between the ‘great man’ and the ‘noted man’ seeks to differentiate between

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the immanent visuality of the true hero, on the one hand, and the heteronomous visibility embodied by the figure of the literary lion on the other.55 For Carlyle, however, to suggest that Scott’s notability is conferred through external representation may be only another way of acknowledging the common anthropological substratum of hero worship, in however degraded a form. The phenomenon of lionism is adjudged ‘not ridiculous only, but sublime’, for even this banal social ritual bears witness to ‘the ultimate and final creed of mankind; indestructible, changing in shape, but in essence unchangeable’. In this sense, lionism is only a weaker form of hero-worship, a temporary placeholder for an ineradicable instinct, which preserves the possibility of its own transcendence: ‘Herein, at lowest’, Carlyle concludes, ‘is proof that guineas exist, that they are believed to exist, and valued’, even if their valuation is inflated (iv, 136–7). Unlike Martineau and other contemporaries, then, Carlyle does not straightforwardly condemn the culture of literary lionism. The essay on Scott attempts to account for this new form of idolatry within the overarching framework of his anthropological doctrine of heroism and heroworship, and thus retrieves its value in establishing a normative foundation for his broader cultural critique. Of course, this endeavour is not without difficulties, the most intractable of which is the epistemological burden which the incorporation of lionism into an expanded field of human practices of worship places upon the hero-worshipper. Though Carlyle argues that modern forms of social visibility residually preserve a symbolic potential that is waiting to be released, he acknowledges that the prevalence of these forms may blind the capacity to recognize such potential. In a culture where ‘fame’ is increasingly defined by mass-mediated forms of visual representation perhaps the ‘great man’ can only be distinguished from the ‘noted man’ by virtue of his reluctance to be made visible, a distinction which would make him hard to recognize indeed. Carlyle raises this possibility in response to the notability of Scott by analogizing sound and vision: ‘Perhaps our greatest poets are the mute Miltons; the vocals are those whom by happy accident we lay hold of, one here, one there, as it chances, and make vocal’ (iv, 149). Similarly, throughout On Heroes, Carlyle’s insistence upon the necessity of ‘sight-worship’ is at odds with his approbation for the ‘silent great men’, for those who refuse to ‘be seen of all the market-place’ (224–5). In moments such as these Carlyle holds on to the desire for an object of reverence which remains radically uncontaminated by the public sphere of print culture; one which withdraws absolutely from the circulation of images and words in the literary market.

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Goethe and professional development ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ has, in recent years, been read as an attempt to work through Carlyle’s early anxieties about the manliness of the literary vocation, varying in the degree of its effectiveness.56 The Carlylean man of letters evidently embodies a ‘strenuously masculine ideal’ of authorship, which, as Carol Christ observes, is gender specific not so much in name as in the ‘discursive space’ which it maps out.57 Yet while the lecture series of 1840, to some extent, marks a resolution of Carlyle’s prolonged absorption with the condition of the modern author (after this date, as is commonly recognized, he pays increasingly less attention to Literature per se), it would be more accurate to conceive this moment not as the final reduction of anxiety and contradiction to apodictic truth, but as a transitional stage within a self-consciously dramatized narrative of professional development.58 This is the narrative of literary apprenticeship which Carlyle derived from, and in part read into, the work of Goethe, and which he in turn mediated for many early and mid-Victorian contemporaries. While, thus far, I have focussed on Carlyle’s iconographic reading of the ‘luminous’ author, using the Eidolon of Goethe as one of its central examples, in the final section of this chapter, I consider his contribution to narrative representations of the professional literary career. During the early part of his career Carlyle closely modelled his own intellectual development on what he understood Goethe’s experience to have been.He accounted for the long temporal duration of Goethe’s literary career as an ongoing process of intellectual growth, projecting into real life the fictional narrative of self-cultivation formulated in Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre (1794). In his 1828 essay on Goethe Carlyle considered Wilhelm Meister as ‘the mature product of the first genius of our times’, a work whose moral and philosophical achievement embodied the truth reflected in its own narrative form (i, 173). Despite his reservations about some aspects of the novel, he saw it as an important advance on Goethe’s earlier, and more popular, work, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), marking a ‘change from inward imprisonment, doubt and discontent into freedom, belief and clear activity’ (i, 184).59 The place of Wilhelm Meister in Goethe’s development is slightly modified, though the overall schema remains unchanged, in the posthumous 1832 essay ‘Goethe’s Works’: here, Carlyle categorizes the Lehrjahre as an intermediate stage of Goethe’s spiritual growth to be later surpassed in the sequel Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre (1821), a work representing the final period of ‘Reverence’ and ‘faith’ in Goethe’s life (iii, 147–8). In this account of Goethe’s exemplary career there is both a

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recognition of ongoing change (within the parameters of religious teleology) and a particular focus on the ‘years of apprenticeship’ during which the young writer commences his education. Not only did Carlyle seek to emulate this Goethean model of literary apprenticeship by translating and commenting on Goethe’s texts during his own apprenticeship years of the 1820s and 1830s, but he also incorporated it within his own early fictional narratives of self-formation, first in the unfinished novel Wotton Reinfred and then, more successfully, in Sartor Resartus.60 The literary-historical significance of Sartor Resartus in interpreting German Romantic philosophy and aesthetics for a Victorian readership has long been established, but what is less commonly recognized is the importance of this work of cultural transmission to the discourse of nineteenthcentury literary professionalism.61 Though less overtly concerned with the ideal function of the man of letters than his 1840 lecture, Carlyle’s earlier text also exercised considerable influence over subsequent debates on the value of professional labour. Book Two of Sartor Resartus, comprising the famous narrative sequence of Teufelsdr¨ockh’s conversion experience, culminates in the discovery of a literary vocation – a dedication to employing the ‘pen’ as his tool – which brings to a close his informal spiritual ‘apprenticeship’. Teufelsdr¨ockh’s apprenticeship teaches him the high dignity of his ‘Calling’, that of an ‘Art’ which should not be ‘degrad[ed] into a handicraft’.62 This internal process is distinguished from the language of ‘terrestrial Apprenticeship’ which the text, following Wilhelm Meister, self-consciously invokes (76). Teufelsdr¨ockh concedes that the latter is necessary in order to shape the ‘vague universality of a Man . . . into a specific Craftsman’, but he also insists that ‘Professions, or Bread-studies’ limit the potential of self-cultivation in its spiritual dimension: ‘the Bread-artist can travel contentedly round and round, still fancying that it is forward and forward, and realise much: for himself victual; for the world an additional horse’s power in the grand corn-mill or hemp-mill of Economic Society’ (93). Professional training, at its crudest level, is not conducive to the highest form of Bildung, but rather leaves the immaterial core of the self undeveloped; the professional author is the ‘Bread-artist’ condemned to the repetitive, circular labour of commodity production, an equation which reduces the process of apprenticeship to one of mere accommodation within prevailing ‘Economic Society’. At the same time, Sartor Resartus argues that the goal of self-cultivation should not be conceived as an autonomous development of consciousness, or through the attempt to define the responsibilities of the self in abstract terms, and instead seeks to anchor its potentially nebulous ‘vague wavering Capability’ in some ‘fixed

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indubitable Performance’: the latter being an expression of Carlyle’s familiar insistence on the necessity of articulating self-identity through work (126). Teufelsdr¨ockh’s apprenticeship thus recapitulates, in thinly veiled form, Carlyle’s account of Goethe’s intellectual development, passing through the ‘mad fermentation’ of youthful ‘Werterism’ (The Sorrows of Teufelsdr¨ockh), also equated with the ‘Satanic School’ of Byron, to arrive at a mature wisdom openly inspired by Wilhelm Meister (123, 138).63 The latter text provides Teufelsdr¨ockh with numerous apothegms on the importance of accepting the practical limitations of self-cultivation, exhorting him to realize his ‘ideal’ within the sphere of the ‘Actual’ (148–9). Carlyle’s interpretation of the ‘message’ of Wilhelm Meister is directly transposed into Sartor Resartus’s narrative of literary apprenticeship, even to the extent that Teufelsdr¨ockh may be read as an inter-textual figure for Goethe himself. In this sense, Wilhelm Meister becomes the ur text of literary apprenticeship, in relation to which all subsequent re-workings of this narrative paradigm are metonymic figures. By privileging Wilhelm Meister’s mature acceptance of the need for practical action over The Sorrows of Young Werther’s overwrought sensibility, Carlyle also promotes a narrative of ‘professional’ development in a different sense of the word. Although wary of the danger of being reduced to a ‘Bread-artist’, Teufelsdr¨ockh ultimately defines authorship as an act of labour rather than a state of mind, his final injunction being to ‘Produce! Produce!’: Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it in God’s name! . . . Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called To-day, for the Night cometh wherein no man can work.(149)

This work ethic is akin to a professional discipline which defines the authorial self through its routine projection onto, and alienation from, the external world. Mary Jean Corbett comes to a similar conclusion in tracing the discourse of autobiographical ‘development’ from Wordsworth’s The Prelude to Sartor Resartus. Whereas Wordsworth’s poetic apprenticeship is shaped by a professional ideology bluntly opposed to participation in the literary market, Carlyle’s professionalism, according to Corbett, is achieved through a strategic accommodation between the man of genius and commercial pragmatism signalled in the idiosyncratic form of his text. The fact that Teufelsdr¨ockh’s transcendental wisdom has to be mediated to the reader by the bumbling and prosaic Editor – a figure much closer to the man of letters as literary hack – implies a recognition of the inevitability

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of entanglement with the market: thus, ‘Carlyle’s heroic author is reborn as the literary professional’.64 Critics have often pointed out that the model of literary apprenticeship presented in Sartor Resartus does not accurately translate the conception of self-cultivation posited by Goethe in Wilhelm Meister, and thereafter associated with the genre of the Bildungsroman, despite its manifest indebtedness. Charles Frederick Harrold, for example, characterized Carlyle as reluctant to embrace the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of Bildung, and wishing to separate ‘action’ from ‘being’. Inasmuch as the Goethean archetype of the Bildungsroman was concerned with unfolding the immanent capacities and desires of an individual subject in tension with the strictures of external environment and circumstance, Carlyle remained a sceptical advocate of ‘self-cultivation’ as a virtue in its own right. Harrold concludes: ‘It may be said, therefore, that Goethe’s doctrine of Bildung aided Carlyle in his formulation of a gospel of action only in so far as it adjusted itself to Carlyle’s hatred for Byronic negation, self-indulgence, unrealistic visioning of man’s capacities’.65 Nevertheless, Carlyle’s singular appropriation of Wilhelm Meister and its discourse of spiritual apprenticeship proved highly effective in reconfiguring a notoriously abstract and esoteric aesthetic ideal as a model of practical ethics suitable for application within specific cultural and institutional contexts. This is not to say that Carlyle merely simplified the ideal of Bildung, as any encounter with the labyrinthine obscurities of Sartor Resartus would testify. Nor is it to suggest that Carlyle’s text pursues the ‘practical’ orientation of Teufelsdr¨ockh’s apprenticeship to its full extent: on the contrary, his conversion leads to no immediate concrete resolution of, or confrontation with, the problems of professional vocation. As in ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’, Carlyle hints at the possibility of legislating for some new ‘organisation’ of the literary profession, heralding Goethe as ‘the greatest living Guild-Brother’, but Sartor Resartus was not influential on account of any practical proposals that it had to offer Carlyle’s fellow writers (219). What is important, rather, are the broader implications of Carlyle’s ‘gospel of action’, a phrase which somewhat crudely reifies his attempt to negotiate a median path between the opposing extremes of ‘Art’ and ‘handicraft’. Wishing to extricate the modern author from his humiliating dependence on the subsistence economy of the latter, Carlyle would endorse Teufelsdr¨ockh’s association of his literary vocation with the elevated sphere of the former; at the same time, he refuses to detach literary Art from the realm of concrete production, thus making it available for a social model of the professions. This pragmatic compromise, which arrives at an ethos of professional discipline by assimilating disparate concepts of

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art and labour, was adopted by more ‘practical’ proponents of literary professionalism, such as Charles Dickens and John Forster, in the 1850s, and also offered an attractively synthetic (or dialectical) narrative of intellectual development for the numerous novels of literary apprenticeship written in Britain in the wake of Sartor Resartus. The following chapter examines this post-Carlylean proliferation of the literary apprentice narrative in the work of early Victorian novelists, including Bulwer-Lytton, G. H. Lewes, and William Thackeray, and continues to probe its underlying cultural and ideological significance. In Sartor Resartus Carlyle combines both figural and narrative motifs to express the new heroic potential of the man of letters which he saw archetypally embodied in the writings of Goethe, yet the emphasis of Teufelsdr¨ockh’s ‘Clothes-Philosophy’ rests, as so often in Carlyle, on the symbol more than the story. Whereas Carlyle’s attempts to show the narrative process of the modern writer’s self-formation were either incomplete or fragmented in form, more conventional novelists of the period were more comfortable with the formula which he pioneered. In their fiction the ascription of temporal depth to the author’s self that is implied by the narrative experience of growth fully reveals the relevance of the Bildungsroman as a generic form to the historical emergence of the literary profession.

ch a p ter t h r ee

Thackeray and the novel of literary apprenticeship

One of the more striking features of the emerging discourse of literary professionalism in the early Victorian period was the adoption of seemingly ‘anachronistic forms’ of social production, at odds with their innovatory claims to cultural authority.1 The paraphernalia of archaic guild structures clothed the practice of modern professional authorship at a time when, elsewhere within Britain’s economy, they had long since been replaced by a capitalist organization of labour. Carlyle’s invocation of literary ‘guilds’ and ‘apprenticeships’ in Sartor Resartus and other texts was clearly a significant influence on the formation of this discourse, which was in turn transposed from the language of Goethe and the quite different social and economic conditions of late eighteenth-century Germany. Even in the original context of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, it has been suggested that such arcane initiation rites as the Society of the Tower refer back to an already obsolescent pre-modern social order.2 Yet, for many British writers of the 1830s and 1840s, the narrative of literary apprenticeship modelled on these sources was a means of forging a new identity for the professional author, which articulated a premeditated response to the prevailing material conditions of literary production. In this chapter I examine a body of texts which, while plainly aware of Carlyle’s mediating presence, shows an independent familiarity with the German sources from which he drew. Between 1832 and 1850 Benjamin Disraeli, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, G. H. Lewes, and William Thackeray all produced novels of literary apprenticeship which directly rework Goethe’s ‘prototype’ of the Bildungsroman. A subsidiary function of this chapter will thus be to demonstrate the extent of Goethe’s influence on leading British novelists of the early Victorian period – more pervasive than is commonly recognized – but its primary focus is on the novels produced by these (and other) writers, with particular attention given to Thackeray’s History of Pendennis (1848–50). The existence of this body of texts is indeed broadly recognized by scholars documenting the dissemination of German Romantic thought within nineteenth-century Britain, 67

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although it has not been recently and extensively studied in its own terms. Maurice Beebe, for example, refers to a series of ‘artist-apprentice’ novels – or more simply ‘art novels’ – appearing in English under the influence of Goethe from the 1830s onwards as the first to feature writers as central characters of fictional narrative: the earliest novel which he identifies is Disraeli’s Contarini Fleming: A Psychological Romance, published in 1832.3 From Disraeli to Bulwer-Lytton and Lewes and thence to Thackeray it is possible to trace a coherent development of intellectual debate and narrative form, albeit one crossed by competing strands of influence and involving rejection as much as absorption of preceding texts. At the risk of simplifying this dense inter-textual discourse, early Victorian novels of literary apprenticeship may be usefully subdivided into two main groups: those which broadly adhere to a narrative of self-formation explicitly modelled on the source-texts of Goethe and/or Carlyle, and those which present a more ‘bohemian’ pattern of professional experience, sometimes culminating in a sceptical withdrawal from, or demystification of, the narrative’s teleological design.

‘The Wilhelm Meister of real life’ In his 1845 ‘Preface’ to Contarini Fleming Disraeli acknowledged Goethe’s autobiography (Dichtung und Wahrheit) and Wilhelm Meister as his principal sources, describing the former as an account of the author’s ‘individual experience of self-formation’, but claimed that prior to the publication of his own text ‘an ideal and complete picture of the development of the poet had not been produced’.4 In the novel itself Contarini’s firstperson account of his development as a novelist and poet is explicitly framed as the story of a ‘long apprenticeship’ in his ‘craft’, echoing Wilhelm Meister in several key episodes.5 In some respects, Disraeli came closer to emulating the Goethean ideal of ‘self-formation’ than any other British writer of the period as the novel provides a focus on the aesthetic dimensions of Contarini’s progress, an aspect of Bildung downplayed by Carlyle and still relatively neglected in the narratives of Bulwer and Lewes. The emphasis placed on Contarini’s growing appreciation of beauty is certainly unusual by the standards of the early Victorian novel of apprenticeship. At the same time, Disraeli shares Carlyle’s interpretation of the requirement for practical application written into the pedagogical form of Wilhelm Meister, which ensures that in the end Contarini’s aesthetic cultivation must give way to ‘action’. Chevalier de Winter, who assumes a role akin to Goethe’s Society of the Tower in guiding the protagonist’s

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development, offers Contarini the following advice towards the end of the narrative: [T]he period has arrived in your life when you must renounce meditation. Action is now your part. Meditation is culture. It is well to think until a man has discovered his genius, and developed his faculties, but then let him put his intelligence in motion. Act, act, act; act without ceasing, and you will no longer talk of the vanity of life.6

This insistent desire to turn theory into practice has long been seen as a characteristic of British appropriations of Goethe’s text, starting with Carlyle.7 Yet Contarini Fleming goes further than Sartor Resartus in accepting the creative labour of art as a legitimate form of action; the answer given by de Winter to Contarini’s question, ‘[b]ut how am I to act?’, is simply to ‘create’. As a result, the novel ends with Contarini having reached a curiously indeterminate state of self-realization. His decision to ‘act’ encompasses the possibility that he will pass his life ‘in the study and the creation of the beautiful’, but equally it may instead lead him to undertake the ‘political regeneration of the country to which I am devoted’: opposing outcomes of his narrative of self-formation, which correspond to contrasting interpretations of its moral and aesthetic value, are held in suspension.8 In a review for The New Monthly Magazine written in July 1832, long before Disraeli’s Preface, Bulwer-Lytton clearly recognized Contarini Fleming’s affiliation to Wilhelm Meister, though interestingly he contrasts Goethe’s preoccupation with the world of ‘Inward’ thought to Disraeli’s delineation of ‘Outward’ passion: thus, even the most introspective of British apprentice novels appears crudely material alongside the original German source of self-cultivation.9 This observation was probably not intended as a criticism of Disraeli as Bulwer himself continued along the same path of adapting Goethe to suit British cultural tastes in his early novels of literary apprenticeship, Ernest Maltravers (1837) and its sequel Alice; or, The Mysteries (1838). In his Preface to the 1840 edition of Ernest Maltravers Bulwer defined the ‘moral education’ of the novel’s eponymous hero – ‘an imaginary author of our own time’ – as an ‘apprenticeship . . . of practical life’ in contradistinction from Wilhelm Meister’s cultivation of ‘theoretical art’.10 The novel is thus conceived as a work of realism (perhaps to the surprise of modern readers) which aims to trace the development of ‘character under the ripening influences of time and circumstance’ (8), albeit Bulwer was never a realist writer in the dominant empiricist tradition, as Edwin Eigner has shown.11 Maltravers’s university education at

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Gottingen rather than Oxford, and his accompanying preoccupation with ‘strange German romance and metaphysical speculations’ (28), seem to mark him out as a crassly derivative figure, but the obvious invocations of Goethean Bildung are intended to signify cultural differences as well as affinities. Bulwer’s narrative voice invites readers to follow ‘the fierce emotions and passionate struggles, through which the Wilhelm Meister of real life must work out his apprenticeship, and attain the Master Rank’ (66), at once acknowledging and loosening Maltravers’s ties to his fictive precursor. Bulwer’s determination to extrapolate a ‘practical philosophy’ (10) from Wilhelm Meister’s ‘theory’ of self-formation can be seen as an attempt to overcome perceived limitations in the culture of sensibility commonly associated with Goethe and other writers of the early nineteenth century. Just as Carlyle sought to disentangle the wisdom of the ‘mature’ Goethe from his youthful ‘Werterism’, so Ernest Maltravers shows Maltravers growing out of his early Romantic influences, chiefly The Sorrows of Young Werther, Schiller, and, most pervasively, Byron, to negotiate a more responsible role in public life. Margaret King and Elliot Engel describe a broader shift within Bulwer’s fiction of the 1830s in similar terms, regarding Ernest Maltravers as a pivotal text which marks the transition from his earlier use of recognizably ‘Byronic’ protagonists to an emerging ‘Carlylean hero’, socially committed and morally sincere. In embodying the ideal of harmonious self-development, Maltravers mediates between the extreme polarities of solipsistic idealism and ‘pragmatic materialism’ represented by the characters of Castruccio Cesarini and Lumley Ferrers, respectively.12 On the one side, Ferrers’s gospel of ‘action’ amounts to a cynical denial of the efficacy of literature and thought, resulting in his worship of power; Cesarini, on the other hand, refuses to countenance the value of mundane experience at the cost of a fetishized poetic sensibility and an increasingly paranoid social isolation. If Ferrers seems to represent the dangers of Carlyle’s doctrine of hero worship taken to excess, Cesarini is a figure of the Romantic po`ete maudite, who is explicitly compared to Shelley in his supposed ignorance of ‘characters of flesh and blood’ (124). In the sequel, Alice, Bulwer continues this attempt to reconcile ‘the man of genius’ with ‘the man of business’ (in the largest sense of the term). Maltravers’s counsellor, de Montaigne, at one point summarizes his progress by remarking: ‘You have for ever left the Ideal, and you are carrying your cargo of experience over to the Practical. When you reach that haven, you will have completed the development of your forces.’ Calling on Maltravers to renounce his intellectual scepticism, figured as an immature Byronic misanthropy,

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and engage actively in ‘useful’ and responsible social ‘labour’, de Montaigne voices the narrator’s constructive appropriation of the Goethean narrative of apprenticeship.13 In terms of literary apprenticeship the movement from the ‘Ideal’ to the ‘Practical’ can be seen as a distinctly professional narrative of artistic development, as Bulwer’s counterpointing of Maltravers and Cesarini – the two main author-figures in the novel – reveals. Cesarini presents a ‘caricature’ of the self-declared poetic ‘genius’ (122), whose transparent craving for external acclaim prevents him from developing beyond a stage of infantile narcissism, whereas, conversely, Maltravers is deemed a true ‘Man of Genius’ (10), partly by virtue of his willingness to serve the interests of the ‘Public’ and submit to the judgement of ‘Posterity’ (135, 200). Maltravers recognizes his position within a broader collective body of authors, figured in Carlylean terms as a democratic ‘priesthood’ or ‘Church of the world’; he declares his allegiance to a ‘glorious and divine profession’, which he views specifically ‘as a profession’ [original emphasis] (201). The formation of Maltravers’s professional identity as a writer thus accompanies the process of intellectual maturation by which he outgrows the febrile sensibility of Cesarini, a sensibility stigmatized as the product of a onesided cult of creative genius. In a similar way, the literary professionalism of Maltravers appears to signal a deliberate departure from the ideal of dandyism promoted (as well as satirized) in Bulwer’s earlier fiction, and which continues to flavour Disraeli’s Contarini Fleming. If the ‘dandiacal body’ may be defined as a locus of ‘Self-Worship’, as Carlyle suggests in Sartor Resartus, then dandyism might be thought to constitute an intrinsic risk of the aesthetic project of self-cultivation.14 In his obsessive pursuit of personal fame Cesarini also represents a parodic figure of the literary dandy, which Bulwer’s narrative reveals as an inappropriate model for mature professional identity. Another writer of the period who adhered closely to Goethean sources in formulating a fictional narrative of literary apprenticeship, and whose concerns reflect the increasingly professionalized literary culture of midcentury Britain, was G. H. Lewes. In his novel Ranthorpe, written in 1842 but not published until 1847, Lewes uses Bulwer’s Ernest Maltravers as a template for the novel of literary apprenticeship, quoting from it repeatedly in epigraphic form, but he also demonstrates a first-hand acquaintance with the work of Goethe, as was later to become manifest in his scholarly biography of 1855.15 The novel borrows from Wilhelm Meister the theme of the young man’s ‘inward calling’, which it applies to the question of whether the ambitious Percy Ranthorpe has ‘mistaken Aspiration for Inspiration’

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in his pursuit of a literary career (159–60). Goethe plays a prominent role in Ranthorpe not only by providing (through various layers of mediation) the narrative form of the text, but also by becoming an exemplary figure who exercises a redemptive influence on the protagonist’s life. Ranthorpe’s experience of failure as an author drives him to the point of suicide, a premature Wertherean (or Chattertonian) termination of his apprenticeship, which is forestalled by the providential intervention of Thornton, a mysterious sage-like figure who persuades him to snap out of his pusillanimous despair by observing, in Carlylean fashion, that while ‘G¨othe wrote “Werther” . . . he did not act it [sic]’ (171). Heralding Goethe as a figure of the ‘strong man’, capable of ‘calm mastery over all the storms of life’, Thornton is eager to correct his popular image, and in the process provides Ranthorpe with an authorial anti-type to the maudlin poets ‘who whine, and whine, and despair, and die’ (170). There is an explicitly gendered aspect to this revisionary construction of Goethe. According to Thornton, Goethe was a masculine type of the artist sometimes perceived as ‘cold and calculating’ by those accustomed to a feminized culture of sensibility (170). Ranthorpe himself is presented as a stereotypically gendered product of the prevailing literary culture, having a ‘weak, wayward, and somewhat womanly nature’ (190), and it is only through striving to emulate the example of Goethe that he can avoid the usual fate of Romantic ‘martyrology’ (230). Through another character, the female artist Isola, Lewes suggests that ‘genius itself is powerless, unless accompanied by strength of will’ (197): ‘genius’ is implicitly a feminine attribute which the professional writer needs to supplement with masculine discipline. Lewes’s endorsement of the professionalization of authorship, evidenced both within the novel and subsequent critical essays, is thus largely framed as a critique of the received myths of ‘genius’. Book iv Chapter viii of Ranthorpe, for example, is ironically titled ‘The Miseries of Genius’ and comes packaged with no less than six epigraphs from Wordsworth (twice), Chatterton, Burns, Shelley, and Leopardi, indicating how well-worn the trope of suffering genius had become by the 1840s. Lewes invokes this impressive list of sources in order to challenge the popular assumption that, as Burns put it, ‘[t]here is not in all the martyrologies that ever were penned, so rueful a narrative as that of the lives of poets’ (229). By this chapter, Ranthorpe has acquired the maturity to recognize that his ‘sorrows’ are caused not so much by his genius as by ‘want of genius’; acknowledging that his misery is a consequence of his own weakness and that he has been ‘punished’ accordingly, he is able finally to reject the ‘common cant of genius being a fatal gift’ (230). By emphasizing the

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unexceptional nature of their suffering, Lewes explicitly places authors on a par with other middle-class professionals: ‘Does the physician never starve? Is the barrister never briefless? Has the clergyman always a living?’ (231) This is a rhetorical strategy that Thackeray later developed to greater satirical effect in Pendennis, a text which both extends and revises the apprentice novel genre. For Lewes, however, it is not a question of debunking the idea of genius per se, so much as mobilizing it in the service of a more constructive account of professional identity. The key distinction of his Fraser’s Magazine article ‘The Condition of Authors in England, Germany, and France’, published in the same year as Ranthorpe, is that ‘[l]iterature should be a profession, not a trade’, and that whilst professional status involves a recognition of the socio-economic function of literary work, this is not the same thing as reducing authorship to a branch of commodity production. Professional authors, Lewes maintains, ‘should be men of an unmistakeable vocation’, ‘lay teachers of the people’.16 In Ranthorpe Lewes presents the professional vocation of authorship as ultimately compatible with the normative function of the literary market as an expression of the bourgeois public sphere: as in Ernest Maltravers, the hero of the novel must learn not to despise the reading ‘public’ or the value of ‘popular’ success. At the same time, this does not imply that Lewes renders the profession democratically accessible to all aspiring writers; Ranthorpe’s quest is to discover whether he has a true spiritual vocation qualifying him to join ‘The Aristocracy of Intellect’, a select cultural body which supplants the traditional aristocracies of birth and wealth as the legitimate object of his ambition (107–11). Lewes’s explicit comparison between old and new forms of ‘aristocracy’ serves to sanctify the intellectual vocation of the writer: ‘While the most potent Marquis of Fiddle-faddle, with all his untold wealth and line of ancestry, “dies and makes no sign” – the house, the room where the author lived, the chair wherein he sat, or the desk on which he wrote, are treasured as national relics unto which thousands of pious pilgrims make journeys from year to year’ (110). The novel’s exposition of Ranthorpe’s growing disillusionment with the prosaic realities of literary life, including his temporary experience of literary lionism, then, does not constitute its final word on professional authorship: the close of the narrative invokes the possibility of a re-enchantment of the writer’s vocation, a restoration of lost dignity. The ‘dignity of literature’ was to become a rallying-cry for professional development during the mid nineteenth century, as I suggest in Chapter 4. The narrative voice of Ranthorpe exemplifies this rhetoric in its desire to establish writing as an autonomous social identity: ‘Either there is dignity

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in intellectual rank, or there is not; if there is, no other rank is needed; if there is not, no other rank can give it; for dignity is not an accident, but a quality’ (111). This assertive professionalism is another of the debts which the novel owes to Bulwer’s Ernest Maltravers. Independently of Carlyle, Bulwer had already formulated an ideal of the literary profession as a modern secularized ‘priesthood’, both circumventing existing hierarchical structures and restricting membership to an elect spiritual body. Maltravers figures Literature as ‘the Great Primitive Church of the world, without Popes or Muftis – sinecures, pluralties, and hierarchies’, a religion whose ‘servants spoke to the earth as the prophets of old, anxious only to be heard and believed’ (201); though divorced from any real sense of economic necessity, it is also a ‘glorious and divine profession’ which he distinguishes from the amateur productions of other leisured gentlemen (201). Bulwer’s commitment to this blend of religious and secular vocation extends back to the early 1830s and a series of articles which he wrote as editor of The New Monthly Magazine. In ‘Literature Considered as a Profession’ (1831) he argued that Literature had arrived at ‘one of the most important and critical moments’ in its historical development, ‘that of the complete triumph and enthronement of public opinion’. In place of direct patronage by ecclesiastical, monarchical, or aristocratic minorities, authors had, for the first time, become clients of an ‘all-powerful . . . majority’: the reading public itself. Yet while Bulwer declares allegiance to the democratic authority of the public sphere, he also expresses concern about the development of an unregulated literary market in which writers are treated ‘like other operatives’, and the ‘principle of free trade’ is applied to intellectual and bodily labour alike.17 Without effective regulation of the market authors will be placed entirely at the mercy of the paying public, and the consequence may be to unleash the charismatic influence of the man of letters in a destructive form. Bulwer thus called for stronger institutional organization of the literary profession (along the lines of more recognized gentlemanly professions) and greater cooperation between men of letters, a plea which subsequently took the form of more concrete proposals for the establishment of a ‘Literary Union’.18 As with Carlyle, then, Bulwer’s promotion of a ‘Church’ of Literature was intended to counter the ‘disorganic’ condition of laissez-faire economics.

Lost illusions Goethe also occupied a significant place in the early career of William Thackeray. Thackeray spent several months in Weimar during 1830–1,

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where he was introduced to Goethe, undertook translations of his work, and even contributed to his journal, Chaos. Daniel Maclise’s portrait of Goethe for Fraser’s literary ‘Gallery’, which drew the attention of Carlyle in 1832, was based on a sketch by Thackeray drawn from memory.19 As S. S. Prawer has documented, references to Goethe are ‘ubiquitous in Thackeray’s world’, in particular to The Sorrows of Young Werther which he seems to have held in ‘fascinated detestation’. As late as 1853 Thackeray composed a poetic parody of this text, ‘Sorrows of Werther’, satirizing the lachrymose poetic sensibility with which it was associated. His response to Wilhelm Meister, which he read in Carlyle’s translation, was also largely negative according to Prawer, though I would contend that Pendennis is, in part, a parodic reworking of Goethe’s novel, again indicating an ambivalent mixture of fascination and critique.20 Nevertheless, Pendennis also belongs to a somewhat different sub-genre of the novel of apprenticeship, which bears equally close links to non-Germanic narrative traditions, and thus marks a significant rupture within the genealogy of fiction discussed to this point. For some theorists of the nineteenth-century European Bildungsroman differences within national cultural traditions or between phases of its historical evolution help to account for the difficulty of establishing a single comprehensive core of generic identity. Marianne Hirsch, for instance, distinguishes between German and Anglo–French varieties of the ‘novel of formation’, arguing that whereas the former tends to stress the ultimate reconcilability of individual desire and collective belonging, locating selfrealization within existing ‘social responsibility’, the latter perceives the individual’s accommodation with society as invariably corrupting ‘natural impulses and values’. The Anglo–French ‘novel of formation’ draws on the stronger realist traditions of both countries in seeking to represent ‘the progressive disillusionment of its protagonist in his encounters with the social reality’.21 Georg Luk´acs, in The Theory of the Novel, makes a similar generic distinction between the ‘novel of education’ in its classical Goethean form (Bildungsroman) and the ‘novel of disillusionment’ epitomized by the fiction of Balzac and Flaubert, which he tends to present as its historical successor, whilst acknowledging that in practice the ‘dividing line’ between them is ‘often fluid’.22 As I have already shown, the suggestion of a broad division between German and British models of the apprentice novel does not fit the available evidence, which overwhelmingly indicates the familiarity of early Victorian writers with German sources, and their self-conscious attempts at cultural adaptation. In the novels of Disraeli, Bulwer-Lytton, and Lewes, we encounter narratives of self-formation which indeed move towards the constructive re-integration of the

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Romantic individual within broader society, however vague or contradictory their resolutions may appear. Thackeray, however, while sharing the same cultural sources as these writers, tends rather to exhibit the characteristics of Hirsch’s Anglo–French realism, a tradition synonymous with what Luk´acs terms the ‘novel of disillusionment’. As I argue later in this chapter, Pendennis can be read specifically as an expression of Thackeray’s distaste for the faux-Germanic trappings of Bulwer’s Ernest Maltravers, a book originally dedicated to the ‘great German People’ which he saw as embodying the worst sentimental excesses associated with the cultural authority of Goethe.23 The theme of ‘lost . . . illusion’ is one that Thackeray clearly derived from Balzac’s novel of the same title, Illusions Perdues, published between 1837 and 1843, contemporaneously with the early British novels of literary apprenticeship. Lewes’s Ranthorpe also shows the influence of Balzac in structuring its hero’s experience of the disappointing reality of literary success as a narrative of successive disenchantments culminating in the loss of ‘ambition’ and ‘illusions’, and Thackeray is known to have read this novel more sympathetically than Bulwer’s.24 Both writers would have found in their French source a closer attention to the material conditions of authorship and the literary market than is apparent in the work of Goethe. In Illusions Perdues Balzac traces the parallel career development of the poet and journalist Lucien Chardon and the printer and paper manufacturer David S´echard, revealing the interdependency of modern professionalized authorship (including that of his own text) and the technological development of literary production. Lucien’s elevated discourse of poetic genius, as well as his compromising acceptance of the sordid realities of feuilleton journalism, is literally fuelled by David’s self-effacing work as an inventor seeking to discover cheaper methods for the mass production of paper. Balzac thus caustically undermines the idealist delusions of his aspiring literary apprentice, the self-styled ‘Byron of Angoulˆeme’, who remains oblivious to the significance of David’s raw material. At the same time, Lucien’s accommodation to the ‘hard facts of the writer’s trade’ leads to the abandonment of his earlier professional ideals; the pursuit of literary ‘success’ at all cost is a corrupting process amounting to a form of prostitution, a metaphor which Thackeray elaborates extensively in Pendennis. Balzac’s text does not, therefore, unequivocally endorse a materialist disenchantment of Lucien’s Romantic illusions, since his ideals – however naive or egotistical – are, in some ways, preferable to a cynical acceptance of reality. Illusions Perdues contains two antithetical images of the modern literary profession, impossible to reconcile and between

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which Lucien is thus forced to choose: on the one hand, the immoral, frivolous, but energizing world of journalism, on the other hand the ‘grave and austere’ intellectual society of d’Arthez’s C´enacle. Both are collective homosocial institutions inviting Lucien’s fraternal belonging, though there is little sense of brotherly harmony at play in the former. In forsaking his comrades in the C´enacle for the feuilletons, Lucien signals a readiness to compromise his artistic principles in order to pursue the ‘shorter and apparently more pleasant route’ to success. The C´enacle thus represents an abandoned ideal of the literary profession in a more positive sense than Lucien’s tarnished clich´es about poetic genius: d’Arthez’s conviction of the ‘priestly function’ of writers, including that of the Press, stands in stark contrast to the representation of newspapers as sordid ‘intellectual brothels’.25 Balzac’s interest for contemporary British writers derives both from his more sceptical narrative of self-formation, which radicalizes the genre’s emphasis on the exposure of subjective illusions to a point where reintegration with normative social values proves difficult to achieve, and his foregrounding of journalism as central to the nineteenth-century experience of literary apprenticeship. These two aspects of Illusions Perdues are intrinsically linked: what the novel demonstrates is how the experience of journalistic authorship shatters Lucien’s prior assumptions about the sanctity of writing. As Suzanne Howe observed, journalism was a recurrent preoccupation of the early Victorian literary apprentice novels, a fact which may be explained in at least two ways.26 Firstly, if the novel of apprenticeship takes as its privileged temporal domain what Sartor Resartus terms ‘the fervid season of youth’ (89),27 as modern critics of the Bildungsroman have often insisted, it is not surprising that a generation of male, middle-class authors whose careers began in the 1820s and 1830s should view journalism as a formative experience (to my knowledge, there are no comparable accounts by female novelists of the early Victorian period, which is presumably related to the greater difficulty faced by women in entering a profession known for its strong masculine homosocial culture during the early nineteenth century). Many of these writers – Thackeray and Dickens being the most prominent examples – began their professional lives by servicing the expanding market for periodicals. Secondly, and in addition to this empirical explanation, it can be argued that journalism became an issue of concern for the Bildungsroman because it posed a threat to its distinctive temporal form, a question which I explore further in relation to the debate between Bulwer and Thackeray on the modern literary profession. Like Balzac, these writers often represent journalism as both a

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narrative staging-post and obstacle to the realization of the writer’s artistic talent, however much they disagree in their moral response to this state of affairs. It is significant that Bulwer’s Ernest Maltravers avoids writing for periodicals through the good fortune of having independent means, making him virtually unique within the literary-apprentice novels of the period. Nevertheless, his narrator explicitly compares the effects of journalism on the career of the aspiring author to the negative influence of coterie fame, remarking that ‘[t]he man of talent who begins young at periodicals, and goes on long, has generally something crude and stunted about both his composition and his celebrity’ (194). This typical figure is compelled to ‘write for momentary effects; to study a false smartness of style and reasoning: to bound his ambition of durability to the last day of the month; to expect immediate returns for labour; to recoil at the “hope deferred” of serious works on which judgement is slowly formed’ (193–4). Journalistic authorship is thus seen as the form of literary production most commensurate with the immediate gratification of lionism and in conflict with the gradual development, and necessary deferral, of posthumous fame. This is a view which Bulwer articulated at greater length in his book England and the English (1833), a work of cultural and social criticism which argues that the establishment of the quarterly reviews at the end of the eighteenth century was responsible for having dissipated the talents of the best authors of the preceding generation into multiple sites of ephemeral publication.28 The argument is not an original one since it borrows, more or less verbatim, from Hazlitt’s earlier account of the disruptive temporal effects of the periodical form on inherited notions of literary fame.29 Interestingly, in Ernest Maltravers, Bulwer cites Hazlitt himself as an exemplary victim of this process, declaring that ‘[p]eriodicals sadly mortgaged the claims that Hazlitt, and many others of his contemporaries, had upon a vast reversionary estate of Fame’ (194). In other words, Hazlitt’s ‘claims’, and those of other early nineteenth-century writers, to a ‘Fame’ which ought rightfully to have been restored to them in posterity were sacrificed to the passing demands of journalism. Lewes took a somewhat different view of the role of periodical literature in the individual and collective formation of professional authors. In ‘The Condition of Authors in England, Germany, and France’ he challenges the customary declamation of the iniquities of journalism, arguing that it is ‘to periodical literature [that] we owe the possibility of authorship as a profession’. This was not only a matter of accepting, with greater realism than Bulwer, the prevailing material ‘condition’ of authorship – the fact that ‘[i]t is by our reviews,

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magazines, and journals, that the vast majority of professional authors earn their bread’ – but also of reclaiming (along with Carlyle) the latent cultural authority of journalism as a ‘potent instrument for the education of a people’.30 The journalistic experience of the literary apprentice became associated during the mid nineteenth century, both in France and Britain, with the metropolitan subculture of ‘bohemia’. In one definition, Wilhelm Meister itself fashions an ideal of bohemian life as a formative stage of individual development through Wilhelm’s peripatetic theatrical experience, which takes him beyond the confines of mundane bourgeois existence. Balzac, however, initiates the novelistic exploration of a specifically journalistic mode of bohemian life that proved popular amongst British writers. Thackeray’s Pendennis was only one of a series of novels published during the 1840s and 1850s which sought to document the contemporary urban milieu of literary journalism with detailed attention to its distinct topographical features and professional practices. James Grant’s Joseph Jenkins; or, Leaves From The Life of a Literary Man (1843), Thomas Miller’s Godfrey Malvern; or The Life of an Author (1843), and Robert Brough’s Marston Lynch (1860) all contain passages of striking resemblance to Pendennis, and should be added to the dense body of work on which Thackeray drew and in turn stimulated. By comparison with the Germanic literary-apprentice novels conceived along the lines of Wilhelm Meister, these bohemian novels offer a less sustained and reflective account of the process of self-formation, being more concerned to exhibit external scenes and incidents from journalistic life. The narrative design which they tend to follow is that of a young man’s pursuit of ‘fortune, as a literary man, in the great metropolis’ and his struggle to ‘make his way in the world’, involving colourful adventures amidst sub-cultural ‘low-life’.31 Grant, though himself a career journalist and future historian of the press, provides a similar depiction of the moral delinquencies of journalistic life to Balzac. Like Lucien Chardon, the eponymous hero of Joseph Jenkins is forced to abandon an early interest in poetry for ‘plain prose’, his toleration of the unscrupulous practice of periodical reviewers signalling a loss of literary idealism (iii, 123). The ‘[b]ribery and corruption’ which Grant presents as endemic to journalism reflect the broader social conditions of Jenkins’ professional experience, his involuntary association with aspects of urban life which foster a ‘passion for criminal pleasure’ (i, 208, 115). Though Jenkins is not an effectively particularized figure – the novel struggles to develop a sustained account of character ‘development’ even at the level of factual consistency – this only serves to highlight his representative status.

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Grant identifies his protagonist as one ‘of hundreds in London, calling themselves literary men, who have not written, nor are capable of writing, a page of passable matter on any subject, whose sole occupation is, to decry and depreciate the works of others’: as a figure of the average, unexceptional hack writer of the period (i, 205). Likewise, he conceives the exemplary function of his narrative as dispensing advice to the ‘thousands of gifted, but far too sanguine young men, just entering on the perilous career of authorship’ (iii, 169). Grant informs the reader that there are between three and four thousand professional authors based in London alone, excluding the ‘thousands’ who have tried and failed to pursue a career, but estimates that ‘not one in five hundred of those who have devoted themselves to professional authorship, are able, by the labours of their pen, to earn a permanent livelihood’ (iii, 169). Jenkins himself proves to be a statistically representative example of the probable failure of literary aspiration, as, by the end of the novel, he has experienced destitution living in slum conditions near Gray’s Inn Lane, before finally abandoning his career in journalism for a ‘mercantile house of the highest respectability’ (iii, 291). Whereas, in novels like Ranthorpe and Ernest Maltravers, the attempt to correct deluded preconceptions and cultural myths associated with the lives of authors prepares the ground for a more constructive narrative of professional development, Grant offers no alternative in Joseph Jenkins to a straightforward cautionary tale. Godfrey Malvern offers a similar, though marginally more appealing, account of bohemian life as a journalist and aspiring professional author in early Victorian London. Again, journalism is invoked as a realistic counterweight to the naive expectations engendered by an early love of poetry: Malvern discovers the familiar truth that poetry doesn’t sell and that what is required instead is the ‘common prose’ of ‘hard-plodding downright authorship’.32 The journalistic world, if not quite so insalubrious as Grant suggests, comprises anonymous, socially indeterminate hacks, ‘literary men, whose names are almost wholly unknown to the public’ and for whom the activity of writing is primarily a mode of economic exchange: ‘When they have written an article, it must instantly be converted into money’ (93). Several years before the publication of Pendennis, Miller exposes the condition of modern journalistic authorship as a form of wage-labour crudely determined by external market demand and deprived of the capacity for autonomous self-direction. Malvern’s first experience of professional writing comes when he is contracted to produce a monthly serial at £10 per number, a ‘given subject’ which he likens to ‘rubbing the sharp edge of genius on a poker, or bringing his nose to the

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grindstone’; compelled to ‘write against time for bread’ his dilemma anticipates a parallel episode in Thackeray’s novel, where Pen’s initiation into the material constraints of authorship is a commission to write a poem accompanying a pre-designed ‘illustration’ for an annual gift book within a matter of hours (185). The topography of Miller’s literary bohemia also comes close to Thackeray’s cultural milieu. The metropolitan terrain of journalists and booksellers, centred on the publishing district of Paternoster Row (near St Paul’s Cathedral), provides a concrete spatial representation of the ‘literary world’ that is extended and further particularized in Pendennis, taking in the surrounding theatres, taverns, and Inns of Temple. The relatively ‘low’ but socially mixed urban settings of bohemian novels stand in marked contrast to the preference for more elevated domestic or coterie scenes of professional authorship in the apprentice novels of Bulwer, Disraeli, and also (as I suggest in the following chapter) Dickens. The term ‘Bohemia’ was not widely discussed in English before Brough’s Marston Lynch, a novel originally serialized in the comic magazine Train in 1856. In Chapter xxx of Marston Lynch, entitled ‘Terra Incognita’, the narrator announces that ‘[t]here exists in the moral topography of London . . . a kind of debatable ground, or no man’s land, to which, till within our own time, no definite name or boundaries could be assigned; but the limits of which are now pretty generally understood, and which its enterprising discoverers have christened Bohemia’.33 Like Thackeray, Brough writes of ‘Bohemia’ in the past tense as a semi-mythical place which evokes ambivalent memories of his own youth: ‘I have lived and suffered in Bohemia, and, I thank heaven, have escaped from it so long ago as to be able to speak of its miseries, which no longer afflict me, without undue bitterness; and of its joys, which no longer tempt me, without partial fondness’ (315). The site of his formative struggles as a writer, Bohemia is associated here both with the suffering of economic hardship and the unspecified pleasures of irresponsible manhood. Brough outlines varying types of the Bohemian writer, ranging from ‘men with high artistic or literary aspirations who cannot succeed in life’ to those who are too ‘indolent’ or ‘improvident’ to maintain professional respectability, and ‘perhaps, the most deplorable of all – the literary Bohemian endowed with great and available powers . . . who has sold himself into slavery, who writes in violation of his conscience and instincts, for the sake of a little ready money’ (315–8). In this account Bohemia is an overdetermined signifier of conflicting cultural identities, equally synonymous with the enforced discipline of the Grub Street hack and artistic rebellion against bourgeois propriety: a place of

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both realism and romance, in other terms. Yet the overriding tone of the chapter is one of nostalgic affection for the ‘admirable degree of esprit de corps’ which exists amongst Bohemia’s motley inhabitants (318). Brough’s narrator argues, and Marston’s experience serves to illustrate, that ‘[i]n the depth of their own sufferings’ impoverished Bohemians ‘will help their still more unfortunate brethren’. In this respect, Marston Lynch celebrates an alternative, dissident model of collective identity to the more elevated professional discourse of the period, which promoted solidarity amongst authors on the basis of a shared ethos of priestly vocation and middle-class prudence. Whereas both Dickens and Thackeray, in their different ways, seem to have had divided loyalties between these two forms of professional sociability, Brough directly condemns attempts to force bohemian writers into conformity with the ‘unmeaning and wearisome restraints of what is called “polite society”’ (320). All three of the texts discussed above may be described, in Luk´acsian terms, as ‘novels of disillusionment’, which explore through narrative exposition the extent to which the material circumstances of journalistic authorship dispel ‘Romantic’ illusions about the self-formation of literary genius. Regardless of whether they were directly influenced by each other, these novels share a fundamental similarity of approach to the narrative of literary apprenticeship, whereby the hero’s desired initiation into the glamorous rituals of creative composition gives way to his apprehension of professional realities which is presented as a process of radical disenchantment, whether for sober or more comic effects. As the narrator of Miller’s Godfrey Malvern observes: ‘Authorship looks pretty enough in perspective – so does the scenery of a theatre; but let the beholder once step behind the scene, and all the enchantment is gone!’ (88–9). This analogy between the experience of professional authorship and theatrical illusion is a common feature in many Victorian apprentice novels, which again could be seen to derive from Wilhelm Meister. Wilhelm’s recollection of his first childhood experience of the ‘enchantment’ of the puppet theatre, and his subsequent desire to know how theatrical illusion is produced (‘I wished at once to be among the enchanters and the enchanted’), is not only a formative moment in his own psychological and vocational development, but also for the whole generic tradition which followed Goethe’s text in exploring the dialectics of illusion and disillusionment within the increasingly entangled spheres of art and commerce.34 Whereas, for Wilhelm, theatre itself is the principal locus of the experience of aesthetic illusion, for Balzac, Thackeray, and other novelists, it serves more as a metaphor for the immediate dilemmas of writing itself.

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The unheroic man of letters Thackeray’s relationship to the dominant discourse of Victorian literary professionalism has long been recognized as fraught. From early periodical reviews of his fiction through to recent academic studies Thackeray has been identified as a sceptical voice in the debates on the ‘dignity’ of literary labour and the heroic figure of the man of letters which helped to shape this discourse. In addition, as this chapter aims to show, Thackeray’s Pendennis can be understood as an inter-textual satire or parody on the established genre of the novel of literary apprenticeship. The iconoclasm which has been noted as a distinctive feature of Thackeray’s intellectual posture led him to oppose many of the sanctified tenets of professional ideology; yet, as we have already seen in relation to Carlyle, iconoclasm is not a pure mode of criticism, untainted by the totemic object which it seeks to dispel.35 Thackeray’s own response to Carlylean thought has received considerable attention in this area. The ‘anti-heroic’ character of Thackeray’s fiction, noted by his first biographer Anthony Trollope in 1879, was seen broadly as a critique of Carlylean historiography by Georg Luk´acs and Mario Praz in the mid twentieth century and then, more specifically, as a riposte to Carlyle’s celebration of literary heroes by later critics; Peter Shillingsburg, for example, has claimed that ‘Thackeray refused to set himself up to be the hero as man of letters’.36 Ian Ousby, however, questions the assumption of a ‘neat antithesis between Carlyle and Thackeray’, pointing out some of their ‘shared assumptions and shared concerns’ with regard to forms of heroism and hero worship in ‘modern society’.37 Thackeray’s anti-heroic rhetoric, he argues, is as much influenced by Carlyle’s account of modern secular idolatry as it is a critique of this doctrine. An important site of Thackeray’s critical ‘dialogue’ with Carlyle is his lecture series on The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century (first delivered in 1851), a text which, partly by virtue of its original medium, seems to invite direct comparison with Carlyle’s On Heroes, which Thackeray is known to have attended a decade earlier.38 Thackeray openly professes his reluctance to ‘make . . . hero[es]’ out of his eighteenth-century predecessors, including his greatest influence, Henry Fielding, even though the biographical tone of the lectures is variable.39 The very fact of his decision to devote a lecture series to a historical period which, for Carlyle, was representative of spiritual vacuity reflects the divergence in method and ideological standpoint. With its relaxed, memoiristic style Thackeray’s approach to the ‘great’ literary figures of the previous century flagrantly flouts a heroic mode of biographical representation, preferring the intimate iconoclastic

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perspective of the ‘valet species’ specifically denigrated by Carlyle. Having attended the lecture series, Carlyle wrote in exasperated recognition of their differences: ‘I wish I could persuade Thackeray that the test of greatness in a man is not whether he would like to meet him at a tea-party.’40 Thackeray’s attachment to intimacy, as a condition of spatial and cognitive proximity to objects of representation, may also be viewed as an aspect of his realism. George Levine follows Luk´acs in placing Thackeray’s narrative protagonists within ‘the realist tradition of the unheroic hero’ derived (in terms of the historical novel at least) from Walter Scott. The subjective correlative of Thackeray’s embrace of the ‘real’, Levine suggests, is the mood of ‘disenchantment’ which characterizes the narratorial consciousness of Pendennis (amongst other texts): a novel which ‘speaks with the voice of disenchantment, seeing things in the cold light of day, aware that they are not malleable to dreams and wishes’.41 More radical than the partial or qualified disillusionment encountered in the apprentice novels of Bulwer and Lewes, Thackerayan disenchantment confronts ‘Romantic’ idealism, conceived as the illusions of subjective consciousness, with what it takes to be the intransigent material realities of existing society. By definition, however, disenchantment remains predicated upon the very illusions which it seeks to deflate: hence, Thackeray’s realism seems closer to a type of negative (or disappointed) idealism than to later, more ‘scientific’ forms. This aesthetic commitment to realism also encompasses, and helps to explain, the desire to confront the realities of literary trade in Pendennis and elsewhere. As Shillingsburg puts it, Thackeray’s ‘ultimate realism’ is his willingness to puncture aesthetic illusion by demonstrating that ‘the truth about the world included the truth about writing fiction for a living’.42 Indeed, it could be said that, for Thackeray, the only ‘reality’ beneath the illusory surface of fictional mimesis is the exchange-value of writing itself. This sets him on a collision course not only with Carlyle’s transcendental account of the hero as man of letters, but also with the more pragmatic vocational ethos of Bulwer and Dickens. Thackeray’s critique of Bulwer’s version of the sanctified literary professional was part of a more sustained and targeted campaign to discredit his rival, which is hard to separate from the broader factional culture of early-Victorian periodicals. Often the polemical positions which Thackeray adopted during this period were influenced by external factors relating to a given periodical’s political affiliation or positioning within the literary market, particularly in the case of Fraser’s Magazine (under the editorship of William Maginn) which published some of his most substantial early texts. Nevertheless, Thackeray’s apparently vindictive satires on Bulwer

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cannot be explained solely as a consequence of political differences or personal ‘animosity’, or some combination of the two motives, since they also reflect substantive differences on professional matters of mutual concern.43 One of the earliest and most notorious of these satires can be found in The Memoirs of Mr Charles J. Yellowplush (also known as The Yellowplush Papers), published in Fraser’s Magazine from 1837 to 1838, where Bulwer is figured in person as ‘Bullwig’, the comically over-inflated ‘fust of English writers’. In the ‘Epistles to the Literati’ number of the series Thackeray’s lowly persona, the footman Yellowplush, charges Bulwer with taking himself, and his literary vocation, far too seriously, while suppressing the less dignified material determinants of his labour: Away with this canting about great motifs! Let us not be too prowd, my dear Barnet, and fansy ourselves marters of the truth, marters or apostels. We are but tradesmen, working for bread, and not for righteousness sake. Let’s try and work honestly but don’t let us be prayting pompisly about our ‘sacred calling’.44

Yellowplush’s bracing acceptance of the economic foundation of literary work substitutes one apodictic truth about literary value for another, and should be seen in the broader context of Thackeray’s iconoclastic practice. The reduction of writing to a commodity exchanged figuratively for ‘bread’ states a reality the force of which is derived from its position within a broader field of debate, rather than representing Thackeray’s understanding as a whole. In a similar vein Yellowplush mocks Bulwer’s grandiose desire for literary ‘immortality’ and the prospects of its realization: But let not all be looking forward to a future, and fancying that . . . our books are to be immortal. Alas! The way to immortality is not so easy . . . If all the immortalities were really to have their wish, what a work would our descendants have to study them all!45

The point of this satire is not simply to contest the merits of Bulwer’s work, but rather to interrogate the broader assumptions and underlying values which shape his authorial persona. Bulwer’s Romantic preoccupation with addressing the ‘future’ occludes the transient circulation of writing within the modern literary industry; a culture of posterity is hard to sustain within an increasingly crowded market. Yellowplush further questions whether posthumous recognition is right or desirable from the point of view of posterity itself: writing for the future impinges egotistically on a present time that is yet to come. Contrary to the views of Bulwer, Lewes, and many other contemporaries, then, Thackeray appears to challenge the

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conventional wisdom on the value of ‘permanent’ fame as compared to ‘momentary effects’. Thackeray maintained this sceptical stance towards the aspiration of writing for ‘futurity’ with striking consistency in the literary reviews that he published during the ensuing decade, employing two distinct, and somewhat conflicting, arguments by way of support. On the one hand, he insists that great writers, from Shakespeare to Fielding and Dickens, are those whose work reaches posterity precisely by virtue of its concern for the contemporary reader; authors who embrace the ephemeral condition of writing have the best chance of surviving.46 On the other hand, he suggests that since not many authors can expect to achieve greatness, it is better for the majority to accept the finite terms of public recognition. This argument is concerned with the career of the average, unexceptional writer, most commonly an anonymous contributor to periodicals, rather than with the unique development of literary genius. In his 1843 review of Louis Reybaud’s The Life of Jerome Paturot Thackeray contrasts the providential salvation granted to the French novelist’s fictional author with the probable fate of a real ‘penny-a-liner’. In the common experience of such a writer there is little prospect of any ultimate reward for his prosaic labour, only the oblivion that awaits the expiration of a fungible unit of production: ‘The paragraph in the paper next to that which records Smith’s death announces the excitement created by the forthcoming work of the admirable Jones; and so to the end of time.’47 This condensed narrative of the ephemeral life of the literary hack echoes the sense of cyclical transience which contemporaries such as Douglas Jerrold witnessed in the phenomenon of literary lionism; Thackeray’s narrative coda – ‘and so to the end of time’ – evokes both finitude and extension, projecting the present moment into an indefinite future. A more topical example of Thackeray’s concern with the career of the ordinary professional writer, or literary ‘tradesman’, and his defence of the journalistic practice of writing for the present rather than for posterity, can be found in his 1846 review-essay titled ‘A Brother of the Press on the History of a Literary Man, Laman Blanchard, and the Chances of the Literary Profession’. The significance of this piece comes from the fact that it was written as a direct riposte to Bulwer’s ‘Memoir’ of the recently deceased Blanchard, prefacing a posthumous collection of his writings, Sketches from Life (1846), which Thackeray deemed to be ‘couched in much too despondent a strain’.48 Laman Blanchard was a personal acquaintance of Bulwer and Thackeray, claimed by both as a fraternal comrade in the literary profession (the title of Thackeray’s review directly alludes to Bulwer’s sympathetic

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appeal to the ‘London brotherhood of letters’), but whose short-lived career was used to exemplify their very different interpretations of the cultural status of the modern author. For Bulwer, the laborious obscurity of Blanchard’s life as a periodical contributor makes him a ‘choice and worthy example of the professional English men of letters of our day’ – a representative figure whose unfulfilled creative talent and premature death (through suicide) provide evidence with which to condemn the commercialization of literature and the baneful effects of journalism. Blanchard offers a distressing case of the aspiring apprentice writer whose ‘ideal standards of excellence, to be reached but by time and leisure’ were frustrated by the constraints of material circumstance, and who is thus ‘condemned to draw heavily upon unmatured resources for the practical wants of life’. Blanchard’s inability to fulfil the potential of organic self-cultivation prompts Bulwer to return to Ernest Maltravers’s concern with the disjunctive temporal experience of periodical authorship: But in our day the professional man of letters is compelled to draw too frequently, and by too small disbursements upon his capital, to allow large and profitable investments of the stock of mind and idea, with which he commences his career. The number and variety of our periodicals have tended to results which benefit the pecuniary interests of the author, to the prejudice of his substantial fame . . . There is a fatal facility in supplying the wants of the week by the rapid striking off a pleasant article, which interferes with the steady progress, even with the mature conception, of an elaborate work.49

Bulwer retrospectively conceives Blanchard’s career as a type of failed Bildungsroman, illustrating the tension between two rival temporal modalities: on the one hand, the gradual, developmental time implied by the achievement of ‘steady progress’ and ‘mature conception’; on the other hand, the frequent, repetitive rhythm defined by the needs of periodical publication – a process of ‘small disbursements’ and ‘rapid striking’. Here, the language of organic development is explicitly aligned with the future-oriented prospect of ‘substantial fame’ whereas the exigencies of journalism restrict Blanchard’s ambition to ‘all that interested the day’.50 To the charge that Blanchard’s talent was ‘fritter[ed] away’ in producing ‘fleeting literature’ and ‘endless hasty sketches’ Thackeray’s riposte is the question: ‘why should not the day have its literature?’ This question may be taken to invite not simply an expedient accommodation with prevailing market conditions, but also an ethical posture in its own right: ‘To do your work honestly, to amuse and instruct your reader of to-day, to die when

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your time comes, and go hence with as clean a breast as may be’; this is Thackeray’s injunction to the modern ‘professional’ writer, and forms the basis of his defence of the integrity of Blanchard’s career, in protest against what he perceives as the ‘discontent and morbid craving for renown’ exhibited by Bulwer. As in The Yellowplush Papers, the self-conscious pursuit of ‘immortality’ appears not only deluded in its hope of success, but also an infringement on the very judgement of futurity which it prizes: it should be abandoned ‘[o]ut of a regard for poor dear posterity and men of letters to come’. Thackeray calls for a more modest appraisal of the ‘chances’ of the literary profession, a word which he uses in awareness of its synonymous economic meanings of risk and speculation. Contrary to Bulwer’s narrative of disappointed expectations, he approves of the pragmatic decision taken by Blanchard when he abandons his early interest in poetry and the theatre and ‘puts Pegasus into harness’ by embarking on a career of regular journalistic labour.51 Blanchard’s literary fate is not a manifestation of the inevitable suffering and neglect endured by ‘genius’, but rather a moderate, qualified success within the given circumstances. Thackeray’s interpretation is not necessarily any truer to Blanchard’s personal experience than Bulwer’s ostensibly more mythologized account; indeed, there is evidence to suggest that Blanchard did view his career in Bulwer’s terms, specifically in relation to the deleterious effects of journalism. In an article for the Morning Chronicle, published in January 1840, Blanchard traced the development of literature from a consecrated scholarly vocation, practised by ‘the initiated priests of knowledge’, to a ‘branch of industry’ adapted to the demand of a growing ‘reading public’ for a ‘regular supply of literary productions’. The ‘rapidity required in every branch of newspaper composition’, he argued, militates against ‘the best and highest productions’ both in novel writing and periodical criticism.52 Again, however, the point at issue is the broader clash of opinion which Thackeray’s intervention signifies. Whereas Bulwer proceeds to argue, from the particularity of Blanchard’s case, for the advantages of state ‘provisions’ for authors (practised in Germany) as a means of protecting them from the full rigours of ‘free trade’, Thackeray’s conclusion is to endorse a more laissez-faire approach: ‘Let men of letters stand for themselves’, he exhorts, and take what ‘chances’ they can within the open market.53 In both of these reviews from the mid 1840s Thackeray rehearses arguments that appear later in some of the set-piece debates staged in Pendennis. Both the fictional Jerome Paturot and the real Laman Blanchard are amongst the many possible sources for the figure of Arthur Pendennis, Thackeray’s own embodiment of the prosaic character of the modern

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professional writer. The stance of the reviewer who calls himself Blanchard’s ‘Brother of the Press’, in self-conscious disavowal of an entitlement to superior cultural status, is not dissimilar to that of the narrator of Pendennis, who exonerates his protagonist, in the final sentence of the novel, as ‘only a man and a brother’, without pretension to heroic status, albeit the context of both utterances suggests an unsettling act of mimicry (977). Moreover, Thackeray’s narrative of Pen’s career traces a similar pattern to that which he locates in the literary lives under review: the sacrifice of youthful poetic ideals to hard-headed professional discipline signalled by the novel’s governing trope of ‘Pegasus in harness’ (450, 606).54 Given the demonstrable parallels between these texts, it is not implausible to view Pendennis itself as a late extension of Thackeray’s anti-Bulwer campaign of the preceding decade. Not only does the novel satirically target the same delusive ideas about the literary profession as ‘A Brother of the Press’, but in Bulwer’s Ernest Maltravers it has a close generic model on which to mount a parodic version of their narrative expression. Ten years prior to the composition of Pendennis Thackeray had read Ernest Maltravers with particular distaste, singling it out for opprobrium even amongst Bulwer’s works. He wrote separate reviews of the novel and its sequel for The Times in September 1837 and April 1838, as well as including it within a collective review of contemporary fiction for Fraser’s Magazine in January 1838; all of which are disparaging to the point of abuse. The political as well as aesthetic preferences of the latter journal clearly inform its dismissal of the novel as ‘unwholesome Radical garbage’, ‘a pert caricature of the sublime’, and ‘the picture of a humbug’ rather than ‘the likeness of a genius’.55 More substantially, though, Thackeray objects to the rhetoric of literary martyrdom which pervades the novel, ostensibly as an objective study of professional development but implicitly self-referential in origin. As the Times review of Ernest Maltravers remarks: One cloys of the undeviating dish of the injuries, the excellence, the persecutions of the author of Pelham; we are sickened with this eternal recurrence of tawdry sentimentalism concerning the sufferings of authorship.56

The ‘sentimentalism’ of Bulwer’s treatment of the formative trials of Maltravers’s literary apprenticeship is key to Thackeray’s repugnance for the novel as an act of professional self-definition. Thackeray does not accept that the profession of authorship accrues more ‘sufferings’ than other comparable professions or trades. Furthermore, he claims to see through Bulwer’s attempt to preserve a distance between author and work in the Preface to Ernest Maltravers, deliberately conflating the novel’s account of its

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‘imaginary author’ (emphatically not an autobiographical figure, according to Bulwer) with the personal experiences of the ‘author of Pelham’. Hence, the novel is judged an exercise in narcissistic self-projection; a characteristic expression of ‘the most concentrated, consummate, ludicrous egotism’.57 By the late 1840s Thackeray was no longer dealing in such crude polemical attacks on Bulwer, but, nevertheless, remained preoccupied with the debate on the ‘chances of the literary profession’ in which he identified Bulwer as a principal antagonist. The decision to begin writing his own novel of literary apprenticeship in 1848 provided an opportunity to negotiate Bulwer’s text in a subtler form, rewriting the ‘Wilhelm Meister of real life’ as a narrative of ‘lost illusions’ which confronts the bohemian world of the Press.

Pendennis: The afterlife of today The early chapters of Pendennis establish the multiple Romantic influences out of which Pen’s youthful identity as an aspiring poet is forged. These sources notably include Byron and Goethe, as well as their immediate Victorian successor Bulwer-Lytton by association. Prior to his entrance into the metropolitan world of professional journalism Pen’s literary endeavours are displayed in scenes of clich´ed poetic frenzy, ‘filled with quite a Byronic afflatus, as he thought’ (31). Byron is the standard poetic influence for a young writer of Pen’s generation, coming to adulthood in the early 1830s, but by the time the novel was written Thackeray shared Carlyle’s influential opinion on his intellectual immaturity and egotism.58 Whereas Carlyle, however, instructed readers to ‘[c]lose thy Byron’ in order to ‘open thy Goethe’, Pen’s Byronism is aligned with his ‘Wertherism’, which Thackeray does not differentiate from the more mature phase of Goethe’s development.59 Pen’s early interest in the theatre appears to be inspired by German writers, perhaps by Wilhelm Meister itself, as he studies the work of a ‘great German critic’ on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and imagines his relationship with the actress the Fotheringay as akin to Hamlet and Ophelia (65). As in Goethe’s novel, Thackeray takes the theatre as a paradigmatic form of aesthetic illusion in the early part of the narrative, preparing the reader for Pen’s subsequent experience of disenchantment in the field of literature and journalism. The Fotheringay’s indifferent response to Pen’s poetic confession of ardent desire reveals the fact that behind the aesthetic sheen of theatrical performance lies callous self-interest or simply a prosaic acceptance of quotidian routines: returning his love poems at the instigation of her father Captain Costigan, the actress ‘tied them up like so much grocery, and sat down and made tea afterwards with a perfectly placid and contented

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heart’ (143). This scene closely resembles Thackeray’s later poetic parody of The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which Lotte is imagined responding to the news of Werther’s tragic suicide with the laconic act of buttering some bread.60 In both cases, Thackeray comically exhibits the subordination of poetic sensibility to material appetites, an inversion of cultural expectation presented apparently without moral censure. If theatrical illusion is capable of concealing the banal material pleasures of its practitioners, poetry itself proves equally deceptive and is also liable to narrative demystification. The poems which Pen initially composes for the Fotheringay in a state of inspired passion are later re-packaged and re-circulated for self-interested ends during his time at university and in his succeeding relationship with Blanche Amory. Romantic sentiment is thus reduced to a fungible commodity, of which the Fotheringay’s treatment seems entirely apt. The character of Blanche is similarly devised to exhibit the inauthentic nature of poetic self-expression; her collection of poems titled Mes Larmes posits the secretion of tears as a signifier of deep, organic sensibility but is in reality a mechanical production: ‘dribbled out of her eyes any day at command’ (283). Blanche’s insistence that her suffering should be seen as a mark of the ‘penalties of genius’ further indicates her caricatured role in Thackeray’s satire on the stock tropes of Romantic discourse (285). The mythology of literary genius, it transpires, is signally inappropriate to the conditions of the modern literary profession. Bulwer-Lytton’s contribution to this discourse is acknowledged both implicitly, through references to Pen’s youthful dandyism, and explicitly through allusions to particular texts which Pen is in danger of wishing to emulate: Bulwer’s drama The Lady of Lyons (1838), for example, provides an inter-textual framework for his illicit cross-class romance with Fanny Bolton and later for his offer of marriage to Blanche. The sections of the novel dealing with Pen’s initiation into London literary society mount a more direct assault on the naivety and shallowness of his constructed poetic persona. His first sight of Paternoster Row, home to the rival publishers Bacon and Bungay, in Chapter xxxi, for instance, provides a telling glimpse of the commodified status of authors within the publishing industry. Looking through the booksellers’ shop windows, Pen observes a multiplicity of differentiated products, appealing to all shades of religious opinion and social class, accommodated within the unitary space of commercial display: ‘Scarce an opinion but has its expositor and its place of exhibition in this peaceful old Paternoster Row, under the toll of the bells of St. Paul’ (400). In much the same way that Thackeray shows the sub-editors of competing newspapers (Hoolan and Doolan) resolving

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their supposed ideological differences in collegial sociability, the authors exhibited in the shops of the Row are engaged in a factitious rivalry; their conflicting views are reduced to economic equivalence, as indeed are the homonymic publishers themselves. The impression created is of another illusory, performative surface, behind which the reader begins to recognize the systemic nature of the literary market. This scene closely resembles a parallel episode in Thomas Miller’s Godfrey Malvern, where the hero is also shown reflecting on the shop windows of Paternoster Row whilst seeking a publisher for his own wares. Malvern’s experience is of a shabbier and more melancholy street, presenting a less impressive facade, but one that is still primarily a site of economic exchange rather than of intellectual debate. For Miller, the Row is similarly emblematic of a jarring collision between the commercial arena of professional authorship and youthful aesthetic ideals: ‘Genius, indeed, is a queer commodity’, Miller’s narrator observes in a refrain that becomes equivalent to Thackeray’s ‘Pegasus in harness’ (182). Significantly, Malvern overcomes the initial disappointment of this encounter with an optimistic vision of the expansion of literary trade: he views the literature displayed in the shop windows as a sample of the ‘thousands of cheap publications . . . which, if superintended rightly, and issued judiciously, would in time do more towards bettering the moral condition of the people than all the laws that were ever passed’ (183). In Pendennis, however, Thackeray presents no such educational or ideological benefits to the mass market, only a medium of commodity exchange which neutralizes the force of ideas. The decisive example of Thackeray’s exposure of the mythology of literary genius occurs shortly afterwards in the first of two set-piece dialogues between Pen and his comrade Warrington which chart the narrative trajectory of Pen’s professional development. This exchange follows on from their visit to the Fleet prison at the end of Chapter xxxi where they witness Captain Shandon (a journalist modelled on William Maginn) writing the prospectus for a new periodical, The Pall Mall Gazette, in exchange for a five pound note, a scene which appears to depict authors in a state of humiliating dependency on the largesse of publishers, evoking the eighteenthcentury image of the literary hack as a ‘bookseller’s hanger-on’ (414). In Pen’s ‘Romantic’ reading of this scene Shandon is a figure who symbolizes the ‘sufferings of authorship’ at the hands of uncomprehending philistines: ‘No man shall tell me that a man of genius, as Shandon is, ought to be driven by such a vulgar slave-driver, as yonder Mr. Bungay, whom we have just left, who fattens on the profits of the other’s brains, and enriches himself out of his journeyman’s labour’ (415). Warrington, however, rejects Pen’s

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‘undeserved compassion’ for Shandon as an instance of the alibi of genius: ‘A fiddlestick about men of genius’ he retorts (415). Whereas, for Pen, the figure of the imprisoned author forced to write in order to buy his freedom, in the process filling the pockets of the publisher who maintains him in poverty, represents a callous exploitation of labour by capital, Warrington points instead at Shandon’s failure to take responsibility for his domestic and social obligations. As Craig Howes recognizes, Pen’s sympathetic and sentimental reading of Shandon’s plight echoes Bulwer’s interpretation of the career of Laman Blanchard, to which Thackeray had responded in Warrington’s sceptical manner.61 The latter declares himself ‘a prose labourer’ rather than a ‘genius’, for which he is rebuked by Pen as ‘very prosaic’ (416); like Thackeray’s ‘Brother of the Press’ Warrington accepts, albeit with some indication of embarrassment, professional membership of the ‘Corporation of the Goosequill’, his euphemistic label for journalism or the ‘fourth estate’ (390). Warrington’s judgement on Shandon proves right inasmuch as it predicts the subsequent development of Pen’s own experience through the remainder of the narrative: Pen goes on to become a successful ‘prose labourer’ and disciplined professional writer; the question of his ‘genius’ is at best suspended.62 Yet it also proves unsatisfactory to the extent that it fosters a degree of accommodation to the literary market in Pen which even Thackeray appears to finds unsettling. In Chapter xli, which contains their second major debate on the ethics of literary professionalism, we find that the dialogical roles played by Pen and Warrington have, in some ways, been reversed. Here, it is Warrington who protests against the commodification of literary labour to which Pen has all too readily adapted in preparing his autobiographical first novel, Leaves from the Life-Book of Walter Lorraine, for publication, while Pen himself defends the normalcy of writing ‘for money’ (520). Warrington is again critiquing a Romantic discourse of poetic sensibility, but this time for its hypocritical compliance with material self-interest: That’s the way of poets . . . They fall in love, jilt, or are jilted; they suffer and they cry out that they suffer more than any other mortals: and when they have experienced feelings enough they note them down in a book, and take the book to market. All poets are humbugs, all literary men are humbugs; directly a man begins to sell his feelings for money he’s a humbug. (520)

If exchanging a manuscript for money can be judged as inherently an act of bad faith, or moral solecism, the very existence of the professional writer would seem to be tainted by compromise. Literary professionals convert

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putatively authentic and spontaneous emotion into exchange value, an exercise of calculation which thereby negates the subjective values which they claim to embody. This is the source of the poet’s ‘humbug’, a word signifying a form of imposture which Thackeray, we recall, had previously applied to the hero of Ernest Maltravers. Pen’s objection to Warrington’s charge, moreover, fails to convince: his insistence that the poet’s sensibility exists prior to the act of marketing the self in a pure, uncontaminated state is contradicted by his own experience of manufacturing ‘feelings’ to meet the pre-existing demands of publishers. The focus of this episode on Pen’s self-representation through autobiographical fiction reaches to the core of the novel’s ethical debate on the practice of writing for money and its occlusion within Romantic discourse.63 As may be expected, the discussion in Chapter xli (‘Contains a Novel Incident’) is eminently self-reflexive since it places one fictive autobiographical text inside another autobiographical fiction, which, as is commonly recognized, draws extensively on Thackeray’s experience of bohemian literary society during the 1830s and 1840s. When Warrington remarks cynically of Pen’s novel, ‘[t]his youth will fetch some price in the market; for he is a comely lad, though not over strong; but we will fatten him up, and give him the bath, and curl his hair, and we will sell him for a hundred piastres to Bacon or to Bungay’, the ironic resonance of his words is not difficult to discern (523). This ‘comely lad’ is both a metaphor for the youthful character of Pen’s novel and, by virtue of its autobiographical content, a metonym for Pen himself: it connotes the fact that, like his novel, Pen too is up for sale – indeed, may be willing to prostitute his talent, as the lurid cast of the metaphor hints. But not only that, the ‘comely lad’ also figures The History of Pendennis, the novel in which both Pen’s youthful experience and his representation of his youthful experience are contained, thus implicating Thackeray’s text in the act of self-commodification practised by Pen.64 Later on, the narrator openly acknowledges the parallels between the diegetic and extra-diegetic worlds of the text in a humorous aside to the reader: ‘And if every woman and man in this kingdom, who has sold her or himself for money or position, as Mr Pendennis was about to do, would but purchase a copy of his memoirs, what tons of volumes Messrs. Bradbury and Evans would sell!’ (839) Connecting his own authorial self-interest to the fictional story of Pen’s growing professional cynicism, Thackeray recognizes the questionable morality of his hero’s state but rejects any attempt to disavow his collusion with it. Yet it should also be remembered that Pen is not Thackeray in any transparent sense of autobiographical representation, and, consequently, that

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his novel differs in important respects from the novel in which it is figured. Indeed, Leaves from the Life-Book of Walter Lorraine would seem, in some ways, to figure precisely the kind of novel that Thackeray’s History of Pendennis is written against. ‘This book’, the narrator comments, ‘written under the influence of his youthful embarrassments, amatory and pecuniary, was of a very fierce, gloomy and passionate sort, – the Byronic despair, the Wertherian despondency, the mocking bitterness of Mephistopheles of Faust, were all reproduced and developed in the character of the hero; for our youth had just been learning the German language, and imitated, as almost all clever lads do, his favourite poets and writers’ (517). The reader also learns that Walter Lorraine was written ‘at the period when the novel called the “fashionable” was in vogue among us’, and observes how Warrington sells it to the publishers by ‘[p]ointing out, as before, how Pen was a man of the very first fashion himself, and received at the houses of some of the greatest personages in the land’ (524). From these descriptions, it seems likely that Pen’s novel, if it existed, would bear a stronger resemblance to the ‘gloomy’ Germanic character of Bulwer’s Ernest Maltravers than to Pendennis itself, and that Pen, at this point in the narrative, risks becoming a parodic figure of the Bulwerian dandy and ‘fashionable’ novelist.65 The extended title of Walter Lorraine also, however, makes a direct allusion to James Grant’s Joseph Jenkins: or, Leaves From the Life of a Literary Man, an apprentice novel of a somewhat different kind as I suggested earlier. Grant’s account of the bohemian life of a journalist who forswears poetry and embarks on a course of ‘low’ sexual indulgence culminating in destitution stands at the opposite end of the professional spectrum from Maltravers’s highbrow literary idealism. Besides hitting another favoured satirical target (Thackeray wrote several dismissive reviews and parodies of Grant during the 1840s, including Punch’s ‘Leaves from the Lives of the Lords of Literature’ in January 1844), this allusion further signals the generic and formulaic character of Pen’s novel.66 A hybrid creation, mixing elements from Bulwer, Goethe, Grant, and others, Walter Lorraine can be read as an inter-textual figure for the wider genre of the novel of literary apprenticeship which Pendennis both inherits and immanently critiques. What distinguishes Pen from the figure of the Romantic or fashionable novelist is the filter of memory through which he looks back on the productions of his youth and stands irrevocably alienated. Pen himself is thus able to recognize those features of his novel which make it ripe for satire: ‘How pompous some of the grand passages appeared; and how weak others were in which he thought he had expressed his full heart!’ (518) For

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Thackeray, retrospection is characteristically a faculty which both revives and dispels the aura of past experience, as Pen discovers when re-reading the manuscript of Walter Lorraine from the semi-detached perspective of the professional writer: As he mused over certain lines he recollected the place and hour where he wrote them: the ghost of the dead feeling came back as he mused, and he blushed to review the faint image. And what meant those blots on the page? As you come in the desert to a ground where camels’ hoofs are marked in the clay, and traces of withered herbage are yet visible, you know that water was there once; so the place in Pen’s mind was no longer green, and the fons lacrymarum was dried up. (518)

The ‘blots on the page’ – tear-stains that mark both the original moment of Pen’s poetic effusion and its current state of desiccation – provide a vivid emblem of Thackeray’s use of recollection as an instrument of disenchantment within Pendennis. This passage reveals that Pen’s former expression of emotion was transient: that it has not been, and cannot be, sustained. Yet, by the same token, the commercial novel that Pen is prepared to manufacture from the carcass of his youthful self is also inherently ephemeral: a commodity with its own sell-by date, as Pen is aware. Thus, the scene of Pen musing upon the death of his former poetic self can also be viewed as a proleptic moment, which destabilizes the superior vantage point of the present by foretelling its own future obsolescence. It is not only the Romantic aspiration for literary immortality that is satirized here, but also the anti-Romantic cynicism that reflects upon its futility. Throughout Pendennis, in fact, writing is figured as a material inscription or trace that survives beyond its ‘day’ only as an ironic reminder of its essentially ephemeral nature. Thackeray’s technique of proleptic narratorial reminiscence (that is to say, invoking a future moment of retrospection on the present) works to establish a wider temporal perspective from which the limited lifespan of literary labour can be fully revealed. Earlier in the novel, for example, the narrator reflects on the afterlife of Pen’s unpublished collection of undergraduate juvenilia, interrupting the current stream of narrated events to contemplate its future significance through memory: Here is the book before me: it is scarcely fifteen years old. Here is Jack moaning with despair and Byronic misanthropy, whose career at the University was one of unmixed milk-punch. Here is Tom’s daring Essay in defence of suicide and of republicanism in general, a` propos of the death of Roland and the Girondins – Tom’s, who wears the starchiest tie in all the

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diocese, and would go to Smithfield rather than eat a beefsteak on a Friday in Lent. (220)

While the book itself is evidently a durable artefact, its survival throws into relief the inconstancy of the thoughts congealed within it. More abstractly, the material endurance of the book enables it to function as a memento mori, bearing witness to the absence that underlies all acts of authorial inscription. Not only are the views of its contributors ephemeral, but some are no longer even present to appreciate the irony: ‘Fate has interposed darkly, and the young voices are silent, and the eager brains have ceased to work’ (221). One of the lessons which Pen must therefore absorb is to restrict the horizons of his professional ambition to match both the cultural and ontological limitations of literary production, whilst, at the same time, staving off the worst excesses of commercial cynicism which attend this insight. Towards the end of the novel the height of Pen’s aspiration as a writer is to complete ‘one or two more stories which will presently be forgotten’, suggesting that his apprenticeship has been successful in the first respect at least. This ironic achievement is surely meant to be discomforting, though, as it represents the outcome of his hard-won experience as an acknowledgement of inevitable defeat. To argue that authors must accept the transient conditions of their profession, writing for the day rather than for a posterity which is liable to disappoint, raises more fundamental questions about Thackeray’s conception of the narrative form of the Bildungsroman. Some modern critical studies have, indeed, consciously excluded Pendennis from this genre on the basis that Thackeray fails to provide a sufficiently sustained narrative of Pen’s ‘development’ as a character, including Howe’s early, and otherwise comprehensive, account of the English reception of Wilhelm Meister.67 Certainly, in comparison to the novels of Bulwer and Lewes, Thackeray makes little attempt, after Chapter xli, to present the career of the professional writer as an organic process of artistic or intellectual maturation. Yet, as others have recognized, Thackeray explicitly acknowledges this absence of development as a facet of his understanding of personal identity, even within narratives that contradictorily take the form of the Bildungsroman. In an often-quoted interjection at the end of Chapter lix, the narrator remarks: ‘We alter very little. When we talk of this man or that woman being no longer the same person whom we remember in youth . . . we don’t, perhaps, calculate that circumstance only brings out the latent defect or quality, and does not create it’ (766–7). On this account,

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Jean Sudrann identifies two conflicting temporal paradigms in Pendennis, finding Thackeray’s insistence on the ‘fixed identity’ of Pen’s character ‘difficult to reconcile’ with his attempt to follow ‘the protagonist’s movement from youth to a maturity based on a coherent philosophy of life shaped by his experiences’.68 More recently, Judith Fisher has observed that ‘[t]he narrator of Pendennis denies the concept of character development, usually considered essential to any kunstler- or bildungsroman’ as part of a broader argument for Thackeray’s rejection of the ‘romantic, organic, “expressive” self and its teleological unfolding by means of natural language’: rather than maturing Pen is locked into a repetitive ‘pattern of self-illusion, projection, and disillusion’.69 Characters may not ‘develop’ in Thackeray’s fiction in a conventional organicist form, but this is not the same as holding that the self can transcend time; rather, the ‘permanence’ of identity derives from an inability to escape the transience of experience, which compels the hero of Thackeray’s novel to move inconclusively between opposing states of mind, preventing him from learning incrementally through acquired knowledge. Regardless of whether or not Thackeray accepted the possibility of organic self-cultivation or education through experience, there are other, more concrete explanations for Pen’s relative lack of development as a literary figure. In Chapter xxxvi Thackeray’s narrator openly professes the difficulty of lending narrative interest to the repetitive act of literary labour performed by the modern professional author, as in the earlier reviewessays: We left him, in his last chapter, regularly entered upon his business as a professional writer, or literary hack, as Mr. Warrington chooses to style himself and his friend; and we know how the life of any hack, legal or literary, in a curacy, or in a marching regiment, or at a merchant’s desk, is dull of routine, and tedious of description. One day’s labour resembles another much too closely. A literary man has often to work for his bread against time, or against his will, or in spite of his health, or of his indolence, or of his repugnance to the subject on which he is called to exert himself, just like any other daily toiler. When you want to make money by Pegasus (as he must, perhaps, who has no other saleable property), farewell poetry and aerial flights: Pegasus only rises now like Mr. Green’s balloon, at periods advertised beforehand, and when the spectators’ money has been paid. (449–50)

Here, Thackeray registers the problem of reconciling the narrative form of the Bildungsroman with the alienated mechanical tasks of the literary hack. If ‘Pegasus only rises’ according to pre-arranged schedules of

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production (unlike in Schiller’s poem), it follows that the author’s experience is one of recurring cycles of fungible labour. This, of course, could be taken as a description of Thackeray’s own fragmented serial production of the novel Pendennis. Not only is this prosaic form of literary work ‘dull of routine and tedious of description’, but it inhibits the sustained, projective movement of self-development required for the pursuit of future fame, as Bulwer had foreseen. The very name that Thackeray gives his fictional author – ostensibly an affectionate abbreviation for a ‘brother of the press’ – is surely an operative pun within this context, signalling the abstract or generic condition of literary production which ‘Pen’ can be taken to represent. From the satirical point of view, Pen is nothing more than his pen, an anonymous instrument of labour ‘just like any other toiler’.70 Thackeray’s inability or refusal to present Pen’s literary apprenticeship as a process of organic self-formation moving towards a mature realization of his artistic potential may be a way of explaining the persistence of pre-Romantic patterns of narrative development alongside the novel’s appropriation of nineteenth-century source material. Pen’s journey from innocent youth to jaded adulthood is not only charted through reference to the apprentice narrative of Wilhelm Meister’s British disciples, but also follows earlier, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tropes such as the ‘Rake’s Progress’ (Chapter xix) and ‘The Way of the World’ (Chapter lxi). The resurfacing of these earlier modes of narrative understanding throughout Pendennis is indicative, at one level, of Thackeray’s identification with a satirical and naturalistic use of novelistic form derived primarily from Fielding.71 Yet it also carries a wider resonance for the novel’s engagement with contemporary debates on the literary profession. Thackeray’s representation of Pen’s modern metropolitan bohemia is overlaid with numerous antiquarian references to the age of Samuel Johnson, establishing an historical continuum of professional experience from the 1760s through to the 1830s. The Inns of Temple, where Warrington and Pen base their journalistic practice, for example, evokes the narrator’s nostalgic ‘reminiscences’ of ‘the place which has been inhabited by so many of his brethren, or peopled by their creations as real to us at this day as the authors whose children they were’ (367), while the Back Kitchen club, where the two journalists socialize with their comrades, is housed in an inn named ‘Fielding’s Head’, after the ‘famous author of Tom Jones’ (378). The topography of literary London thus functions as a palimpsest, whereby the protagonists of the modern publishing industry are shown to follow literally in the footsteps of their eighteenth-century predecessors. The underlying message inscribed on this

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palimpsest is ambiguous. On the one hand, the presence of these historical ghosts provides an ironic instance of the survival of literature beyond the passing hour to which Pen and Warrington are confined: the memory of the narrator, if not of the characters themselves, serves as a medium for transmitting knowledge about writers of the past to posterity, in contrast to the way in which retrospection works as an instrument of disillusionment elsewhere in the text.72 Yet, on the other hand, the historical continuum between the Grub Street world of Johnson (whom G. H. Lewes described as ‘the first professional author’) and the nineteenth-century literary market may suggest the lack of cultural progress made with the status of the profession.73 Near the end of the novel Pen’s early acquaintance, Bows, interprets his prosperous, dandified appearance as evidence that ‘[y]ou literary gents are better off now’ than in the days of Johnson, with his ‘ragged shoes, and a bundle of penny-a-lining for the Gent’s Magazine’ (928). Yet Pen himself attributes his success to ‘good luck’ rather than the improved social position of the man of letters, and the novel as a whole does not support the notion of necessary historical advancement (928). Thackeray’s allusions to the eighteenth-century literary world serve as much to remind readers of similarities between the modern ‘literary hack’ and his forebears as they do to reveal differences between them. Indeed, as I suggest in the next chapter, the implication that Pendennis reduced the status of the modern professional author to equivalence with the eighteenth-century literary hack was a source of the heated controversy which its publication provoked. Pendennis, as we have seen, was one of a number of ‘bohemian’ versions of the literary-apprentice novel written in English during the 1840s, resembling if not necessarily inspired by Balzac’s Illusions Perdues. The reception given to Thackeray’s novel, however, established a uniquely complex and contentious legacy, in excess of its distinctiveness as a rewriting of earlier generic forms. Nigel Cross describes Pendennis as the novel which ‘gave definition to Victorian bohemianism’ by mythologizing the ‘sordid world’ of early to mid-nineteenth-century periodicals, which Thackeray had personally experienced.74 Although this ‘novel of disillusionment’ was couched in a spirit of abrasive realism, aiming to confront received stereotypes of poetic genius with the prosaic reality of professional writing, it is known to have positively inspired some readers to pursue a career in journalism. The ironic refrain of ‘Pegasus in harness’ may have emphasized the material constraints within which professional writers are compelled to work (and indeed should be compelled to work, according to the narrator), but Pendennis was also capable of evoking a space of personal freedom for some of

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its early (and usually male) readers. Amongst these readers were bohemian journalists, such as Edmund Yates and George Augustus Sala, from whom Thackeray later became alienated, in part because of their association with Dickens who, conversely, became his most prominent critic.75 Incongruously, the author of Pendennis was to adopt an anti-bohemian stance in his public quarrels with these writers, whilst the author of David Copperfield, which offers an account of the professional author that aims far more concertedly at achieving middle-class social respectability, defended the bohemians. This apparent reversal of positions was bound up with a much larger debate, which involved Thackeray and Dickens as leading antagonists on the question of the ‘dignity of literature’ in an age of professional development.

c h a p ter four

Dickens and the profession of labour

Between 1848 and 1851 – dates rather neatly centred upon the mid-point of the nineteenth century – a debate on the cultural status of the modern writer, engaging, amongst other participants, the two most prominent English novelists of the period, provides one of the most visible landmarks in the shift towards a distinctly post-Romantic conception of authorship. Conventionally known under the heading of ‘The Dignity of Literature’, which began as a localized controversy surrounding the publication of Thackeray’s semi-autobiographical novel Pendennis, this debate held wider implications for the professionalization of authorship within Victorian literary culture. Put schematically, it exposed the tension between two countervailing interpretations of the meaning of professional status: one stemming from the desire to endow authors with the collective autonomy and solidarity characteristic of more established middle-class professional identities, the other seeing in the prosaic form of these same professions something akin to Marx and Engels’s demystifying perception of bourgeois society: ‘The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage-labourers.’1 Whereas Thackeray was condemned for his ‘cynical’ adoption of the latter perspective, his critics, most notably John Forster and Charles Dickens, declared a strong commitment to the former project. In reality the debate proved more complex than this schematic characterization suggests. If the other side of ‘The Dignity of Literature’ was the recognition of the disenchantment of the author, this recognition was by no means confined to Thackeray, but also formed an underlying concern, or shared presupposition, of the proponents of professional reform. Though commonly viewed as presenting a diametrically opposed conception of the professional author to Pendennis, this chapter argues that Dickens’s almost exactly contemporaneous novel David Copperfield (1849–50) may also be read as a negotiation of the process by which the ‘poet’ is converted to 102

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the function of ‘wage-labour’ within modern society. In recent criticism David Copperfield has increasingly been seen within the framework of the development of nineteenth-century professional ideology, yet its polemical function within the specific rhetorical context of ‘The Dignity of Literature’ debate remains largely unacknowledged or misrepresented. Whilst Dickens’s position as a prominent advocate of the mid-century professional re-organization of authorship is well known, chiefly through his role in the establishment of ‘The Guild of Literature and Art’ in the year following the completion of David Copperfield, his stance on ‘The Dignity of Literature’ is more complex than the Romantic (or Carlylean) consecration of the writer portrayed in standard biographical accounts of both novelists as well as modern critical assessments of their dispute.2 By contrast, I suggest that the ‘bourgeois pseudo-religiosity’ of nineteenth-century professional ideology, which Marshall Berman claims was not yet apparent to the authors of The Communist Manifesto (1848), coexists in Dickens with an apprehension of the materiality of literary production as clear-sighted as that of Thackeray.3 During the late 1840s and early 1850s Dickens embraced a conception of professional dignity which self-consciously sought to resurrect the lost ‘halo’ of the poet whilst simultaneously acknowledging his position within an economy of wage-labour.

‘The Dignity of Literature’ The debate on ‘The Dignity of Literature’ emerged initially out of a dispute between editorials in The Morning Chronicle and The Examiner newspapers, in January 1850, on the question of whether writers should be entitled to receive state pensions or forced ‘to compete in an open market’, to which both sides censured Thackeray for an undignified satire on literary society in Pendennis, his current serialized fiction. While The Morning Chronicle accused him of ‘fostering a baneful prejudice’ against men of letters by resurrecting an image of the Grub Street hack deemed inappropriate for ‘the more enlightened spirit of the times’, its laissez-faire position on the issue of state ‘patronage’ was, in fact, similar to Thackeray’s own views. More wounding was the criticism of John Forster in The Examiner, who charged Thackeray with ‘a disposition to pay court to the non-literary class by disparaging his literary fellow-labourers’: a charge of ‘condescension’ towards other writers, which was, in effect, one of unprofessional conduct. Thackeray, Forster implies, has no desire to identify with his own professional ‘class’ because he considers himself to belong to a higher social class.4

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Forster, of course, was Dickens’s closest literary associate during this period, and the slogan of ‘The Dignity of Literature’ appears to have emerged in their circle during the late 1840s, well before the controversy around Pendennis. On 22 April 1848 Dickens wrote to congratulate Forster on the completion of his four-volume biography of Oliver Goldsmith, offering it his most extravagant terms of praise: I don’t believe that any book was ever written, or anything ever done or said, half so conducive to the dignity and honor of literature, as the life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith by J.F. of the Inner Temple. The gratitude of every man who is content to rest his station and claims quietly on Literature, and to make no feint of living by anything else is your due for evermore.5

The compliment was, no doubt, partly a reciprocation of Forster’s fulsome dedication of the biography to Dickens, but should also be seen as a response to its overt preoccupation with the cultural and material conditions of the eighteenth-century man of letters, embodied in Goldsmith’s life of ‘continued privation’.6 Forster shapes Goldsmith’s professional life into a narrative which proceeds diachronically from a state of ‘Authorship by Compulsion’ to one of ‘Authorship by Choice’ (the titles of Books 2 and 3 of the biography) – a trajectory significantly reversed in Thackeray’s motif of ‘Pegasus in harness’. Through the form of his biography, then, Forster sought to demonstrate both the constricting material environment of mid-eighteenth-century Grub Street and Goldsmith’s heroic attempt to overcome the impediments of a historical moment poised in transition between the eras of private (aristocratic) patronage and public consumption: in becoming an ‘author by choice’, Goldsmith prefigures the model of dedicated professional autonomy celebrated in Dickens’s letter. Forster himself was rather less comfortable in adopting Dickens’s term of approbation: his second editorial attack on Pendennis, titled ‘The Dignity of Literature’ (19 January 1850) in response to Thackeray’s letter to The Morning Chronicle published under the same heading, is dismissive of the imputation of mere ‘fanciful or querulous complaining about the dignity of literature’. What is at issue in this debate, he retorts, is not the ‘empty rank or inappropriate station’ to which Literature should aspire, but rather ‘the means and opportunity of rendering service to the State, and . . . the rewards it would thus become entitled to’.7 Nevertheless, two years after his dispute with Thackeray, Dickens, in a speech to the Newsvendors’ Benevolent Institution on 27 January 1852, again hailed Forster as a ‘gallant champion of the dignity of literature and its common cause with

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the people against sordid patrons, hard task-masters, empty-headed noodles, and every description of froth and foppery that could possibly surround them’.8 In the intervening period Dickens and Forster had collaborated in the establishment of The Guild of Literature and Art, a practical endeavour to support and define the professional dignity of writers and artists. Although Dickens did not openly contribute to the debate prompted by Pendennis, there is no doubt, then, that he was aware of the controversy, and that his position on ‘The Dignity of Literature’ was explicitly supportive of Forster. In consequence, critics have inferred that the publication of David Copperfield (issued in serial form between May 1849 and November 1850) may be seen as a coded rejoinder to Thackeray, or, at the very least, a significant addendum to the preceding debate. Michael Lund speculates that Dickens’s decision to give his eponymous hero and narrator a vocation as a writer (which does not necessarily follow from his use of the autobiographical fragment subsequently published by Forster as source material for the novel) was directly influenced by his reading of Pendennis or Forster’s critique of that novel; an argument which he supports by detailed comparison of their overlapping publication schedules.9 The similarities between the two novels in terms of narrative form, genre, and subject matter are sufficiently striking to suggest the probability of some form of inter-textual dialogue, perhaps even of a reciprocal nature given that Pendennis was less than halfway through its own extended serial composition (November 1848 to November 1850) when the first number of David Copperfield was issued.10 Notwithstanding Mark Cronin’s claim that the influence of Pendennis on David Copperfield has gone largely ‘unnoted’, their comparability was widely remarked at the time of publication, with several joint reviews appearing in the early 1850s.11 Yet in modern critical accounts of this presumed exchange, it is customary to view the formal and thematic resemblance between the two texts as throwing into relief the known divergence of their authors’ views on ‘The Dignity of Literature’, thus resulting in a series of schematic contrasts between them. Cronin, for example, reduces the ‘textual relations’ between David Copperfield and Pendennis to a straight binarism, whereby Dickens – the Carlylean idealist – is counterposed against Thackeray’s sceptical, anti-heroic materialism. As often occurs in comparative discussions of Dickens and Thackeray, this idealist/materialist dichotomy slides into a biographical account of their respective class affiliations: Dickens, the aspiring self-made bourgeois professional, as against Thackeray, the haughty pseudo-aristocratic gentleman-amateur.12 To be sure, this conventional comparison is not

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altogether without foundation. Even a cursory reading of the two novels reveals a fundamental distinction between their use of the Bildungsroman form, which lends a measure of support to biographical interpretation: whereas, in David Copperfield, Dickens constructs the process of David’s literary apprenticeship as a narrative of moral and social ascent, Thackeray, as Cronin suggests, presents Pen’s entry into the literary profession as a narrative of descent, a fall from what his character imagines to be a prior state of social elevation (though this is, in part, recognized as Pen’s selfdelusion).13 That said, what is obscured by most critical commentaries on ‘The Dignity of Literature’ debate is the underlying consensus on the basis of which the dispute between Pendennis and David Copperfield is played out: namely, that both texts ultimately subscribe to the proposition that the conversion of the ‘poet’ into a ‘paid wage-labourer’ is the necessary cost of the formation of the modern professional author. In Pendennis this proposition is not difficult to discern since it forms the manifest theme of Thackeray’s representation of Pen’s professional experience, and was the immediate source of the critical discomfort which the novel aroused. Some, though not all, contemporary critics were repelled by the seemingly irreverent and iconoclastic manner in which Thackeray strips away the illusions of his hero’s youthful ‘Romantic’ consciousness to display the nakedly material concerns of modern literary trade. Despite his subsequent pronouncements to the contrary, it is clear that Thackeray knowingly presents characteristic episodes of literary life in an unflattering light; the scene in which Captain Shandon is found composing a prospectus for the Pall Mall Gazette in the Fleet Prison being a notorious example, as discussed earlier. Warrington’s rebuke of Pen’s undue sympathy for Shandon as a figure of exploited ‘genius’ leads to a scathingly generalized assessment of the professional literary class: I deny that there are so many geniuses as people who whimper about the fate of men of letters assert there are. There are thousands of clever fellows in the world who could, if they would, turn verses, write articles, read books, and deliver a judgement upon them; the talk of professional critics and writers is not a whit more brilliant, or profound, or amusing, than that of any other society of educated people. (415)

Warrington’s refusal to grant any specific professional privilege or competence to men of letters is the most challenging aspect of this scene, as contemporary responses to the novel indicate. In ‘Pendennis: The Literary Profession’, a generally appreciative review-essay for the North British Review published in August 1850, J. W. Kaye complained: ‘We think it

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only fair that professional authors should have the credit of being able to do what other people cannot.’ By no means insensitive to the satirical mode of Pendennis, Kaye is at pains to defend the value of professional authorship, even as regards the lower cultural form of journalism, against the degrading presumption that anyone can write. His conception of professional status is thus necessarily exclusionary but not incompatible with the economic functions of labour and commerce: ‘The amateur articles of very clever people are generally what an amateur effort at coat-making would be’, he writes in riposte to Warrington’s argument. In Kaye’s account the ‘literary profession’ is not intrinsically distinguished from ‘prose labour’ or ‘literary trade’ insofar as these latter designations also comprehend specific fields of cultural competence.14 The characterization of authorship as a determinate form of social labour had become a commonplace assumption by the late 1840s: most protagonists of the literary-apprentice novels of this period, including David Copperfield, readily identify themselves as humble ‘labourers’, adherents of the Carlylean ‘Gospel of Work’, as did Forster and Dickens in their statements on ‘The Dignity of Literature’ (a phrase which, not coincidentally, renders literature directly analogous to labour). In Pendennis, however, the irreverence towards ‘men of genius’ displayed by Warrington, and apparently shared by Thackeray’s narrator, subsumes the specificity of literary work into an abstract, undifferentiated condition of alienated labour, by which distinctions of social class and vocational identity are collapsed: Do not let us, however, be too prodigal of our pity upon Pegasus. There is no reason why this animal should be exempt from labour, or illness, or decay, any more than any of the other creatures of God’s world. If he gets the whip, Pegasus very often deserves it, and I for one am quite ready to protest with my friend, George Warrington, against the doctrine which some poetical sympathizers are inclined to put forward, viz., that men of letters, and what is called genius, are to be exempt from the prose duties of this daily, bread-wanting, tax-paying life, and are not to be made to work and pay like their neighbours. (450)

Here, Thackeray explicitly refuses the opportunity to endow the professional author’s creative labour with exceptional status: the ‘literary man’ endures the same degree of suffering as ‘any other daily toiler’. The motif of ‘Pegasus in harness’ invokes a brutal subordination of mental activity to the conditions of manual labour, which, at first glance, suggests an aim of radical critique. Yet since the oppression of labour is conceived as equitably

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universal in scope, the narrator concludes only that no claim to exemption on behalf of ‘men of letters’ can be morally justified. Thackeray’s argument is directed not against conditions of labour per se – these being simply the inalterable ‘prose duties’ of life – but rather against those deluded ‘poetical sympathizers’ who seek to transcend them. This posture, to be sure, embodies only one facet of the narratorial consciousness of Pendennis, a novel that is conspicuously dialogical in form as has been shown. Thackeray’s public defence of Pendennis, however, was based upon a similarly anti-professional rhetoric of literary labour, albeit one which was increasingly cast in moralistic terms. In his letter to The Morning Chronicle Thackeray insisted that ‘[t]he only moral that I, as a writer, wished to hint in the descriptions against which you protest was, that it was the duty of a literary man, as well as any other, to practise regularity and sobriety, to love his family, and to pay his tradesmen’.15 While the promotion of such archetypal bourgeois virtues as ‘regularity and sobriety’, domestic affection, and financial prudence is, in fact, strikingly similar to many of Dickens’s pronouncements on the moral responsibility of literary professionals, Thackeray characteristically emphasizes the commonality of the author’s ‘duty’. Likewise, in the peroration of his concluding lecture on The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, first delivered in July 1851, Thackeray denies that the condition of the man of letters is essentially different from that of a multitude of other ‘labourers’, even those of a differing social class: With what difficulty had any one of these men to contend, save that eternal and mechanical one of want of means and lack of capital, and of which thousands of young lawyers, young doctors, young soldiers and sailors, of inventors, manufacturers, shopkeepers, have to complain? Hearts as brave and resolute as ever beat in the breast of any wit or poet, sicken and break daily in the vain endeavour and unavailing struggle against life’s difficulty. Don’t we see daily ruined inventors, grey-haired midshipmen, baulked heroes, blighted curates, barristers pining a hungry life out in chambers, the attorneys never mounting to their garrets, whilst scores of them are rapping at the door of the successful quack below? If these suffer, who is the author, that he should be exempt?16

As in Pendennis, it is ‘lack of capital’ that Thackeray sees as the necessary stimulus of literary labour (labour becoming a substitute for capital as the author’s only ‘saleable property’), a negative conception of work which can no doubt be related to the economic circumstances of Thackeray’s own entry into professional authorship.17 This leaves the author in an ambiguous position so far as economic and social status are concerned. On the one

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hand, Thackeray’s depiction of the author as a literary hack (‘Pegasus in harness’) figuratively aligns him with the condition of alienated manual labour – what Marx termed the ‘productive labour’ of the ‘proletarian man of letters’.18 On the other hand, his emphasis on the author’s ‘lack of capital’ implies that literary labour may be undertaken as a speculative investment, an attempt to yield profit from the exploitation of his own ‘mental capital’, to use Jennifer Ruth’s term, in lieu of more tangible resources.19 Returning to ‘The Dignity of Literature’ controversy in a passage of his later novel The Newcomes (1853–5), Thackeray spins the capacity to ‘exercise our trade’ with ‘scarce any capital’ into a positive advantage over the pursuit of other ‘learned professions’: authorship, he suggests, offers the aspiring middle classes a low-maintenance alternative to medicine and the law.20 For Thackeray, then, the questions of whether authorship should be placed on the side of capital or labour, whether it should be defined as a respectable profession or grubby trade, and what class status its adherents might claim, are left disturbingly open-ended. Thackeray was not, it should be said, the only writer to meet with opprobrium during ‘The Dignity of Literature’ controversy of the early 1850s. William Jerdan recorded in a Prefatory Chapter to the second volume of his Autobiography (1852), titled ‘The Profession of Literature’, the hostile criticism faced by the preceding volume on the charge that it ‘tends to the disparagement of the literary class or “profession”’, the same accusation as was levelled against Pendennis. Jerdan published his Autobiography at the end of a long and prominent career as editor of the Literary Gazette from 1817 to 1850, and his observations on the difficulties of sustaining a profitable career in literature were the result of considerable professional experience. To his critics, whom he characterized as ‘youthful and earnest upholders of the dignity of their literary condition’, however, Jerdan’s narrative was an example of outdated Romantic martyrology, in some respects the opposite problem to Pendennis. Unlike Thackeray, Jerdan maintained that ‘literature is neither appreciated, encouraged, nor honoured as it ought to be; and that its professors (if dependent altogether upon it) are liable to worse usage and more misfortune than any other intellectual class in our social scheme’. His emphasis on the suffering of authors is reminiscent of the writings of Isaac D’Israeli from earlier in the century, but Jerdan also had much in common with proponents of professional dignity such as Dickens and Forster, having himself played a leading role in previous campaigns for professional reform, including the establishment of the Royal Society of Literature in 1824. The alleged crime of the Autobiography was to have reinforced the popular stereotype of the temperamental weakness

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of authors, their ‘often blameable inattention, impunctuality, and want of order’ which render them ‘helpless prey, to be preyed upon by the sordid, the grasping, the scheming, and the rascally’, a similar representation to that of Thackeray’s Captain Shandon but from a differing perspective. In defence of his position Jerdan pointedly argued against the tendency to conflate economic and moral prudence in the rhetoric of literary dignity: ‘If only the improvident and misconducted fail, let them show me the provident and the discreet who have succeeded . . . Surely it cannot be contended that all the unsuccessful are careless, extravagant, reckless, vicious!’ In his own estimation Jerdan was providing a more representative account of the ‘uncertainties and disappointments incident to a life entirely dependent on literature’ than could be garnered from the altogether exceptional career of Dickens. By contrast with Forster, Jerdan did not accept that the material and cultural conditions of authorship had substantially improved from the age of Johnson and Goldsmith. At the same time, in obvious reference to ‘The Dignity of Literature’ debate, he criticized Thackeray for refusing to encourage such change: ‘He now, I think erroneously, if not unfeelingly, upholds the cause against his brethren; and, since he has at last got up the hill, maintains that All are sufficiently encouraged, and that if they are not in pleasant circumstances, they have nobody to blame for it but themselves!’ Here, Jerdan echoes Forster’s language of professional solidarity despite having been made its target in contemporary reviews.21

Professional labour Returning to the dialogue between Pendennis and David Copperfield, it is tempting to recall the barbed valedictory comment contained in Dickens’s obituary of Thackeray that ‘he too much feigned a want of earnestness, and that he made a pretence of undervaluing his art, which was not good for the art that he held in trust’.22 As a summation of Dickens’s perception of Thackeray’s eschewal of professional dignity, this statement bears directly upon David Copperfield, all the more so since it clearly echoes the wellknown passage from Chapter xlii in which David attributes the ‘source of . . . [his] success’ as a writer to a ‘thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness’: My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural

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or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules.23

Yet whilst the self-conscious ‘earnestness’ of David Copperfield can be taken as an implied critique of the ‘feigned’ or authentic ‘want’ of that quality in Pendennis, one should also recognize the extent to which Dickens’s narrative mirrors Thackeray’s in seeking to replace a Romantic iconography of suffering ‘genius’ with a more prosaic model of disciplined mental labour.24 A fundamental point of resemblance between the two novels, often overlooked in comparative readings, is revealed by the fact that the governing trope of Pen’s literary career – putting ‘Pegasus in harness’ – might also serve as an appropriate metaphor for the narrative trajectory of David’s professional apprenticeship. The status of labour in Dickens’s account of David’s pursuit of literary success, however, is considerably more enigmatic than is the case in Pendennis. On the one hand, as the passage quoted above illustrates, labour is the openly acknowledged source of David’s triumphant achievement as a professional author, revealed through the most ostentatious gestures of self-validation to be the ultimate (if not absolutely sufficient) foundation of all literary value. Hence, Mary Poovey’s suggestion that ‘the work involved in writing is explicitly effaced’ by David’s narration seems oddly misplaced. At the same time, there remains a sense in which the labour of writing is occluded within the text, as Poovey maintains; that, despite all his talk of effort, the process of David’s literary production appears somehow ‘effortless’.25 Moreover, these two contradictory impressions function in a mutually constitutive manner since it is David’s very insistence that labour be recognized as the determining source of his success which marks its perceptible absence. In his laconic, parenthetical allusions to the composition and reception of his successive literary works, labour produces value with such magical immediacy as to appear, literally, without effort: witness, for example, the bland opening sentence of Chapter xlviii, ‘I laboured hard at my book, without allowing it to interfere with the punctual discharge of my newspaper duties; and it came out and was very successful’ (636); or the equally vapid paratactical concatenation of statements from Chapter xliii:

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Here, it is as if the temporal coincidence of effort and reward short-circuits the process of literary production and consumption, allowing David to retain imaginary possession of the products of his labour. One effect of this rhetorical technique is to reinforce what Poovey construes as Dickens’s fabrication of literary work into a paradigmatic form of non-alienated labour; offering such work, contra Thackeray, an exemption from the oppressive conditions of labour in society at large.26 That literary work, in the form espoused by David, is represented by Dickens as a type of labour without alienation can be supported by referring to the primary definition of ‘alienated labour’ provided by Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844): Firstly, that labour is exterior to the worker, that is, it does not belong to his essence. Therefore he does not confirm himself in his work, he denies himself, feels miserable instead of happy, deploys no free physical and intellectual energy, but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. Thus the worker only feels a stranger. He is at home when he is not working and when he works he is not at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary but compulsory, forced labour.27

For Marx, then, the worker for whom labour is ‘alien’ or ‘exterior’ can be understood as removed from the spatial familiarity of ‘home’ both in historical and phenomenological terms. The demarcation of the ‘home’ as a site of refuge from the self-estrangement of industrial labour is an important component of the dominant middle-class ideological consciousness of David Copperfield, as Poovey and other modern critics have shown. Crucial to David’s ultimate achievement as a professional writer is the fact that his literary work is increasingly centred within the space of home, and equally that the home is progressively refined into an ideal site of literary work, with all that this implies in terms of the male author’s ambiguously gendered identity.28 Hence, David’s decision to abandon the public arena of journalism for the private domain of the novelist – a commitment in excess of autobiographical reference given Dickens’s own career and in stark contrast to the topography of literary society observed in Pendennis – holds a deeper structural significance for the narrative representation of his life. The relocation of literary work within domestic space serves not only to

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insulate David’s authorship from the experience of alienated labour, but also, in the process, supports his claim to autonomous professional status. A close parallel to the logic of this manoeuvre can be found in Kaye’s review of Pendennis, an essay which reflects extensively upon the need to improve the moral and social standing of the literary profession in the light of Thackeray’s corrosive satire, and which could well have been written under the influence of Dickens. Accepting the premise of Pendennis, that the bohemian culture of authorship lacks the prudential ethos of other middle-class professions, Kaye recommends a practice of ‘professional labour’ which is strikingly reminiscent of David Copperfield’s domesticated professionalism: It is not so much that authors do not know how to make money, as that they do not know how to spend it. The same income that enables a clergyman, a lawyer, a medical practitioner, a government functionary, or any other member of the middle classes earning his livelihood by professional labour, to support himself and his family in comfort and respectability, will seldom keep a literary man out of debt and difficulty – seldom provide him with a comfortable well-ordered home, creditable to himself and his profession. It is ten to one that he lives untidily; that everything about him is in confusion; that the amenities of domestic life are absent from his establishment; that he is altogether in a state of elaborate and costly disorder, such as we are bound to say is the characteristic of no other kind of professional life.29

Like Dickens, Kaye envisages the elevation of the literary profession to moral dignity and social respectability through a rationalization of domestic economy which encompasses both the spaces and routines of literary labour and the intimate arrangements of familial life. He even espouses the same patriarchal judgement, which David acquires through experience, that (male) authors ‘would often do better if they were more fortunate in their wives; but literary men sometimes make very strange alliances, and have little good housewifely help at home to balance their own irregularities’.30 Yet, in contrast to David Copperfield, Kaye explicitly acknowledges that the professional author’s ideal domestic environment cannot be established purely through the subjective exercise of prudential choice (Agnes instead of Dora), since the ‘absolute requirements of literary labour not unfrequently compel an irregular distribution of time, and with it irregular social and moral habits’. In particular, Kaye points out, the work of journalism, an increasingly dominant form of modern literary production, ‘cannot be done at home’. The conditions of journalistic authorship (especially within the newspaper press) are, indeed, synonymous with the temporal and spatial

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axes of industrial labour: on the one hand, journalists are ‘the slaves of time, not its masters; and must bend themselves to circumstances, however repugnant to the will’, while on the other their work is conducted in the office or, still worse, the tavern, rather than at home. Thus, while Kaye propounds an ideal of ‘professional labour’ in which the domestic locus of literary production allows the male author ‘distribution of his own time’,31 so liberating his work from alienation and securing him an equal rank alongside the more established bourgeois professions, he also recognizes the force of Thackeray’s account of the material constraints which render this aspiration a form of wishful thinking. Although Thackeray’s novel is by no means immune to gendered domestic ideology, it is not the conjugal home which emerges as the paradigmatic site of literary labour in Pendennis, but instead the bohemian world of journalism, centred upon the masculine homosocial spaces of the newspaper office, the public tavern, and the Inns of Temple. For most of the narrative, Pen’s literary ‘home’ is the bachelor establishment which he shares with Warrington, his ‘brother of the press’, rather than a female muse. While it is true that Dickens presents David’s domestic professionalism as a model of non-alienated literary labour, it is more doubtful that the ‘ideological work’ involved in this project operates through the strategies of effacement, disavowal, and mystification outlined in Poovey’s influential study of the novel. As noted already, David repeatedly draws attention to the labour of writing, even in the same gesture with which it is occluded. Far from attempting to conceal the professional author’s compromising resemblance to more degraded forms of commodified labour, David’s narrative risks exposing the dependence of his development upon the very conditions of estrangement which he ultimately claims to transcend. Dickens thus self-consciously negotiates the Thackerayan experience of post-Romantic disillusion, rather than naively idealizing the author’s professional status as a Carlylean ‘hero as man of letters’. Readers of the novel are, of course, familiar with the traumatic circumstances surrounding the degrading experience of factory work in David’s childhood, yet it is equally clear that this experience comes to represent a formative moment in the retrospective account of his literary development, even acquiring the status of a foundational myth. Instead of disassociating the conditions of literary labour from more socially demeaning forms of work, David embarks upon his career as a writer by directly incorporating the figure of the ‘labouring hind’, or ‘common drudge’, into his newfound sense of vocation (150, 168). Indeed, such is David’s enthusiasm for likening his clerical and journalistic work to manual labour that his first wife Dora has to be reassured that he is not really

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a labourer: ‘from my manner of stating the case I believe Dora concluded that I was a navigator, and went balancing myself up and down a plank all day with a wheelbarrow’ (501).32 This comically exaggerated emphasis upon the strenuous physicality of writing coincides with David’s explicit assertion that his capacity for labour is founded on ‘the painful discipline of my younger days’ (481). Just as he presents the mechanical literary work of the parliamentary reporter and clerical assistant as a necessary stage in the formation of the fully fledged ‘creative’ writer, so the former, according to the same developmental schema, is grounded in the primal experience of ‘real’ (i.e. manual, industrial) labour. David’s childhood experience of labour is thus fully sublated in his mature identity as a professional author, its ‘painful discipline’ preserved and transcended, as the reiterated contrast between David and other author-figures within the novel serves to demonstrate. Whereas the conception of such interminable literary projects as Mr. Dick’s ‘Memoir’ and Dr. Strong’s ‘Dictionary’ effectively forecloses the possibility of their becoming alienable commodities, David’s creative labour, as we have seen, results in a ‘punctual discharge’ of literary products. As Ruth puts it, ‘David’s writing proceeds . . . like clockwork’, imitating the temporal discipline of the industrial mode of production from which, as a child, he had sought to escape.33 What appears, at one level, as David’s attempt to withdraw from the self-estrangement of industrial labour into the non-alienated domestic sphere of the novelist appears, at another level, as a successful relocation of factory conditions. Yet this is not, as some critics have suggested, merely another instance of ideological subterfuge on David’s (or Dickens’s) part, for the lesson of the contrast with other writers is openly expressed: it is precisely because of his acceptance of the necessity of alienated labour that David is elevated above the role of unreflective amanuensis, to which Mr. Dick and other non-professional authors in the novel are eventually reduced.34 Just as Thackeray’s affectionate abbreviation of the name ‘Pendennis’ ironically reveals the status of his unheroic man of letters as a generic instrument of literary labour, so in David Copperfield Dickens invests the obsessively recurring figure of the writer’s ‘hand’ with its familiar Victorian metonymic function. The fetishistic representation of hands, or, more precisely, fingers, as material signifiers of the capacity for commodified labour is a symptom which connects David’s professional authorship with more transparently commercial uses of writing, as well as other forms of work. When Mr. Dick, for example, receives payment for copying legal documents, thereby learning how to put his hitherto unprofitable writing capacity to economic use, he is observed by David as having triumphantly

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‘flourished his ten fingers in the air, as if they were ten banks’ (489). Later on, when recounting his own entry into ‘authorship’, David responds to his first regular payment as a contributor to magazines with a strikingly similar, though noticeably more coy, gesture of the hand: ‘when I tell my income on the fingers of my left hand, I pass the third finger and take in the fourth to the middle joint’ (578). The euphemistic act of counting income by number of fingers, rather than openly declaring it, could, of course, be taken to suggest a certain embarrassment at the equivalence between the economic rewards of professional authorship and the mechanical labour of the copyist, as well as being a form of acknowledgement. While David’s narrative demonstrates how the formation of the ‘autonomous’ literary professional is predicated upon the prevailing modes of social labour, it is understandably sensitive to the danger of eroding the very distinctions which professional ideology (‘The Dignity of Literature’) requires it to make. To maintain the semblance of a claim to professional autonomy, David must avoid the implication that literary work is merely one manifestation of an undifferentiated condition of ‘daily toil’, as Thackeray had suggested. The most visible emblems of the precarious balancing-act which David performs in his simultaneous identification with and repulsion from the labour of writing are the hands and fingers of Uriah Heep. Uriah’s ‘damp fishy fingers’ and ‘fish-like hands’ (530, 561) have received critical attention as signifiers of the sexual anxieties projected onto him by David, but the narrative’s obsessive reduction of Uriah to the figure of the ‘hand’ has not been commonly discussed in terms of the metonymy of labour.35 That Uriah’s hands are specifically equipped for the labour of writing is evidenced in David’s recollection of the day of their first encounter, which describes an uncanny moment of mutual recognition and estrangement: Uriah, having taken the pony to a neighbouring stable, was at work at a desk in this room, which had a brass frame on the top to hang papers upon, and on which the writing he was making a copy of was then hanging. Though his face was towards me, I thought, for some time, the writing being between us, that he could not see me; but looking that way more attentively, it made me uncomfortable to observe that, every now and then, his sleepless eyes would come below the writing, like two red suns, and stealthily stare at me for I dare say a whole minute at a time, during which his pen went, or pretended to go, as cleverly as ever. (212)

As a writer, Uriah is seen here as a copyist, one of many within the novel, whose labour does not warrant (or receive) the name of ‘authorship’. By implication, it is David, who observes Uriah observing him from beneath

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the mediating screen of the text which he is apparently transcribing, who is the true author of this scene in every sense. Yet, as Simon Edwards notes, Uriah’s work as a copyist also ‘resembles’ and anticipates David’s own literary apprenticeship as ‘a shorthand writer at the law courts, transcribing, as here, an existing text’.36 The hands which fill David with such visceral disgust, it may be deduced, are the stigmata of his own necessary experience of wage-labour, not only during the formative years of his childhood and early career, but also as a mature professional author writing this very scene. At the same time, Dickens seems to recognize an equal danger in placing too much distance between the exalted status of the literary professional and the common condition of labour. Far from being absorbed uncritically, the words ‘profession’ and ‘professional’ invariably carry negative connotations within David Copperfield: David going so far as to tell Uriah on one occasion, ‘I am not fond of professions of humility . . . or professions of anything else’ (530). The novel thus reminds the reader that to lay claim to a professional identity is disturbingly close to practising the form of deception latent in another sense of the word ‘profession’. When, towards the end of the novel, David encounters Uriah and Mr. Creakle in the penitential guise of ‘Model Prisoners’, he concludes that ‘the hypocritical knaves were just the subjects to make that sort of profession in such a place; that they knew its market-value at least as well as we did’ (786–7). Yet to profess a professional authority, whilst secretly knowing its ‘market-value’, is precisely the kind of charge which David’s account of his development as an author runs the risk of incurring. As commentators on the ‘rise’ of modern professionalism have suggested, the capacity for mystification of professional authority is not so much predicated on individual moral lapses as inherent within its ideological structure. The inflationary tendency of professional self-evaluation derives, according to Harold Perkin, from the fact that ‘[t]he professional had to assert the high quality and scarcity value of the service he provided or forego the status and rewards that went with it’; since the value of professional labour cannot be easily demonstrated in empirical terms, it must be established through the efficacy of rhetorical persuasion, or ‘profession’.37 Similarly, drawing upon Larson’s sociological analysis, Siskin proposes that the ideology of literary professionalism may be understood according to a binary structure of ‘technicality’ and ‘indetermination’: the former representing the body of standardized knowledge to which professional training gives (in theory) universal access, the latter signifying the ideological ‘surplus value’ which locates professional authority in the charisma and prestige of select individuals.38 ‘Indetermination’ describes that aspect of professional authority which is not accessible solely by the acquisition of positive knowledge, and is hence, by definition,

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not accessible to all who might aspire to professional status. The potential slippage between ‘professional’ and ‘profession’ hinted in the passages quoted above is not just a matter of verbal nuance, then, but an intrinsic threat to David’s attempt to align professional authorship with moral authority and autobiographical truth. It is here that the importance of labour, and the ‘steady, plain, hard-working qualities’ which it fosters in David, comes sharply into focus. By constantly professing his capacity for laborious effort, David endeavours to persuade the reader that his triumphant elevation to the status of professional author is not founded on a hollow or mystifying act of ‘profession’, but has material substance behind it. In sociological terms, one might say that David emphasizes the ‘technicality’ of professional training – the painful acquisition of specific material technologies, such as his mastery of shorthand – so as to offset the more contentious ‘indeterminacy’ of his claim to professional status. David is not a professional author simply by virtue of his skill or effort in these practices, but without them being a professional author would not carry the weight of moral authority with which Dickens seeks to invest the role. In this respect, as Ruth has aptly observed, Dickens’s literary professional occupies a ‘new mental class’ which ‘must simultaneously oppose . . . and identify with . . . the manual class’ which it claims to transcend: an ambiguous and perhaps uniquely fraught compromise on the professional writer’s place within the social division of labour.39 Ruth’s suggestion that David’s professional authority is primarily defined by the rationalized temporal discipline of industrial labour and speculative capitalism, however, overlooks the equally powerful developmental and retrospective modes of his narrative consciousness. In his recurrent nostalgic appeal to the power of memory, evoked in the service of self-formation, David simultaneously draws on the Romantic discourse of professional development which Siskin and others have located paradigmatically in Wordsworth’s The Prelude (a poem posthumously published in the same year as Dickens’s novel). As in Pendennis, the protagonist’s retrospection on his development from the past suggests a capacity for temporal depth which eludes the experience of the literary hack strictly defined; paradoxically, memory is also the faculty by which the aspiring professional author represents a capacity to address posterity (the retrospection of the future).40 Whether or not David Copperfield is judged to be persuasive in its attempt to steer a median course between the social degradation of manual labour, at one extreme, and the moral dubiety of professional ideology, at the other, the attempt itself represents a significant contribution to the midnineteenth-century debate on ‘The Dignity of Literature’. In this novel

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Dickens strives to formulate an ideal of ‘professional labour’ in which both halves of the felt oxymoron undergo a process of revision. This ideal finds its most appropriate expression in David’s determination ‘[n]ever to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self ’ [my emphases]: a sublation of the metonymic ‘hand’ of alienated labour within the unified ‘self’ of the bourgeois professional, which explicitly renounces the ‘affect[ed] depreciation’ of literary work which Dickens discerned in Thackeray’s Pendennis. The movement from singular hand to totalized self is central to the chronological narrative of David’s literary apprenticeship, his passage from youth to maturity. This story can be conceived along the lines of a tripartite dialectical schema, the stages of which are marked by, firstly, David’s childhood faculty of imagination (his gift for storytelling), secondly, the ‘painful discipline’ of labour (the experience of Murdstone and Grinby’s bottle factory followed by his literary apprenticeship in the mechanical work of parliamentary reporting), and, thirdly, the triumphant synthesis of labour and imagination (his successful career as a novelist). In terms of the analogous marriage of labour and professionalism, David begins his journey from a position in which labour is devoid of autonomy, moves to one in which labour is yoked to a weak sense of ‘profession’, before finally reaching a satisfactory accommodation of their competing claims. Describing his work as a parliamentary reporter – the median point of both narrative sequences – David significantly confesses: ‘I record predictions that never come to pass, professions that are never fulfilled, explanations that are only meant to mystify’ (577). Despite his diligence as a reporter, labour alone cannot compensate for the hollowness of the ‘professions’ which it is compelled to reproduce; David is aware that some ‘professions’ are ‘meant to mystify’, just as much as those modern critics who have judged his own assertion of professional authorship an act of mystification. In David Copperfield, then, Dickens argues for the necessity of reforming the literary profession as much as he transfigures the work of writing.

David Fallen: ‘The Guild of Literature and Art’ The project of professional reform was one that preoccupied Dickens, beyond the pages of David Copperfield, for much of the late 1840s and 1850s. Most notably, his long-standing dissatisfaction with the Royal Literary Fund [RLF], the primary national institution concerned with the material welfare of authors during the early nineteenth century, was due to its perceived failure to act as an autonomous professional organization, constituted by and for the writers whom it sought to assist. In May

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1851, six months after the completion of his novel, Dickens published a Prospectus of a New Endowment In Connexion with an Insurance Company, for the Benefit of Artists and Men of Letters, which set out his plan for a new professional institution to be named ‘The Guild of Literature and Art’. Described as a ‘Branch Insurance and Provident Society, solely for the Professors of Literature and of Art’, the declared aim of the Guild was to go beyond the existing ad hoc method of distributing remedial financial assistance to writers in impoverished circumstances – a charitable response to economic distress which, for Dickens, smacked too much of aristocratic patronage – and to create instead an organization which promoted professional autonomy and solidarity.41 The ‘real question’ at stake in this project, Dickens wrote in a brief notice of the Prospectus for Household Words, was ‘whether Literature shall continue to be an exception from all other professions and pursuits, in having no resource for its distressed and divided followers but in eleemosynary aid; or, whether it is good that they should be provident, united, helpful of one another, and independent’.42 Here, Dickens claims a common professional identity for authors on the basis of parity with other, more established middle-class professions, whilst, at the same time, asserting the self-determination of the literary profession on the basis of its claim to a unique expertise. Daniel Hack has suggested that this potentially conflicting argument was intended to counter the objections of laissez-faire critics to the privileging of ‘Literature’ above other professional and commercial pursuits.43 Hence, Dickens’s initial justification for the Guild of Literature and Art was couched in somewhat similar terms to Thackeray’s anti-professional rhetoric, although the latter, as might have been expected, was firmly opposed to the project.44 In this context, arguing against literary exceptionalism was a means of establishing the common rules under which the professional author was entitled to demarcate a claim to autonomy, rather than denying the validity of such claims per se. Similarly, Dickens views collective solidarity within the profession as reinforcing the prudential self-reliance of individual authors: independence is synonymous with ‘unity’ rather than monadic separation. In contrast to the hierarchical charitable dispensation of the RLF, then, Dickens presents the Guild’s professional function as egalitarian. Whereas the RLF inculcates a culture of dependence through its insistence on the beneficiary’s ‘degrading plea of poverty’, the Guild is designed to appeal both to the rational economic self-interest of authors and to their collective acceptance of a ‘disinterested’ criterion of aesthetic value: the Prospectus proposes a voluntary life insurance scheme for Guild members as well as a funded pensions list awarded on grounds of literary ‘merit’ rather than economic need.45 In

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his biography of Dickens, Forster later characterized this programme as ‘a system of self-help, under which men engaged in literary pursuits might be as proud to receive as to give’.46 It is this dual insistence upon the solidarity and independence of the literary profession which constitutes the most innovative feature of the Guild’s rhetoric. Closing his remarks in Household Words, Dickens embodies the ethos of collective self-sufficiency by declaring of himself: ‘He is one of an order beyond which he affects to be nothing, and aspires to be nothing.’47 Dickens is surely one of the earliest writers, historically, to have been capable of making such a statement, which expresses not only an allegiance to his professional ‘order’, but also a refusal to desire any other social identity than that of author. Similarly, David Copperfield may well be the first novel in which authorship is presented as the unequivocal summit of the hero’s worldly and spiritual aspirations, rather than as a provisional stage in more diffuse schemes of personal development or social ambition, as is the case in Pendennis and even Bulwer’s Ernest Maltravers. These statements of professional identity were written into the institutional structure of the Guild through the specification that eligibility for membership be restricted to ‘all writers, of either sex, of original works or dramas, or of not less than twenty original papers in Periodicals’: a seemingly capacious invitation but one which was specifically ‘intended to exclude accidental contributors to periodicals, who may not be attached to literature as a profession’. Given such rules of membership, the Prospectus is able to maintain that ‘the constitution of any similar society should be centred in itself, and comprise all the necessary checks; free from the control of any purely extrinsic body’.48 An example of how this self-constituted model of professional authority worked in practice would be the Guild’s proposed method of allocating pensions: since merit, rather than need, was to be the criterion used, only those with professional knowledge, capable of judging literary value, were qualified to administer the scheme. There is little doubt that Dickens and other leading proponents of the Guild of Literature and Art believed that they were contributing to the emancipation of authorship from the state of social and economic subordination in which it had hitherto existed. In a letter to Bulwer-Lytton, dated 5 January 1851, Dickens envisaged the transformative effects of the Guild as nothing short of revolutionary: ‘I do devoutly believe that this plan, carried, will entirely change the status of the Literary Man in England, and make a revolution in his position which no Government, no Power on earth but his own, could ever effect.’49 A key strategy in the Guild’s self-promotional work was to contrast the impending development of the

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nineteenth-century professional author with attitudes towards authorship derived from the previous century. Most obviously, Dickens’s association of the RLF with an aristocratic and amateurish culture of patronage can be seen as a way of relegating that institution to an outmoded eighteenthcentury past (despite the fact that the RLF was itself a relatively recent organization, founded in 1790 and incorporated by royal charter in 1818). In a speech to the Annual General Meeting of the RLF in March 1856, Dickens makes this charge of anachronism fantastically literal by recalling a speech given at a previous meeting in which he had ‘felt like a sort of Rip Van Winkle reversed, who had gone to sleep backwards for a hundred years; and, waking, found that Literature, instead of being emancipated, had to endure all manner of aristocratic patrons, and was lying at the feet of people who did nothing for it, instead of standing alone and appealing to the public for support’.50 Above all, then, the modern professional author, as conceived by Dickens and his associates, was to be liberated from the humiliation of patronage (or, alternatively, enslavement to booksellers) by virtue of the new relationship between author and ‘public’ forged within an expanded literary market. This, it will be recalled, was Forster’s account of the passage from ‘authorship by compulsion’ to ‘authorship by choice’ prefigured in the life of Goldsmith, a ‘transitional’ eighteenth-century man of letters.51 Moreover, in Forster’s later biography of Dickens a similar pattern emerges, whereby the individual shape of Dickens’s career can be taken to embody the wider historical struggle of professionalization; according to Forster, Dickens won his independence as an author only after experiencing exploitation at the hands of publishers during his early career: ‘the uneasy sense accompanying his labour that it was yielding insufficient for himself while it enriched others.’52 From the perspective of the early 1870s, Dickens’s professional career marks a triumphant realization of the note of unfulfilled promise with which Forster had ended his biography of Goldsmith over twenty years earlier: ‘The world will be greatly the gainer, when such time shall arrive . . . when the biography of the man of genius shall no longer be a picture of the most harsh struggles and mean necessities to which man’s life is subject, exhibited as in shameful contrast to the calm and classic glory of his fame.’53 Forster is referring primarily here to the late eighteenth century, but his sense of the ‘shameful’ treatment received by authors extends to the present moment of writing and ‘The Dignity of Literature’ debate. It is only through the efforts of committed professionals such as Dickens, in other words, that the nineteenth century can progress beyond the conditions under which writers such as Goldsmith suffered.

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The striking prominence accorded to eighteenth-century literary culture within many of the key texts of the mid-nineteenth-century debate on the profession of authorship can, at least partly, be explained, then, by its rhetorical value to the debate’s participants. Besides Forster’s Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith and Thackeray’s Eighteenth-Century Humourists – two explicitly opposing interpretations of eighteenth-century authorship – it is possible to view the relationship between Pendennis and David Copperfield in terms of an analogous conflict of literary-historical representation. Both novels were avowedly written in imitation of the manner of Fielding, and, in addition, both contain numerous references to eighteenth-century precursors of their modern-day literary protagonists.54 Whereas Thackeray, as we have seen, places Pen within a journalistic world of Grub Street hacks, Dickens traces the origins of David’s authorship back to his reading, and re-telling, of the novels of Fielding, Smollett, Goldsmith, and Defoe, again suggesting a synecdochic relationship between individual and historical development. An earlier, and possibly influential, fictional representation of eighteenth-century authorship can also be found in Laetitia Landon’s historical novel Ethel Churchill: or, The Two Brides (1837), which incorporates as a sub-plot the narrative of Walter Maynard’s pursuit of literary fame within a Grub Street environment populated by the booksellers Edmund Curll and Bernard Lintot, not to mention the figures of Pope, Congreve, Swift, and Mary Wortley Montagu. Though somewhat removed from the polemical context of later texts, Landon’s portrayal of Maynard as a tragic figure of the poetic ‘ideal’ in conflict with the ‘real’ – his potential is crushed by the commercial exploitation of publishers and the degradation of aristocratic patronage – closely prefigures Bulwer-Lytton’s historical drama, Not So Bad As We Seem; or, Many Sides To A Character (1851), a pastiche comedy of manners written specifically to inaugurate and subsidize the foundation of the Guild of Literature and Art.55 First performed at Devonshire House on 16 May 1851 before a royal audience, with a cast comprising of leading supporters of the Guild, including Dickens and Forster in two of the major roles, Not So Bad As We Seem lends further weight to the cause of professional autonomy by dramatizing the condition of the eighteenthcentury man of letters through a character ominously named David Fallen. Whether or not Bulwer consciously devised this name as a verbal echo of Dickens’s most recent fictional hero, he could hardly have chosen a more suggestive one in light of the debate to which both texts belong. While David Fallen’s surname reads like an allegorical signifier for the degraded status of the eighteenth-century literary hack, his forename suggests that he might be viewed as an inverse figure of Dickens’s triumphant

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professional author: both an ante-type and an anti-type of David Copperfield. In this respect, Bulwer’s character offers little more than a stock Victorian image of the impoverished eighteenth-century writer; his first appearance on stage, for example, exhibits a garret scene described as ‘resembling that of Hogarth’s “Distrest Poet”’. Fallen speaks of being ‘disenchanted’ by his experience of the literary world, echoing the disillusionment of Thackeray’s Grub Street hacks.56 Unlike Thackeray, however, Bulwer presents Fallen as a morally untainted figure, capable of acting with noble disregard to his self-interest, and as a victim of the circumstances of his age. The central incident of the plot is Fallen’s refusal to sell the manuscript of a former patron’s scandalous memoir to the aristocratic Lord Wilmot (ironically performed by Dickens), posing as the bookseller Curll, despite having reasonable motives for retribution against him. The incorruptibility of the man of letters stands in stark contrast to the irredeemably fallen world of political intrigue, exemplified by the comically bribable figure of Robert Walpole. Intriguingly, the scene of Wilmot’s attempted bribery of David Fallen appears to allude to what Mark Rose has characterized as a ‘pivotal moment in the production of the concept of intellectual property’ during the eighteenth century, the celebrated copyright case of Pope v. Curll (1741). Pope’s successful legal challenge to Curll’s unauthorized publication of his private correspondence with Jonathan Swift was significant, Rose suggests, in establishing the principle that ‘copyright in a letter belongs to the writer’ rather than to the recipient, thus demonstrating ‘the essentially immaterial nature of the object of copyright’. This was a crucial step in the emergence of ‘the author as professional’ for it distinguished the author’s proprietorial claim to the immaterial products of his labour – the basis of modern copyright – from the ordinary law of private property.57 Like Pope, then, Bulwer’s fictive eighteenth-century author can be seen to acknowledge a proto-professional claim to intellectual property, albeit on behalf of someone who is not himself a professional writer. The fact that Fallen is concerned to prevent the commercial exploitation of an author’s private experience reinforces the sense that intellectual property is indissoluble from the very ‘personality’ of the author.58 In Not So Bad As We Seem Bulwer thus establishes a proleptic relationship between the eighteenthcentury setting of the play and its mid-nineteenth-century cultural context, the converse of the grotesque analeptic scenario outlined in Dickens’s 1856 speech to the RLF. Here, the anachronism consists of a representation of eighteenth-century authorship designed both to prefigure the subsequent development of the literary profession and to point out the necessity of this

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development by way of contrast. Through his social degradation Fallen embodies the historical condition which the Guild of Literature and Art seeks to redeem, whilst, through his moral dignity, he illustrates the value that such redemption holds for society at large. This quasi-allegorical reading of the play is reinforced in a verse epilogue entitled ‘David Fallen is Dead!’, which was described by Bulwer as an interpretive ‘key to the play’, though it was not in fact performed on stage as originally intended. Here, the announcement of the subsequent (and unexplained) death of David Fallen is explicitly connected to the play’s meta-historical narrative of professional development: hardman. Let us deem him the Last of a Race! sir geoffrey. But the race that succeeds may have little more pelf. hardman. Ay; and trials as sharp. I’m an author myself. But the remedy? Wherefore should authors not build – easy. An alms-house? hardman. No, merchant, their own noble guild! Some fortress for youth in the battle for fame; Some shelter that Age is not humbled to claim; Some roof from the storm for the Pilgrim of Knowledge;– wilmot. Not unlike what our ancestors meant by – a College;59

As the ‘Last of a Race’, Fallen’s death can be read as a token of the future ‘remedy’ enshrined in the play’s culminating vision of a ‘noble guild’. The conception of the Guild is at once the teleological end-point of Bulwer’s historical narrative of professional authorship and the present startingpoint for his re-imagining of the eighteenth-century past. At the same time, as Wilmot’s remark acknowledges, this vision of the future-present also draws upon a deeper ancestral past. The word ‘guild’, according to the Guild’s Prospectus, was adopted ‘in accordance with the name given by old Saxon custom to societies in which the members of a class contributed to the benefit of each other’ in order to distinguish its function from that of an ‘Academy’ or ‘Asylum’.60 Drawing upon an established nineteenthcentury presumption of the democratic nature of Anglo-Saxon institutions, its use in this context frames the modern professional ethos of solidarity and autonomy on a model of the past which pre-dates the author’s entry into the inequitable systems of both aristocratic patronage and the literary market. As we have seen, the idea of establishing a ‘Guild’ for professional authors had already been broached by the likes of Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, well before the foundation of the Guild of Literature and Art. Writing as early

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as 1836, Mill envisaged that ‘[t]he time is perhaps coming when authors, as a collective guild, will be their own patrons and their own booksellers’, while, more pessimistically, Carlyle supposed, in ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’, that ‘this that we call Organization of the Literary Guild is still a great way off, encumbered with all manner of complexities’ (165–6).61 In their recourse to an idealized version of Anglo-Saxon and Medieval forms of precapitalist society, such comments exemplify Emile Durkheim’s suggestion that the nineteenth-century revival of guild institutions was symptomatic of a reaction against unregulated commercial competition in the market for professional services.62 Carlyle, in particular, predicated the desirability of an authors’ Guild on the ‘disorganic’ force of the literary market. By contrast, however, the Guild of Literature and Art did not present its vision of a collectively organized profession as inherently antagonistic to the workings of the market. As witnessed in David Copperfield, Dickens viewed the labour of producing commodities for the market as an integral aspect of the author’s professional autonomy. Bulwer-Lytton came to share this positive understanding of literary labour, as his declaration in an advertisement for a popular collected edition of his writings, published in 1847, testifies: May these works, then, thus cheaply equipped for a wider and more popular mission than they have hitherto fulfilled, find favour in those hours when the shop is closed, when the flocks are penned, and the loom has released its prisoners; – may they be read by those who, like myself, are workmen.63

Here, as in Dickens’s novel, the labour of writing is both ostentatiously aligned with the prosaic world of ‘daily toil’ and tacitly withdrawn from the condition of alienation which it endures. Through their equivalent status as ‘workmen’, author and reader are united within a non-hierarchical structure of commodity exchange; the worker in the shop or factory who purchases one of Bulwer’s novels effectively exchanges one form of labour for another. Yet, unlike these other forms of labour, the products of authorship are associated with the free-time of leisure, offering an escape from imprisonment. Even more striking is the parallel drawn in the Guild’s Prospectus between the collective labour of the literary profession, embodied in the proposed performance of Not So Bad As We Seem, and the achievements in other branches of labour displayed concurrently at the Great Exhibition of 1851. The purpose of the Guild’s ‘Dramatic Representations’ is ‘to place before the public, at a time when the other producers of the country will receive a memorable attention, the claims of a class whose productions form not the least honour to England in the eyes of the foreigner’.64 In other words, the staging of Bulwer’s play should be seen not as a frivolous exercise in professional self-promotion, but as a spectacle of productive social labour,

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no less significant than the display of industrial products assembled in the Crystal Palace.65 Despite its nominally pre-industrial form, then, the Guild remained committed to an ideology of professional emancipation through modern commercial and technological development, effectively seeking to manage its more hazardous consequences. Underlying this self-confident presentation, of course, were contradictions and anomalies which the Guild was unable to resolve. Fundamentally, the Guild was conceived in response to conflicting pressures: on the one hand, by the desire to surmount an outmoded system of external patronage, but on the other by the need to correct or redress the deficiencies of an unregulated market. It was imagined as a ‘College’ rather than an ‘almshouse’, yet, as Hack has shown, the Guild found it difficult to distinguish its own activity from charity.66 The most tellingly incongruous moment of Not So Bad As We Seem is a scene in which Wilmot responds to David Fallen’s rejection of bribery by rewarding his ‘heroic example’ with the offer of an annuity exactly equalling the amount of money which he has refused, as a result of which Fallen is rescued from a life of Grub Street privation. Wilmot attempts to explain his gesture by describing it not as ‘alms’ or ‘charity’, but as a form of ‘tribute’ or repayment of a ‘debt’ owed doubly to the author’s literary merit and moral example.67 As Hack observes, it is far from clear how this conclusive action of the play can be distinguished from the charitable patronage which the Guild was supposed to render obsolete, or, alternatively, how it prefigures the new methods of financial support which it offered to professional authors. A more glaring anomaly was the Guild’s reliance upon the very form of aristocratic patronage which Dickens found so distasteful in the Royal Literary Fund: its chief patron being the Duke of Devonshire, who not only hosted the premi`ere performance of Bulwer’s play, but also received an obsequious authorial dedication in the eighteenth-century manner, and became the Guild’s first President.68 One response to such contradictions would be to conclude that the Guild of Literature and Art was not a professional organization in any meaningful sense, but, as Thackeray memorably claimed, merely another ‘literary Soup-Kitchen’.69 This, however, is partly to judge the mid-century debate on ‘The Dignity of Literature’ from a later knowledge of professional development, an approach which is likely to erase the fluidity and uncertainties of a still emergent discourse.

Copying Copperfield Dickens’s active involvement in the spectacle of collective labour staged by Not So Bad As We Seem (he not only acted in, but also stage-managed,

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the first performances of the play) suggests a commitment to the ethos of professional solidarity, which a closer reading of David Copperfield renders somewhat more ambivalent. Whilst there are many writers, and instances of writing, featured within the novel, as critics have noted, there is clearly only one professional author, and he, moreover, is the medium through which the reader learns about the inadequacies of all the other potential candidates. One by one David reveals the unsuitability of his fellow writers – Mr. Dick, Dr. Strong, Micawber, Traddles, Dora, and Uriah – for aspiring to the professional status to which he tacitly lays claim. Yet under no circumstances does he acknowledge other writers as rivals for success, or directly comparable to himself. In this respect, the novel could hardly be more different from the context of collegial activity in which it can be situated, and may even have helped to inspire. If we are to think of David Copperfield as a narrative charting the formation of a distinctly professional authorial identity, its bias would thus appear to lie more on the side of autonomy than solidarity. The process by which David’s gradual accession to the unique competency of ‘professional labour’ simultaneously defines the terms by which other claims are excluded can be seen in the light of Lewes’s figuration of the literary profession as a ‘Macedonian phalanx’, a body of authors ‘compact, chosen, [and] irresistible’ in its determination to repel ‘Xerxes’ army’ of aspiring commercial writers, an ‘innumerable host of hungry pretenders’.70 Just as Lewes defines a collective professional identity by what it is not, and should remain impervious to becoming, so in David Copperfield Dickens fashions a narrative of self-authorization which is predicated on establishing the privilege of professional status. The resulting impression of David’s sole occupancy of the literary field resembles what Larson has described as professional ideology’s ‘tendency to monopoly by elimination of competing “products”’, rather than its ‘shared set of cognitive and normative rules’.71 If this interpretation identifies a latent rhetorical claim of the narrative, it is important, nevertheless, to consider whether, through his implied authorship of the text, Dickens effectively endorses or questions David’s exalted status. In the remainder of this chapter I examine the possible tensions within David Copperfield’s seemingly triumphant progressivist narrative with a view to understanding the cultural significance of its preoccupation with the relationship between ‘originals’ and ‘copies’. By no means all readers of the novel have been inclined to accept David’s status as the hero as man of letters, potentially inscribed in the opening sentence of his narrative.72 Murray Baumgarten, for instance, contends that ‘[d]espite David’s prominence as character and narrative voice, his

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view of writing is not the only one in the novel. We are not allowed to accept his while treating the others merely as way stations on the road to his conclusion.’73 Others have argued similarly by proposing alternative candidates for heroic status: Garrett Stewart characterizes Micawber as ‘the great rival author in David Copperfield, a commanding stylist against whose prose David must define his own expressive tendencies’, while William Spengemann views Mr. Dick as a more significant figure in terms of Dickens’s autobiographical fiction.74 All of these suggestions build on Forster’s original recognition of the error of assuming ‘anything like a complete identity’ between the figure of David and Dickens himself.75 If, as Spengemann suggests, Dickens’s attempt to retrieve from the past the hidden sources of his mature authorial identity found ‘not the tangled root-system of a single self but the seeds of many separate selves’, then it is possible to view David, Micawber, and Mr. Dick as fragmented parts of an autobiographical consciousness which cannot be adequately represented in any singular figure.76 Thus, the monopolistic image of the literary professional embodied by David may represent only one aspect of the diverse, commingled, or contradictory conceptions of authorship attributable to ‘Dickens’. While the character of Micawber is perhaps most readily understood as David’s stigmatized alter ego – the very antithesis of a disciplined professional writer, as David’s extraordinary polemic against his exorbitant linguistic style in Chapter lii betrays – he can also, through a reversal of perspective, assume the function of David’s reproving conscience, becoming a manifestation of all that is repressed by the demands of his stringent economy of literary production. It is Micawber, in particular, who registers an uneasiness with the potentially mystifying and depersonalizing aspects of professional ideology, which is shared by David himself as I suggested earlier. As with Mr. Dick, Micawber’s attempt to restrain his capacity for self-expression within a more ‘economic’ mode of writing proves more disturbing, in its willed alienation, than the original prolixity of his style. Adopting a ‘professional correspondence’ as Uriah’s secretary, Micawber discovers that ‘the mind is not at liberty to soar to any exalted form of expression’ (521); his ironic fate is to be reduced to the level of a consciously unthinking copyist, obliged to carry the burden of a one-sided professionalism which David successfully transcends. In quite literal terms, the practice of copying becomes the defining characteristic of all of the unprofessional – or too professional – writers encountered within the novel. Not only Mr. Dick and Uriah, as already seen, but Dora, Traddles, and his wife Sophy are all, at one stage or another, depicted in the act of copying texts, often for monetary exchange. Relegated

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to mechanical, imitative, and subordinate tasks of writing, these figures serve to define the creative originality of David’s professional authorship through comparisons which appear transparently invidious.77 David’s skill as a parliamentary reporter, for instance, is emphasized by its proximity to Traddles’s menial employment in ‘getting up the facts of dry subjects, to be written about and embellished by more fertile minds’ (578), while the contrast between David’s confident authorial ‘I’ and Dora’s incongruous insistence on attaching her signature to copies of his manuscripts is even more cruelly drawn. In this respect, David himself is figured as the original text surrounded and reproduced by a host of inferior copies, of which Dora, Traddles, and Uriah provide examples in differing guises. More subtle is the distinction between David’s mature claim to originality, founded on his early apprenticeship in the art of copying, and the elimination of idiosyncrasy from the writings of Micawber and Mr. Dick through their voluntary reduction to the status of mechanical labour. In each of these comparisons the primacy of the original over the copy is enforced, yet, by the same token, the original is shown to require the existence of the copy for its value to be confirmed. Copyists may be reviled (as in the case of Uriah), abject (in the case of Dora), or merely pedestrian (like Traddles), but without them the authenticity of David’s authorial inscription would not be recognized. This paradox can, in part, be attributed to the changing relationship between ‘originals’ and ‘copies’ within the system of industrialized commodity production which is both reflected and embodied by Dickens’s text. Through the mass production of commodities, as Alexander Welsh has emphasized, the process of copying loses some of its derivative status whilst the ontological primacy of the original is commensurately diminished: in Charles Babbage’s early nineteenth-century theory of industrial manufacture, according to Welsh, ‘[t]he sole end of the original is the copy’.78 Similarly, readers of David Copperfield are made acutely conscious of the necessity of copying for the dissemination of the original: a statement which is applicable both to David’s successful development as a popular novelist and to the production of the novel on which Dickens described himself, in March 1850, as ‘working like a Steam Engine’.79 Right from the beginning of the novel, indeed, David’s claim to originality, based on the assumption of a unique proprietorial relationship to his personal experience, is undercut by an anxiety about the necessity of self-dissemination for the production of autobiographical texts. The sale of David’s ‘caul’, recalled as an incident ensuing from the very moment of his birth, emblematizes a tension between the founding act of selfidentity and the fragmentation and dispersal of self which phantasmatically

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accompanies it. Presented explicitly as a scene of commercial exhibition and exchange – or, more precisely, of their failure – the fate of David’s caul prefigures the hazards undertaken by the author who voluntarily detaches ‘part[s] of myself’ for market distribution (12). Even before this moment, in fact, the inscription of the extended title of the serial publication of the novel, The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger, of Blunderstone Rookery, which he never meant to be published on any account, registers an analogous conflict. The conceit of a private text which has somehow escaped the control of its author’s intention by entering the public sphere (adduced from the fact that we are reading it) indicates both the fictive author’s desire to assert ownership of his text, and thus, by extension, of his authorial personality, and the meta-authorial acknowledgement that ownership of the text – in the sense of a culturally recognized legal entitlement – can only be established through a process of dissemination by means of copying. David’s title is, of course, disingenuous insofar as publication is not accidental but essential in cementing his reputation as a professional author, though nonetheless appropriate insofar as it associates his authorship with the authenticity of ‘private’ experience. In its anxious reflections on the nature of authorial originality, then, David Copperfield explores not just the impact of an increasingly technologized mode of literary production, but also the emergence of the author as a ‘properly legal professional agent’ within mid-nineteenth-century discourse.80 Dickens began work on the novel only seven years after the Copyright Amendment Act of 1842, which, according to Shillingsburg, ‘codified for the first time the author’s “right” in perpetuity to the publication of unpublished material by making the “copyright” in such material an explicit part of the author’s estate’.81 Extending the judgement of Pope v. Curll, almost exactly one hundred years later, the latter provision makes the fiction that David Copperfield’s manuscript was ‘never meant to be published’ especially topical, for it reinforces David’s claim to be acknowledged as the legitimate owner of his text in the very gesture of disregarding his authorial intention. The text which is (or should have been) left unpublished now becomes the purest expression of the author’s proprietorial right to personal identity, an assumption echoed in the central debate of Bulwer’s Not So Bad As We Seem. At the same time, the right of ownership over ‘unpublished material’ can only be conceived as a right to publish that material, if it is to be understood as a claim on the ‘immaterial nature of the object of copyright’, not simply as a form of private property. In David Copperfield the analogical nexus of originality, personality, and property, which Rose suggests was central to the formation of the discourse of copyright, is fully

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exposed: David himself embodying the hypothesis that ‘[t]he basis of literary property . . . was not just labor but “personality”, and this revealed itself in “originality”’.82 Equally, though, the novel suggests that what both consolidates and threatens the discourse of copyright is the practice of copying, the necessary supplement of originality. The extraordinary manner in which Dickens informs the reader of David’s rapid rise to literary ‘fame’ in the last third of the novel is perhaps the most vivid indication of this conflict. Fame, in David Copperfield, may be conceived as another instance of copying, whereby the ‘original’ self is able to view its image reflected by others, a process dependent upon the multiple reproduction of texts. We first hear of David’s growing fame as a writer from Mrs. Steerforth in Chapter xlvi, and thereafter it becomes the choric refrain of nearly everyone who knows him. From Dora’s ‘dear old clever, famous boy’ (643) to Traddles’s ‘And grown so famous!’ (757), through to the reports of his fame in such disparate locations as Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Chillip) and Port Middlebay, Australia (Micawber), David cannot escape being reminded – or, rather, reminding us that he has been reminded – of his increasing public visibility. The self-validating nature of David’s professional narrative is, here, powerfully augmented by the various reflective mirrors which surround him in the guise of other characters, though only partially diffusing the apparent narcissism of its form. Again, David’s claim to a singular authorial identity is grounded in the derivative process of reproduction and dissemination by which other writers in the text are reduced to the function of copyists. This becomes increasingly evident through the widening geographical extension of his literary celebrity. To have one’s name recognized in the provincial backwaters of Suffolk is no doubt gratifying, but to become known at the furthest reaches of the Empire, as revealed by Micawber in the penultimate chapter, suggests the achievement of a truly global brand-recognition. Addressed to ‘DAVID COPPERFIELD, ESQUIRE, THE EMINENT AUTHOR’, Micawber’s letter from Australia offers fitting testimony to the successful dissemination of David’s professional image beyond the confines of his immediate domestic circle:

MY DEAR SIR, Years have elapsed, since I had an opportunity of ocularly perusing the lineaments, now familiar to the imagination of a considerable portion of the civilized world. But, my dear sir, though estranged (by the force of circumstances over which I have had no controul) from the personal society

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of the friend and companion of my youth, I have not been unmindful of his soaring flight. (801)

Micawber’s elision of David’s proper name with the cultural status of ‘EMINENT AUTHOR’ is the novel’s final ratification of its hero’s pursuit of professional autonomy – the ultimate point of convergence between private and public narratives, in which the self-authorization of the autobiographical act is achieved through the collectively defined status of the literary profession. It is at this point, significantly, that David emerges into the full visibility of a literary icon, taking his place as an ‘object seen’ (in the Carlylean sense) in addition to his role as observing subject (as specified in the extended title): ‘personal society’ is no longer necessary for ‘ocular perusal’ of an author whose fame ensures that his ‘lineaments’ are ‘now familiar to the imagination of . . . the civilized world’. In this sense, David has achieved something close to what Dickens himself sought, but failed to achieve, through his support for the cause of international copyright during the 1840s: the diffusion of his authorial identity beyond national boundaries without relinquishing proprietorial control of the process.83 The tension underlying the triumph here comes from the fact that David’s burgeoning fame must coexist with his enduring commitment to the private sphere and the ideology of inalienable domestic labour with which it is invested. In becoming a public icon, recognizable without limits, David risks losing the qualities of secrecy and invisibility which have often been associated with his character and narrative function within the text.84 As previously noted, David refuses to reveal his consciousness in the act of professional writing other than to declare its status as a form of mental labour: the author draws attention to his work only by repeatedly declining to discuss it. Yet it is important for Dickens to make clear that the occlusion of David’s writing does not confine it to the marginality of private life, either in terms of a devalued ‘feminine’ mode of authorship or in terms of a Romantic solipsism. By the end of the novel, as we view David sifting through his fan mail (‘an enormous quantity of letters from people of whom I had no knowledge’), he has come to feel ‘like a Home Secretary of State without the salary’ (776); to assume, that is to say, a quasi-official public role in the minds of his readers. At this point, David’s story of professional self-realization does, indeed, begin to resemble the formation of a Carlylean hero as man of letters, an icon whose cultural visibility serves a greater purpose than that of personal celebrity, or even perhaps a distinctly bourgeois version of Shelley’s ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’.85 What mediates between these opposing commitments to the

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private and public spheres is an ideal of the literary profession in which the intimacy of authorial personality is translated into the objective condition of autonomy. Whilst I have argued that David Copperfield should not be read as an entirely seamless resolution of this project, it is, nevertheless, true to say that the negotiation of the boundaries between private and public in Dickens’s professional narrative is considerably less problematic than it was for other contemporary writers, most notably women, for whom occupation of the domestic sphere was not simply a matter of voluntary affiliation, and working-class men, whose experience of labour proved much less amenable to professional upgrading.

c h a p t e r fi v e

Broken idols The development of the working-class author

The previous chapter showed how, during the mid-nineteenth-century debate on ‘The Dignity of Literature’, professional authorship came to be viewed as synonymous with the performance of labour. For reasons of both principle and strategy, both Dickens and Thackeray drew attention to the arduous work of writing in their competing fictional accounts of the development of a middle-class male authorial persona, loosely derived from autobiographical experience. There is, however, a more direct and pressing analogy to be made between ‘literature’ and ‘labour’ during the first half of the nineteenth century, which concerns the increasing prominence of a recognizable model of working-class authorship: a literature that emerges directly from the ‘labouring classes’. In The Literature of Labour, published in 1851, Edwin Paxton Hood celebrated the ‘Poetry’ of ‘Labour’ in terms that are strikingly reminiscent of David Copperfield’s rhetoric, yet the class affiliations of this study are quite different: ‘The Hand! – what a Poem is there – the Hand!’, Hood exclaims in the context of a discussion which attempts ‘to show that mental labour may very frequently combine nobly with manly labour’.1 Hood’s purpose seems to resemble Dickens’s desire to dignify the prosaic routine of David’s literary work, yet for his ‘Illustrious Instances of the Education of Poetry in Poverty’ – mainly poets of working-class origin from the previous half century – combining physical and mental labour is an act of practical necessity and statement of literal truth, not just a metaphor of choice for the writer’s professional self-discipline. Hood’s work clearly participates in the same broader project of redefining authorship as a concrete form of ‘social labour’ (a term which he uses) and establishing authors as members of the ‘Producing Classes’ that preoccupied middle-class professional polemicists such as Dickens and Forster. Like them, Hood condemns the separation of mental and manual labour in ‘these latter ages’ for giving rise to a prevailing assumption of the inutility of ‘genius’. He accepts the claim of middle-class authors to be labelled ‘Productive Labourers’, citing Wordsworth, Scott, and Dickens 135

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as notable examples, and argues that ‘we must extend the meaning of the term, the Labouring Classes’ accordingly. Nevertheless, when Hood writes of nationally renowned authors in the same breath as ‘lucifer-match maker[s]’, ‘street sweeper[s]’, ‘carpenters’, and ‘masons’, he presents an equality of social labour which even Thackeray may have found hard to countenance.2 Not only is this gesture devoid of the insecurities of social respectability which bedevil David Copperfield’s declarations of literary labour, but it must also be read within the adjacent context of the lifestories of writers whose manual labour is an apparently ineradicable element of their authorial identity. The Literature of Labour comprises chapters devoted to ‘Robert Nicoll, the Kine Herder’, ‘John Clare, the Peasant Poet’, ‘James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd’, ‘Thomas Cooper, the Shoemaker’, and ‘Hugh Miller, the Stone-Mason’: here, the physical work that denotes membership of the ‘Labouring Classes’ (in the more restricted sense of the term) is visibly inscribed on the figure of the author, whose imaginative and intellectual life consequently becomes another scene of heroic toil. Because these writers are obliged to combine their literary vocation with other forms of labour, Hood implies, writing itself becomes all the more laborious: their generic occupational titles are thus truly welded to their singular authorial names. In this chapter I will be discussing the ways in which early to mid Victorian writers, of all social classes, approached the development of working-class authorship, both at the level of individualized narratives of self-formation and the broader process of collective cultural definition. This question inevitably reinforced the shift towards describing authorship in terms of a political economy of labour, rather than through Romantic tropes of genius or divine inspiration, which we have already witnessed. In the following discussion, however, I am more concerned with examining the specific models of working-class literary development formulated between the 1830s and 1850s than with expanding an abstract conceptualization of literary labour. As before, the focus of this enquiry will be broadly twofold, exploring both narrative and iconographic modes of representation. Firstly, I consider the extent to which working-class authorship participated in the prevailing narrative form of literary development derived from, or associated with, British appropriations of the German Bildungsroman, and the extent to which such participation should be conceived as an assimilation of bourgeois cultural norms, as some critics have suggested.3 Although it is hard to find precise working-class equivalents to the novel of literary apprenticeship as practised by Bulwer-Lytton, Thackeray, and Dickens, in some respects the subject position of the self-taught writer was of

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central importance to mid-century discussions of the benefits of ‘selfculture’ ostensibly reproduced by this form. Far from being of marginal concern to this ‘bourgeois ideology’, working-class authorship was (perhaps unsurprisingly) fertile territory on which to map exemplary narrative accounts of self-formation and improvement. As we shall see, though, narratives of autodidactic self-culture took the form of both authentic and simulated working-class autobiography, as well as biography written from the differing standpoints of sympathetic upper-class patronage and coequal class solidarity. Secondly, this chapter examines the dominant iconographic representation of working-class authorship current within early to midnineteenth-century culture, which is strikingly at odds with the benign, meliorist narrative of self-improvement. A countervailing myth of the male working-class writer’s ‘tragic’ inability to develop his literary talent to its full potential gave rise to an image of literary martyrdom firmly rooted in an earlier Romantic iconography of the poet. This tragic model of personal incompletion, leading to both self and narrative fragmentation, was most often exemplified by the figure of Robert Burns, unquestionably the most prominent writer of the labouring classes during the first half of the century. The Burnsian paradigm of working-class authorship remained influential within early Victorian culture largely as a result of Thomas Carlyle’s work in augmenting earlier biographical interpretations of the poet’s life. Carlyle’s version of Burns, I will argue, is based on the iconographic figure of the broken idol, a trope which became widely used in middle-class accounts of working-class writers. In turn, Carlyle’s mediation of Burns helped to make him one of the most significant contemporary influences on workingclass literary culture: an iconic figure (though of a different kind) in his own right. The latter half of the chapter pursues the question of Carlyle’s role in shaping attitudes, amongst all classes, towards the phenomenon of working-class authorship through a more indirect route. Charles Kingsley’s novel, Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet. An Autobiography (1850), is the clearest and best-known example of a fictional narrative account of the development of a working-class author produced during the mid nineteenth century, and was visibly influenced by Carlyle’s reading of Burns, his broader account of the hero as man of letters, and his mediation of the Bildungsroman, as well as responding directly to the contemporary genre of working-class autobiography and to the Chartist poet and intellectual Thomas Cooper in particular. Published in the same year as the first volume editions of David Copperfield and Pendennis, Alton Locke shares many of the same generic features as these definitive accounts of male middleclass literary development, but Kingsley’s adaptation of this narrative form

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generates notable differences, which can be traced to his attempt at articulating the specific cultural dilemmas of a working-class protagonist. This distinctive variation on the novel of literary apprenticeship is the result of an often uncomfortable fusion, or collision, of the conflicting narrative and iconographic paradigms of working-class authorship.

Working-class narratives of self-culture Despite his role in fostering a potentially inhibiting cultural myth about the tragically unfulfilled potential of Robert Burns, Thomas Carlyle was frequently cited as an inspirational figure by self-educated writers from the 1840s onward. Poets and autobiographers such as Samuel Bamford, Thomas Cooper, and Christopher Thomson invoke Carlyle as a key cultural reference point, or even personal mentor, in their struggle for intellectual self-improvement. Thomson’s Autobiography of an Artisan (published in five parts between 1846 and 1847), for example, is framed by epigraphs from Carlyle and Tennyson which lend authority to the writer’s embarkation on the ‘glorious mission of self-culture’ and legitimize the lives of the socially obscure as fitting subjects for autobiographical representation.4 Bamford and Cooper both became personal correspondents with Carlyle in relation to their development as poets (typically, Carlyle tried to persuade them to find other means of self-expression), and Cooper’s most ambitious poem, The Purgatory of Suicides (1845), a classical epic in ten books composed during a two-year prison sentence in Stafford Gaol for his alleged role in inciting a riot while speaking as a Chartist representative, was published with a dedicatory sonnet to Carlyle: an act of ‘simple and real intellectual homage’, he wrote.5 Later on, we will see that Kingsley invokes the authority of Carlyle repeatedly throughout Alton Locke, partly as a reflection of ‘intellectual homage’ on his own part no doubt, but also, conceivably, as an attempt to represent accurately the intellectual subculture of Radical artisans during this period. The latter is most obviously suggested by the fact that one of Alton Locke’s intellectual mentors is the Scotsman Sandy Mackaye, a character generally assumed to be modelled directly on Carlyle. Carlyle’s significance for aspiring working-class writers may be attributed to a variety of causes, not excluding what Patrick Brantlinger describes as his own ‘ambiguous’ class status as the university-educated son of a stonemason and farmer of rural ‘peasant’ stock.6 One important factor, often overlooked, is that some of Carlyle’s most distinctive intellectual doctrines could be seen to legitimize a working-class desire for self-development: in

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particular, his ideas on the nature and social recognition of heroism, which are often related to questions of ‘rank’ and illuminated by examples of men who achieve greatness from lowly beginnings. In a literary context, as I have noted, Carlyle’s treatment of Burns as an embodiment of the hero as man of letters – however flawed or ambiguous he appears in this role – constructed a powerful and popular image of the working-class poet. Elsewhere, he made more positive statements about working-class cultural development, most notably in an essay on Ebenezer Elliott, ‘Corn-Law Rhymes’ (1832). Beginning from the assumption that ‘Genius, which the French lady declared to be of no sex, is much more certainly of no rank’, Carlyle, in this essay, proceeds to speculate that, for an aspiring ‘Thinker and Writer’, ‘it is actually, in these strange days, no special misfortune to be trained up among the Uneducated classes, and not among the Educated’. In this context, he maintains, ‘where a genius has been given, a possibility, a certainty of its growing is also given’; genius has the innate capacity to transcend material circumscription, ultimately making light of the adverse social conditions in which it may have originated. Conversely, however, genius can suffer from over-cultivation when it is set within more comfortable surroundings; thinking of intellectual development in organicist terms, Carlyle concludes that ‘often it seems as if the injudicious gardening and manuring were worse than none at all’ (iii, 159–61). This line of reasoning is then extended by a comparison between the educational conditions and opportunities of Burns and Byron, which comes down clearly on the side of the former. Reflecting a familiar polarization of gendered class characteristics, the peasant Burns exemplifies vigorous masculine growth contrasted with Byron’s effeminate aristocratic refinement. Though, importantly, Carlyle also views the development of Burns and Elliott as ‘more or less marred’ by their material constraints, this is evidently deemed preferable to the opposing scenario: ‘that he, whose other wants were all beforehand supplied; to whose capabilities no problem was presented except even this, How to cultivate them to best advantage, should attain less real culture than he whose first grand problem and obligation was nowise spiritual culture, but hard labour for his daily bread!’(iii, 164) Carlyle’s sympathetic account of the potential for intellectual selfdevelopment amongst the ‘uneducated classes’, predicated by his assumption of the universality of genius, helped to establish a broadly positive framework for discussions of working-class authorship during the early Victorian period. Yet Carlyle’s influence should not be overstated since he was only one participant in the formation of a wider discourse on working-class cultural development, and not the earliest contributor for

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that matter. Modern critics have been divided in their assessment of the politics of this discourse, with some arguing that its emphasis on ‘selfculture’ and ‘self-improvement’ marks an intrinsically conservative strand within Radical intellectual culture. This view is espoused by Martha Vicinus in The Industrial Muse (1974), as well as in more recent work on working-class autobiography by Nan Hackett and Regenia Gagnier. For these critics, the incorporation of self-development as a distinct narrative form of working-class literature suggests an uneasy assimilation of middleclass cultural ideals at the expense of more direct and autonomous forms of political engagement. The turn towards self-culture in the work of Chartist intellectuals such as Thomas Cooper signifies, in Vicinus’s account, a withdrawal from political activism during the late 1840s, while for Hackett and Gagnier it represents the intrusion of an introspective subjectivity which is alien to existing patterns of working-class self-representation. During the nineteenth century, according to Hackett, working-class autobiography was distinguished from the more familiar middle-class forms of the genre by its relative ‘lack of introspection’ and an emphasis on the ‘testimonial’ or ‘representative’ functions of narrating the self: rather than aiming at a ‘presentation of the self as a unique individual’, working-class autobiography typically produces ‘an alternative form of self-presentation’ whereby a ‘de-personalized’ individual subject is situated in relation to broader contexts of family and class.7 Yet other critics have argued that the attempt to separate the ethos of self-development from ‘authentic’ forms of workingclass cultural expression leads to a simplified characterization of opposing class subjectivities. David Vincent’s Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Autobiography (1981) provides a more nuanced account of the dissemination of ‘self-improvement’ culture during the 1830s and 1840s, which recognizes the dynamic nature of the interaction between dominant middle-class cultural institutions and their intended working-class audiences. Commonly equated with the ‘rise’ of the bourgeois subject, the flourishing existence of working-class autobiography seems not only surprising but also inherently problematic, for it raises the question ‘of whether in embracing literature as a means of discovering itself the working class had sacrificed its independence at the very outset’. However, whilst the model of self-improvement adopted by male workingclass autobiographers of this period is sometimes informed by middle-class propagandist bodies such as the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), founded in 1826, Vincent demonstrates the extent to which it was actively redefined in their hands.8 In their co-authored Introduction to The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated Critical

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Bibliography (1984), Burnett, Vincent, and Mayall further contend that the ‘autobiography of self-improvement’ is the most ‘characteristic’ form of the genre produced by working-class writers during the nineteenth century, and that this form was not in any straightforward sense handed down from above. For one thing, improvement ‘in the moral and intellectual state of the writer’ was often distinguished from ‘upward mobility’ in terms of social position. This distinction draws upon the tradition of spiritual autobiography, which has deep roots in working-class culture, as well as appropriating the modern secular ideal of aesthetic education.9 Moreover, as Patrick Joyce points out, to conceive of self-development solely in terms of a binary opposition with collective identity precludes the possibility of a more benign, reciprocal relationship between the two; at least in the earlier part of the century, Joyce contends, ‘cultivating the self’ did not automatically signify a form of individualism at odds with the ideal of ‘solidarity with a common humanity’.10 Perhaps the single most influential text on early Victorian narratives of working-class intellectual development was G.L. Craik’s The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties (1830–1), published in two volumes ‘under the superintendence’ of the SDUK. As a quasi-official instrument for the propagation of ‘useful knowledge’ within the (male) labouring class, Craik’s work was widely disseminated and furnished a template for numerous subsequent accounts of individual and collective auto/biography, culminating, most famously, in Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance (1859). Despite its institutional sponsorship, The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties expresses an aesthetic appreciation of the ‘work of self-cultivation’ alongside its motivational narrative paradigm. By comparison with later writers, Craik’s conception of selfdevelopment may seem insubstantial: he makes no particular distinction between literary or cultural knowledge and the accumulation of empirical or scientific facts, and the connection between acquiring ‘knowledge’ and character-formation remains under-explored. Yet Craik does firmly distinguish the pursuit of knowledge, as a realization of the ideal of ‘intellectual or moral progress’, from the instrumental pursuit of ‘mere wealth or station’: his numerous examples of this pursuit are rendered admirable and heroic for this reason. Indeed, Craik’s separation of intellectual knowledge and practical self-interest frequently appears too emphatic, as if he is consciously working to persuade his reader that the development of the mind is entirely ‘independent’ of ‘external circumstances’. While this declaration of intellectual autonomy may offer consolation for those to whom ‘fortune’ has ‘refuse[d] . . . all other riches’, it also betrays an anxiety to

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detach working-class cultural development from more directly threatening forms of social mobility, which Vincent views as characteristic of the SDUK’s ideological project.11 Establishing a binary opposition between the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of wealth enables Craik to preserve both sides of the equation from contamination by the other, although only the former is acknowledged as an object of concern. This strategy results in an extraordinarily optimistic assessment of the capacity to achieve self-cultivation regardless of material constraints, an optimism which runs directly counter to Romantic iconography of the suffering genius. Responding to the work of Isaac D’Israeli, Craik insists that: Anecdotes illustrating the devotion with which knowledge has been pursued under the pressure of severe penury, or other forms of worldly misfortune, are evidences, not of any calamities to which literature has a peculiar tendency to expose its votaries, but rather of the power with which it arms them to conquer and rise superior to calamities.12

In this view, any ‘calamities’ endured by impoverished authors or other seekers of knowledge should properly be treated as occasions for demonstrating the superior efficacy of ‘regularity and diligence . . . resolution and perseverance’ in elevating the mind above its external circumstances, rather than as signifying an innate pathology of ‘genius’ (the terminology clearly anticipates that of David Copperfield). For Craik, what is important is the exercise of mental fortitude shown in surmounting ‘difficulties’, not so much the level of achievement to which the autodidact attains; indeed, unlike Carlyle, Craik is not of the opinion ‘that the circumstance of an individual’s having been what is called self-taught, is generally favourable to the originality of his literary productions’.13 The upsurge of self-styled working-class autobiographical writing during the mid to late 1840s exhibits the influence of Craik’s narrative model, though in a less obviously generic form than Smiles’s Self-Help. Thomas Carter’s anonymously published Memoirs of a Working Man (1845) demonstrates this link on an institutional level as it too was published with the support of the SDUK. Framed with an introductory essay by Charles Knight, Carter’s autobiography is explicitly presented as an exemplary instance of the ‘pursuit of knowledge under difficulties’ and a validation of Craik’s separation of knowledge from social ambition. According to Knight, the chief merit of Carter’s memoir is its ‘history of the formation of his habits of thought, and thence of his system of conduct – the development of his intellectual and moral life’. The anonymous, depersonalized location of the narrative (neither the name of the autobiographer

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nor those of his family and friends nor of his native town are specified) focusses attention on this exemplary, generic aspect of the text. Carter, as Knight correctly observes, ‘makes no claim to any extraordinary powers of understanding’, and thus cannot be figured as some ‘mute inglorious Milton’; he is simply the embodiment of a generalized intellectual aspiration characteristic of his social class, which has the added ‘inducement’ of being ‘independent of any collateral advantage’.14 In fact, Carter’s autobiography provides less unequivocal support to this didactic interpretation than at first appears, since it transpires that his intellectual accomplishments do become a mechanism for social advancement after he joins a ‘literary society’ which allows him to mix with men of a higher class, and subsequently to develop a career as a published lecturer. Like other working-class autobiographers, though, Carter understandably seeks to suppress any element of material self-interest within his ‘instructive’ narrative by reaffirming pride and contentment in his existing station – his ‘proper business’ as a tailor.15 Although less obviously serving a didactic function, Alexander Somerville’s The Autobiography of a Working Man (1848) and Thomson’s Autobiography of an Artisan also emphasize their educational value to working-class readers in a spirit of liberal utilitarian progress, tacitly (and on occasion explicitly) distanced from contemporary Radical politics. Like Carter, both of these men document modest or subsidiary literary ambitions, eschewing any claim to the status of genius or professional authority. The implied significance of these narratives lies primarily in their testimonial status as accounts of the ongoing work of self-development, irrespective of the achievement of any intellectual or social goals. Somerville, for instance, proudly proclaims the autonomy of his endeavours in defiance of the failure of his ‘commercial enterprise’ and lack of ‘good fortune’: ‘Whether at labouring or literary work, with a spade or a pen, I have been my own helper.’16 Thomson, as suggested earlier, expounds a similar doctrine of ‘self-culture’, but with greater insistence. Firmly convinced of the ‘social progression’ of the nineteenth century, he acknowledges Knight’s Penny Magazine (the house periodical of the SDUK) as ‘the first intellectual mile-post put down upon the way-side, wherefrom coming ages may measure their progress towards a commonwealth of books’, and recounts his own involvement in establishing analogous educational institutes for the working class, such as ‘The Association of Self-Help’ founded in the Nottinghamshire village of Edwinstowe in 1847, with the aim of ‘improv[ing] the moral condition of its members’. The 1847 volume edition of The Autobiography of an Artisan is, indeed, dedicated to ‘The Artisans and

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Labourers of England, Fellow-Workmen in the Holy Cause of SelfElevation’, a sufficient indication of Thomson’s class solidarity and the Craikian optimism emanating from his sense of ‘living in the sun-rise of an intellectual day’. As in the other texts I have discussed, Thomson sees no difficulty – on the surface, at least — in separating the principle of self-help from the possible corollary of social mobility; for him, self-help is synonymous with a form of ‘self-dependence’ which disavows the desire to transcend his identity as an artisan. Intriguingly, though, Thomson’s ‘mission of self-culture’ incorporates a sustained account of his bohemian experiences as an itinerant actor and theatre manager, which makes his narrative seem closer in spirit to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister – the prototype of the bourgeois Bildungsroman – than any other working-class autobiography of the period.17 Closer in textual form to The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties are Hood’s Literature of Labour and Smiles’s Self-Help, each being examples of collective biography, or compendia of micro-biographical ‘anecdotes’ and ‘illustrations’. Both of these writers follow Craik’s paradigm explicitly in terms of the validation of adversity as a positive stimulus to internalized moral-aesthetic cultivation. As in Carlyle’s ‘Corn-Law Rhymes’, the ‘difficulty’ faced by the aspiring working-class autodidact even becomes a mark of good fortune in these texts, since it proves more productive of heroic struggle than the ‘most favourable circumstances’ enjoyed by those of a higher class. In Hood’s case, the inspirational and exhortatory narrative tone is by no means redolent of a facile positivity: on the contrary, most of the poets featured in his book provide instances of the ‘perpetual “pursuit of knowledge under difficulties”’ culminating in heroic failure – Robert Nicoll, John Clare, and James Hogg may be cited as examples.18 The resulting compilation synthesizes the contrasting influences of Craik and Carlyle, in particular accommodating the latter’s account of the career of Burns, which I consider in the following section. In the case of Samuel Smiles, an essentially meliorist interpretation of individual struggle remains paramount. The over-familiarity of Self-Help as a text supposedly representative of Victorian middle-class values has perhaps prevented readers from recognizing it as a work primarily concerned with working-class cultural development. Though not published in volume form until the late 1850s, Self-Help was derived from lectures on ‘The Education of the Working Classes’ originally delivered to the Mutual Improvement Society in Leeds as early as 1845; its roots were thus firmly located in the debate on workingclass self-culture which had emerged over the preceding two decades. It is tempting to view Smiles’s treatment of ‘self-culture’ – a term which he

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uses synonymously with the more popular ‘self-help’ – as a middle-class domestication of the strenuous working-class culture of intellectual selfimprovement, part of his project being to disseminate and generalize the application of the ‘spirit of self-help’ amongst all social classes. Yet much of the book’s critical impetus stems from its original context of debate. For example, Smiles positions the ‘doctrine’ of self-culture in opposition to that of ‘Caesarism’, a worship of the ‘great man’ which is ‘human idolatry in its worst form’. Self-help is, of course, a model of individualism, but Smiles envisages each individual instance of the practice as organically related to a collective process of cultural development, whereby ‘all have contributed towards the grand result, one generation building upon another’s labours, and carrying them forward to still higher stages’. Within this grand evolutionary schema, the higher classes are, at least nominally, assimilated within the terms of the lower, as all practitioners of self-help become ‘the artisans of civilization’.19 Though Smiles’s biographical practice is not often connected with the field of literature, Self-Help also holds lessons for aspiring authors. In the first place, he maintains that ‘[g]reat men of science, literature, and art . . . have belonged to no exclusive class’: hence, ‘[s]ome of God’s greatest apostles have come from “the ranks”’, including Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Burns. Secondly, though, Smiles attributes the achievements of such men primarily to circumstantial environmental factors, rather than appealing to the notion of the universality of genius. It is because, not in spite of, their ‘early encounter with difficulty and adverse circumstances’ that these cultural ‘apostles’ have succeeded, an argument which extends Carlyle’s speculation on the benefits of material hardship for self-formation. Difficulty enforces the development of ‘persevering application and energy’, ‘the greatest industry and the most carefully-disciplined skill’, and it is these qualities which attain the ‘highest results’, rather than the ‘man of the greatest natural vigour and capacity’. If such characteristics are, for Smiles, most often embodied in the figure of the self-taught engineer, they are equally applicable to ‘writers of books’ and ‘creators of works of art’ whose labour also represents the conjoint activity of ‘hands and minds’ in service of the ‘industrial spirit’. Like Hood, then, Smiles makes literature synonymous with labour, an activity expending both mental and physical energy. In this respect, it is not difficult to discern a strong resemblance between numerous passages of Self-Help and the rhetoric of professional labour in David Copperfield: for both texts, the a priori condition of ‘natural’ talent is rendered subordinate to the a posterior effects of ‘common sense, attention, application, and perseverance’; ‘the man of genius’ turns out to be not

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so dissimilar to ‘the man of ordinary mould’. In David Copperfield Dickens fashioned a narrative of literary self-help, which, were it not for the idiosyncrasies of David’s middle-class anxiety of social displacement, might well have offered a serviceable model of working-class intellectual development. The potential crossover between artisan and bourgeois narratives of literary labour is reinforced by the fact that Smiles chooses Walter Scott as one of his prime examples of authorial achievement defined by ‘prosaic office discipline’ and ‘steady, sober diligence’. Yet in construing literature as labour, it should not be thought that Smiles moves away entirely from a de-materialized definition of self-culture. Rather, his ideal is of a regime of personal development ‘combining physical training or physical work with intellectual culture’ in an attempt to overcome the one-sided formation of both classes: ‘youths of the leisure classes . . . taught to associate labour with servility’ and those who are ‘in early life under the necessity of applying themselves laboriously to some mechanical task’. Smiles outlines the benefits of this integrated process of self-development in terms that invoke Goethe’s ideal of Bildung, or at least Carlyle’s interpretation thereof. The ‘neglect of physical exercise’, and the bodily health which it supports, is a cause of the intellectual disorder known under the names of ‘Wertherism’ or ‘Byronism’, terms which signify a ‘tendency towards discontent, unhappiness, inaction, and reverie, – displaying itself in contempt for real life and disgust at the beaten tracks of men’. By implication, Smiles’s cultivation of the self through ‘action, work, and bodily occupation’ aims to achieve a more mature, rounded phase of identity – to move beyond Werther to Meister, one might say. From the perspective of the 1850s, these literary figures can perhaps also be read as synecdoches representing a process of cultural development from the early part of the century to the present. Like Dickens and Thackeray, the mid-Victorian Smiles rejects ‘Romantic’ accounts of aesthetic cultivation as dangerously idealist, while, at the same time, remaining acutely aware that ‘[o]ne way in which self-culture may be degraded is by regarding it too exclusively as a means of “getting on”’.20 Despite his concern with working-class education, Smiles was no more closely identified with autonomous working-class literary culture than his forerunner Craik and the SDUK. It is possible, however, to find examples of working-class writers of the period who both actively embraced the doctrine of self-culture and went on to develop professional literary careers well beyond the publication of autobiographical texts. Here, I will briefly consider the case of two of the most significant of these figures, Thomas Cooper (1805–92) and Thomas Miller (1807–74), both of whom, by

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coincidence, were brought up in the Lincolnshire town of Gainsborough and knew each other from childhood. At their outset, the careers of Cooper and Miller share some striking parallels, though they were later to bifurcate in terms of literary practice and political commitment: both underwent arduous programmes of self-education whilst serving apprenticeships as artisans (Cooper as a shoemaker, Miller as a basketmaker), showed an early interest in poetry, moved to London in search of literary success during the 1830s, and later produced several novels. Most significantly, it could be argued that both writers constructed a narrative of their careers in terms of the model of the literary Bildungsroman: Cooper through his early didactic essay-writing on the theme of ‘self-culture’ and his later autobiography, The Life of Thomas Cooper. Written By Himself (1872), and Miller in his novel Godfrey Malvern, described by Nigel Cross as ‘the Pendennis of workingclass literature; the only fictional account by an important working-class writer of a literary career’ produced during the nineteenth century.21 Of the two, Cooper fits most readily into the framework of this chapter since he was both a vocal advocate of the benefits of self-education and well-known for his involvement in Radical politics, at least during the first half of his career. It is sometimes claimed that these two aspects of Cooper’s work are essentially conflicting: Vicinus, for example, unsympathetically characterizes him as ‘an important exponent of self-help and gradualism’, whose adherence to the virtues of ‘individual perseverance’ developed ‘in a manner antithetical to [his] Chartism’.22 From this standpoint, Cooper’s commitment to an ethos of personal development (‘gradualism’) appears at odds with the more obviously revolutionary episodes of his experience as a Chartist lecturer during the 1840s. It is precisely this conjunction of evolutionary and revolutionary cultural politics which makes Cooper such a fascinating source-figure for Kingsley’s novel Alton Locke. Cooper himself, however, offers a more complex and ambivalent assessment of the politics of self-improvement. Retrospectively, in The Life of Thomas Cooper, he too shares (and perhaps instigates) the perception of incompatibility between his individual pursuit of knowledge and commitment to collective political goals. Recalling the decision to prioritize his journalistic campaign in support of the Leicester stocking-weavers in 1841 (the commencement of his involvement with Chartism), Cooper is clear as to why his private literary ambitions had to be sacrificed: ‘“What is the acquirement of languages – what is the obtaining of all knowledge”, I said to myself, “compared to the real honour, whatever seeming disgrace it may bring, of struggling to win the social and political rights of millions [?].”’23 According to Robert Conklin, Cooper effectively abandoned self-improvement for political activism

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during the ensuing decade, finding them difficult to reconcile in terms of his own intellectual development, if not from general principle.24 Yet in his Letters to Young Working Men, published towards the end of the 1840s, Cooper presents the alternative case for viewing intellectual selfdevelopment as a direct route to political ‘enfranchisement’. This text is firmly situated in the existing tradition of popular, didactic writing aimed at entrenching the value of ‘self-culture’ – as distinguished from the material gospel of ‘getting on’ – in working-class men; Cooper even recommends that his readers consult the work of his ‘acquaintance’ Craik. Cooper differs from this template, however, in openly politicizing the ulterior goal of the ‘pursuit of knowledge under difficulties’: ‘to raise yourselves morally and intellectually, – and so, shame those who say you are not fit for the franchise into the perception that you deserve it better, perhaps, than themselves, and that you must and will have it’.25 This strategy suggests that Cooper may have considered his own remarkable feats of literary self-education as inherently political acts, consciously designed to provide an exemplary model for fellow artisans by emulating the intellectual culture of his superiors, and thus ‘shaming’ them into a recognition of his representative status – an argument which should be distinguished from Vicinus’s contention that Cooper sought ‘literary acclaim from the middle class’ for personal gratification.26 Cooper’s primary imperative in Letters to Young Working Men is to disseminate the fruits of his own learning so as to assist in the creation of a wider body of working-class intellectuals, the ‘Men of the Future’ as his readers are hailed.27 The case of Thomas Miller is more difficult to interpret, in part because less is known about the intellectual motivation and trajectory of his literary career. Though evidence suggests that Miller was seen by contemporaries as a writer of the labouring classes, he appears to have operated outside the environments usually associated with this category. Rosina Bulwer-Lytton, the wife of the novelist, described Miller as an ‘English Burns’ in a diary entry of 1835, but in fact his career does not provide one of the best examples of the ‘Burns syndrome’ used by Vicinus as a template for the cultural experience of many self-educated writers during the period.28 A novelist and author of rural sketches as much as a poet, Miller developed beyond the confines of genteel provincial patronage to become a commercially successful metropolitan writer and publisher; according to Cross, ‘[n]o other working-class writer of the time had found so much favour’ in the ‘middleclass publishing world’.29 Yet nor does Miller’s career entirely fit with the countervailing narrative of earnest intellectual self-cultivation epitomized by Cooper; if his work did bear such significance, it was certainly not

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revealed with the moral fervour of his early acquaintance. According to Ashraf, Miller was ‘a radical democrat in opinion, but kept aloof from political activity’; his work did not specifically address a working-class readership, but was published ‘in the hope of a wider public’.30 Miller’s apparent detachment from the artisan culture inhabited by Cooper makes the class ambiguity of his fictional account of professional literary development in Godfrey Malvern somewhat more explicable. For Cross, as noted above, the novel holds cultural significance as a transparent mediation of Miller’s authorial experience – a working-class equivalent to Thackeray’s semi-autobiographical novel of literary apprenticeship. While conceding that the hero of the novel is ‘no humble, self-educated working man’, Cross surmises that ‘his career follows the pattern set by such intelligent village boys as Thomas Cooper who became the Gainsborough village schoolmaster aged twenty-two’.31 Unfortunately, there is little concrete evidence to support a straightforward biographical reading of Godfrey Malvern, beyond a broad assumption about its generic identity. Not only does the figure of Malvern not fit any of the established contemporary models of workingclass authorship, but his narrative is also marked by explicit disavowal of such an identity. The novel anticipates David Copperfield, rather, in its preoccupation with the respectability of the literary profession; like Copperfield, Malvern utilizes authorship as a means of restoring his fallen patrimonial prestige, whilst contradictorily asserting that the means does not require the end – the author makes his own prestige, far superior to any inherited class position: I should like to prove that I am by birth a gentleman, though I am convinced that birth alone does not altogether influence the character of the future man; and that any of us, if we strive, may stamp our own nobility. And that to make yourself a good and glorious name, is far nobler than to be born with one, which in the end is brought to disgrace. (70–1)

On one level, then, Godfrey Malvern provides an account of intellectual selfimprovement predicated on the successful application of personal ‘industry’; an allegorical title page designed by ‘Phiz’ (Hablot K. Browne), depicting an ascent of Parnassus in the form of stacked bookends, foregrounds a motif that is consciously elaborated within the text and is akin to David Copperfield’s trope of scaling the ‘ladder’ of literary success [Figure 7]. On the other hand, the novel is absorbed by the notion of inherited gentility in a way that seems at odds with the discourse of working-class self-culture. Though beginning his career in lowly circumstances – Malvern is an illegitimate child with confused recollections of his genteel origins – throughout

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Figure 7 Phiz, title page of Thomas Miller, Godfrey Malvern (Second edition, 1844).

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the narrative we receive hints that he is indeed a ‘born gentleman’ and that the ‘nobility’ of genius is not an empty metaphor (80). At the same time, Miller presents the notion of an ‘aristocracy of intellect’ (also discussed by Lewes in Ranthorpe) in secular terms, as a matter of the social opportunities available to authors in consequence of their indeterminate status: ‘There is a kind of neutral ground which talented authors will ever occupy; and although they may never become what the world calls “gentlemen”, in the worldly sense of the word, still they will always be received and treated with respect, by those who move in the highest circles of fashionable society’ (59). Godfrey Malvern is by no means simply a wish-fulfilling fantasy of social mobility masquerading as a novel of literary apprenticeship, but neither can it be described as an unambiguous portrayal of working-class authorship. The latter point is revealed by the narrator’s schematic contrast between Malvern and a figure of the ‘self-educated’ poet, Tom Grinder (196). It is, in fact, Grinder, a ‘north-country poet’ lionized by fashionable society, who matches up to the model of working-class authorship envisaged by Cross (that of an ‘English Burns’): set beside this ‘rude acquaintance’, Malvern becomes all the more discernibly middle class, a figure who ‘mingled the gentleman with the poet’ (205, 196, 206). By the end of the novel, Grinder is reduced to a comical figure of provincial crudity, whereas Malvern’s innate gentility comes to embody the conflated identity of the literary professional and ‘true gentleman’ (370). If any conclusion can be drawn from this contrast, it is that, for Miller, the mid-century ideology of professional labour ultimately appeals more than the narrative of working-class self-culture.

Burns and his School The profound impact of Robert Burns on the practice and conception of working-class poetry during the first half of the nineteenth century is widely recognized. It was first discussed in the prominent essays and lectures of Carlyle and Kingsley and in lesser-known autobiographical reminiscences of the poets themselves, and has been generally accepted by modern scholars of working-class writing. Autobiographers such as Bamford and Cooper, for example, routinely cite Burns alongside Byron (and sometimes Shelley) as their key poetic influences, and the unique status of Burns can be attributed to the sense that he ‘was the first writer with whom the working-class intellectual was happy to identify’.32 According to Paul Murphy, Burns was commonly perceived as the ‘first true working-class poet’ within Chartist circles; thus, his figuration was loaded with considerable ideological weight

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during the 1830s and 1840s.33 At the same time, the ‘Burns syndrome’ identified by Vicinus describes a broader and less constructive influence on the representation of working-class literary careers: the phrase refers to the widely held contemporary view that Burns’s nineteenth-century successors often followed a similar arc of professional experience, from independent self-culture to upper-class patronage and local celebrity, before finally succumbing to the self-destructive consequences of unsustainable success. More than any other mediator of the time, it was Carlyle who was responsible for perpetuating Burns’s prominence, both as a figure of the democratic poet for politically informed working-class readers and one of associated cultural myths for a wider audience. Indeed, it could be argued that it was Carlyle who invented a ‘Burnsian’ model of working-class authorship for early Victorian society, such was his influence as a cultural intermediary. In this section I consider Carlyle’s representation of Burns as a powerful counter-weight to progressive narratives of working-class selfculture, and through him approach Kingsley’s similar conception of Burns and his ‘school’ of self-taught poets. In his 1828 review essay on Lockhart’s Life of Robert Burns Carlyle interpreted Burns’s biography as essentially tragic in form: ‘through life he enacted a tragedy, and one of the deepest’ (i, 199); a verdict which he repeated in the more widely read lecture ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’, where he declares that ‘The Life of Burns is what we may call a great tragic sincerity’ (192). Tragedy is the mode of narrative emplotment by which Carlyle consistently constructed Burns’s life and literary career. This may be seen particularly through the interpretation which he gives of Burns’s rise and fall within the ‘higher ranks’ of Scottish society: his lionization by the Edinburgh intelligentsia and subsequent decline amidst ‘[p]icturesque tourists, all manner of fashionable danglers after literature, and far worse, all manner of convivial Maecenases’ (i, 233, 228–9). One of Carlyle’s main concerns in his 1828 essay is to establish the degree to which Burns’s ‘fall’ may be attributed to baneful external agencies or to ‘some internal mal-arrangement’ – an inner flaw – of his character (i, 234–5). The results of this enquiry provide a complex analysis of the determinants of his life’s tragic design. In Carlyle’s reading, Burns’s career echoes but ultimately deviates from the prevailing model of working-class self-culture: it is a story of arrested intellectual development, ‘self help’ compromised by harmful ‘dependence’, and a failure to achieve ‘unity in his purposes’ which annuls the pursuit of Bildung (i, 228, 235). The incompletion of Burns’s development as a poet is in part ascribed to the material conditions of life faced by the working-class writer: Burns’s published writings are but ‘a poor mutilated fraction of what was in him; brief,

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broken glimpses of a genius that could never show itself complete; that wanted all things for completeness: culture, leisure, true effort, nay even length of life’ (i, 201). Though elsewhere, as I have suggested, Carlyle sought to redeem the material and cultural privation of self-taught writers on the grounds of stimulating energy and self-reliance, here he views Burns’s lack of formal education as a source of enduring immaturity: his premature death at the age of thirty-seven leaves him ‘youthful’ in a double sense (i, 222). On the other hand, Carlyle refuses to absolve Burns of ultimate responsibility for his ‘failure’: his ‘want of unity’ is the consequence of a ‘hapless attempt to mingle in friendly union the common spirit of the world with the spirit of poetry, which is of a far different and altogether irreconcilable nature’ (i, 235). Both external and internal forces lead Burns in the direction of self-fragmentation: the ‘brief, broken glimpses of a genius that could never show itself complete’ (i, 201). Unable to achieve organic wholeness, the developmental narrative of the working-class writer is arrested in the inanimate posture of an unfinished statue or, alternatively, fractured into the figure of a broken idol, one of Carlyle’s recurring iconological tropes. The same figure is recycled in ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’, where Carlyle observes that Burns’s ‘writings, all that he did under such obstructions, are only a poor fragment of him’ (190). This iconic, visualized image of Burns as a ‘fragment’ or ‘fraction’ of a unitary self represents in spatial terms the conception of his tragically arrested temporal formation (i, 201). It also encapsulates, though, Carlyle’s apprehension of Burns’s damaging vacillation between conflicting goals of self-improvement. As in some of the texts discussed earlier, Carlyle distinguishes between the laudable intellectual development of Burns’s poetic talent and his ‘far meaner ambition’ of entering a higher social echelon (i, 220). As such, the trope of sculptural fragmentation emblematizes internal fractures within the contemporary discourse of working-class self-culture. The underlying metaphor buried within these scattered images of fragmentation is more fully revealed in ‘The Hero as Poet’, where Carlyle sets out a broader argument about the necessary material constraints under which all artists work, illustrated by Shakespeare’s subjection to the ‘conditions’ of the Globe Theatre: It was with him, then, as it is with us all. No man works save under conditions. The sculptor cannot set his own free Thought before us; but his Thought as he could translate it into the stone that was given, with the tools that were given. Disjecta membra are all that we find of any Poet, or of any man (110).

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In a Hegelian manner, this passage suggests that self-fragmentation is an inevitable outcome of the alienation of creative subjects within the medium of their expression. Since all artists are obliged to objectify their ideas in material forms – of which sculpture, according to Hegel’s Aesthetics, may be viewed as the purest embodiment – not even the greatest artist can express his ‘free thought’ as an unmediated whole; rather, his actual works are the ‘Disjecta membra’, or broken limbs, of an ideal sculptured image.34 In his writings on Burns Carlyle indicates that this general metaphorical condition has a particular bearing on the lives of workingclass poets. The fragments of Burns’s poetic achievement are more fragmentary than others, it would seem, since the mediation of his thought proves more obdurately material. Carlyle’s sculptural analogy carries an even more specific resonance within biographical discourse on Burns during the early part of the century. The term ‘fragment’, for example, can also be derived from the incomplete posthumous corpus of an author’s work, as in the title of James Currie’s The Life of Burns, with His Correspondence and Fragments (1826), while the composition of biography itself could be likened to the casting of a statue or bust, as occurs at the beginning of Allan Cunningham’s The Life and Correspondence of Robert Burns (1836).35 In this context, Carlyle’s figuration of Burns’s work as a ‘poor mutilated fraction of what was in him’ both corroborates a recognition of incompleteness within the poet’s literary ‘remains’ and is iconoclastic in its suggestion that Burns’s idealized image as a biographical subject must be defaced. More than twenty years after Carlyle’s first and most substantial commentary on Burns, Charles Kingsley approached the same figure in remarkably similar terms. Kingsley acknowledged his familiarity with Carlyle’s ‘noble’ essay, though claimed not to have read any other biographical material on Burns before publishing ‘Burns and his School’ in November 1851 for The North British Review, an article which identifies Burns as the primary model for a group of later artisan poets marked by their self-conscious class identity, political Radicalism, and unfulfilled artistic potential. Like Carlyle, Kingsley figures the incompletion of Burns’s poetic corpus as a fragmented or mutilated body: ‘only the disjecta membra poetae; hints of a great might-have-been’.36 Similarly, in a later essay contrasting the contemporary self-taught poet Alexander Smith with the neo-classical model of Alexander Pope, Kingsley views the former as characteristically lacking in totality: ‘Our poets are not merely vague and confused, they are altogether fragmentary – disjecta membra poetarum; they need some uniting idea.’ Poetic fragmentation is a symptom of a broader cultural

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condition, to which the solution for Kingsley is (unsurprisingly) ‘faith’, but, significantly, it is the self-educated poet who is made to embody the dissolution of modern society into competing subjective interests.37 In ‘Burns and his School’ Kingsley’s borrowing of the Carlylean trope of the broken idol conveys his ambivalent response to the influence of Burns on working-class authorship. On the one hand, the essay is celebratory of Burns and his inspiring example to later poets: its allusions to Carlyle suggest that Burns should indeed be construed as a heroic figure worthy of the reader’s worship. This positive iconographic reading extends to the use of portraits as aids to the physiognomic interpretation of character, a practice borrowed from ‘The Hero as Poet’. Kingsley begins his biographical sketch by contemplating a portrait of Burns, whose subject he ranks amongst the four most beautiful faces of ‘modern men’ (the others being Shakespeare, Raphael, and Goethe). In accordance with Carlylean theory, the portrait is imbued with ‘symbolic’ meaning ‘for the mind marks the body, not the body the mind; and the inward beauty seldom fails to express itself in the outward, as a visible sign of the grace or disgrace of the wearer’. Thus, Burns is explicitly framed from the outset of the essay as a consecrated icon, though later his image becomes somewhat tarnished (‘He ceases to worship, and therefore to be himself worshipful’).38 On the other hand, Kingsley also shares Carlyle’s analysis of the truncated potential of Burns’s self-development. Characteristically, the biography of the Burnsian poet recounted in the essay is tragic in form, as is demonstrated not just in the case of Burns himself but also through the careers of his later disciples, such as Robert Nicholl, William Thom, and John Bethune. Despite its invariably premature termination, though, the tragedy of the individual poet’s life can be seen as contributing to a broader project of self-improvement. In this respect, the influence of Burns on subsequent working-class writers continues to be characterized as progressive, for it offers a radically new conception of the work of self-culture: He first proved that it was possible to become a poet and a cultivated man, without deserting his class, either in station or in sympathies; nay, that the healthiest and noblest elements of a lowly born poet’s mind might be, perhaps certainly must be, the very feelings and thoughts which he brought up with him from below, not those which he received from above, in the course of his artificial culture. 39

Here, Kingsley is even more emphatic than Carlyle in supporting the autonomy of working-class intellectual development, as against the passive assimilation of ‘artificial culture’. This organic conception of development

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serves as an effective barrier against the danger of conflating self-culture with material self-advancement; ‘culture’ is not a commodity to be acquired as a means of facilitating entry to a higher social class, but an immanent process of self-realization which can be achieved regardless of rank. According to Kingsley, Burns’s importance is that he first made possible the narrative of working-class intellectual self-development as a legitimate end in itself, even though he was tragically unable to complete this narrative in his own life. By seeking to become ‘a poet and a cultivated man, without deserting his class, either in station or in sympathies’, Burns acquires a cultural status not dissimilar to Antonio Gramsci’s definition of an ‘organic intellectual’.40 Written only a year after the publication of Alton Locke, this passage from ‘Burns and his School’ provides an important context for examining Kingsley’s most influential novel.

Alton Locke: the unaccredited hero Since its first appearance in 1850, the representation of working-class authorship in Alton Locke has often been judged in relation to the problematic authorship of the book itself. Originally issued without the appendage of Kingsley’s authorial signature, the novel was presented to its earliest readers as a simulacrum of working-class autobiography.41 It is not clear whether this omission was ever intended to be a permanent feature of its para-textual apparatus, or what authorial strategy it was meant to serve. But, in any case, the disguise proved ineffectual: virtually none of the reviewers who commented on the first edition of Alton Locke credited the fiction that Alton, a tailor and poet, was the real author of his ‘autobiography’, and most modern critics have remained equally dismissive of the plausibility of Kingsley’s ‘cross-class ventriloquism’,42 albeit for different reasons. Contemporary reviewers saw the gap between the real and surrogate authorship of the text as transparent, but their criticism of this supposed aesthetic failing was often linked to concern with the novel’s political content. Under the heading ‘The Autobiography of a Chartist’, The Times (Friday, 18 October 1850) remarked that ‘Alton Locke is the composition of any one but a Chartist’: the book is ‘not the labour of a working man with a smattering of learning, but of a scholar with an inkling of Chartism. Not another word need be said to prove its utter worthlessness as a handbook for our guidance’.43 Writing in Blackwood’s Magazine, W. E. Aytoun was even more scathing of the novel’s authorial conceit: a ‘barefaced and impudent assumption of a specific character and profession by a person who never handled a goose in his life, and who knows no

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more about tailoring or slop-selling than he has learned from certain letters which lately appeared in the columns of the Morning Chronicle’ (a reference to Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, from which Kingsley openly derived material for the novel). Aytoun was particularly sceptical of the account of Alton’s educational accomplishments and of a narrative voice which he deemed ‘totally out of keeping with the quality and circumstances of his interlocutors’: objections based on unquestioned empirical grounds which persist even in recent criticism of the novel.44 A more considered response identified the limitations of authorial sympathy for the working-class narrator without entirely traducing Kingsley’s artistic resources: Robert Bell, in Bentley’s Miscellany, discerned an underlying detachment in ‘the production of a writer who merely sympathises with the miseries he looks on from a safe distance, and advocates principles which his conscience and his intellect reject’.45 Similarly, the author of a Fraser’s Magazine review described the disappointment of seeing through the illusion of authenticity to uncover the true authorship of the text, even though the experience is of a transcendent kind: [B]efore we have proceeded through half-a-dozen pages, we discover that a higher and more educated mind is at work in the autobiography than that of a mishapen youth, who is brought up in the dry and ungenial atmosphere of Calvinism, debarred from the cultivation of knowledge, and put out to get his bread and scramble through life as he may in the pestiferous and crowded workshop of a tailor. The illusion vanishes the moment we turn over the title-page, and we feel as we advance through the work that it is not a stunted tailor, or an aspiring verse-maker, or a hair-brained Chartist, who is speaking, but a scholar and a thinker . . . not one who is of the life he paints, but who examines it from a distance with deep interest and a sincere desire to alleviate its calamities. There is no vraisemblance even attempted in the autobiography.46

The reviewer’s perception that the real author of Alton Locke belongs to a ‘higher’ stage of educational development than the fictive author presents a problem of novelistic verisimilitude on an aesthetic level, but it also implies a moral inadequacy in the authorial act of sympathetic ventriloquism. Underlying these various dissatisfactions, however, is a deeper implication for the legitimacy of working-class autobiography: namely, the extent to which Alton Locke’s supposition of authorial subjectivity exceeds the circumstances in which working-class subjects are formed. For Fraser’s Magazine, it would seem that the ‘mishapen youth’ is so distorted and cramped by his external conditions as to render implausible the assumption of autonomy implied by the exercise of authorship. Though here this

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objection is formulated in terms which are explicitly unsympathetic to the novel’s apparent Radicalism, in modern criticism an inverted form of the same argument is sometimes made in exposing its alleged conservatism. Evan Gottlieb, for example, argues that in choosing to represent Alton as an autobiographer, Kingsley forces him to reproduce a ‘work of writing which is introspective and individualistic, not public and class-oriented’, thus abrogating the class identity which he is supposed to represent.47 Gottlieb’s assumption is that autobiographical interiority encodes middle-class values under which the interests of working-class subjects are necessarily subsumed. From a similar perspective, Catherine Gallagher finds a deep-rooted internal contradiction between the form and content of Alton Locke: whilst the novel’s first-person narrative implies Alton’s capacity for autonomous self-definition, its empirical social criticism reveals the power of external environments to constrain individual development. Thus, Gallagher views the literary form of the novel as ‘inappropriate’ to its sociological content: the ‘fictional autobiography of a writer . . . presupposes the reconcilability of material circumstances and spiritual life’, yet the novel proceeds to demonstrate the impossibility of achieving such unity within Alton’s authorial persona. This reading of Alton Locke is not dissimilar to my earlier discussion of Carlyle’s construction of the Burnsian model of working-class authorship, for although Gallagher believes that Kingsley’s use of a ‘providential’ autobiographical form ‘denies that working-class life is tragically determined’, she comes to the conclusion that ‘Kingsley’s intention was to write a history of Alton’s obstructed development, a history in which the character’s growth is prevented and his minimal identity disintegrates’.48 Both modern critics and early reviewers, however, seem to have been largely unaware of the tradition of working-class autobiography on which Kingsley drew in order to dissimulate his authorial voice. Far from imposing an intrinsically middle-class narrative form onto recalcitrant subject matter, Alton Locke was conceived in imitation of the pre-existing genre discussed earlier in this chapter. Kingsley had almost certainly read Thomas Carter’s Memoirs of a Working Man, which, as Cross points out, recounts the experiences of a self-educated tailor, and the novel also alludes explicitly to Alexander Somerville’s Autobiography of a Working Man.49 By ‘imitation’, here, I refer to the formal narrative construction of the text rather than to an ideological correspondence. Indeed, read as a riposte to Carter’s memoir, which Charles Knight commended for ‘the rational and contented tone of mind with which the writer looked upon his own vocation in life’, Alton Locke presents a rather subversive adaptation of a working-class

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source-text.50 In turn, it can be argued that Kingsley’s fictional autobiography was influential in shaping actual working-class autobiographical practice, most famously in the case of Thomas Cooper from whom Kingsley originally derived source material for the figure of Alton, but whose own autobiography was published many years later. The personal relationship between Kingsley and Cooper has long been recognized as an important forum of intellectual exchange for both writers, Louis Cazamian having researched the subject as early as 1903.51 Kingsley first met Cooper in June 1848, a month before his conception of the novel, and their lengthy correspondence continued well into the 1850s. Of all the various possible models for the figure of Alton Locke whose names have been put forward, Cooper is intellectually the most important, if not necessarily the closest resemblance in terms of biographical detail. As is well known, Kingsley based the central plot sequence of Alton’s involvement in Chartist agitation and subsequent imprisonment for inadvertently inciting a riot on episodes in Cooper’s life centred upon his work as a political activist. Equally significant, though, is Cooper’s status as one of the leading working-class exponents of intellectual self-improvement. Alton’s autobiography is avowedly constructed as the ‘history of my mental growth’ and ‘self-development’ (70, 30, 54), and when measured by the scholarly accomplishments of Cooper, his relatively modest feats of learning are hardly as implausible as reviewers complained.52 Kingsley’s ventriloquism of Cooper, however, would seem to have been reversed after the publication of Alton Locke. In the first instance, Cooper was encouraged by publishers to capitalize on the success of Kingsley’s text by producing his own ‘Chartist novel’, and later his re-conversion to Christianity in the mid 1850s followed the fictional path laid out in Alton Locke’s narrative. According to Conklin, Cooper denied that Kingsley was responsible for his conversion, though it is clear from their correspondence that Cooper sought Kingsley’s advice on doctrinal matters during the period of spiritual crisis preceding his formal renunciation of the doctrine of Strauss.53 Cooper’s conversion was not, in any straightforward sense, an assimilation of Kingsley’s ideology – not least because he re-converted as a Baptist rather than into Kingsley’s Anglican version of Christian Socialism. Nevertheless, in reaching the ‘distressful conviction of my own personal life of sin’ which transforms the latter half of Cooper’s intellectual life, there are striking parallels with the trajectory of Alton’s career as it moves towards a final confession of the moral inadequacy of his earlier political beliefs under the spiritual influence of Eleanor Lynedale.54 Nigel Cross is thus right to conclude that ‘Alton Locke not only borrowed Cooper’s experiences, it also

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predicted them’.55 At the very least, there is a structural homology between the conversion narratives of Alton Locke and Cooper’s autobiography, written at the age of sixty-six. The Life of Thomas Cooper is constructed in tripartite form with Cooper first recounting his ‘Chartist Life’, then his ‘Literary Life’, and finally entering into the ‘Right Life: the Life of Duty’: a movement of narrative transcendence but without dialectical synthesis. Similarly, as Vincent suggests, Kingsley’s novel combines elements of an earlier tradition of spiritual autobiography with a modern, secular account of working-class self-improvement; though clearly distinct from the type of autobiography being written by self-educated artisans in the 1840s, his use of religious conversion narrative was by no means alien to the vernacular culture.56 The questions around the ‘authorship’ of Alton Locke’s representation of working-class authorship are too complex, then, to be reduced to a dichotomy between authentic and inauthentic identities. However tendentious as a narrative strategy, Kingsley’s simulation of working-class autobiography does not merely represent a forged authorial signature designed to pass off middle-class concepts of self-cultivation and interior depth as working-class subjectivity. A more satisfactory way of conceiving the relationship between the true and fictive authors of the text is to adapt Brian Maidment’s suggestion that, during the first half of the nineteenth century, ‘self-taught writing was almost invariably mediated into public consciousness through the filter of its middle-class supporters’.57 Maidment has in mind acts of critical mediation exemplified by such essays as Kingsley’s ‘Burns and his School’ and Carlyle’s ‘Corn-Law Rhymes’, whereby prominent middle-class writers formally introduced unfamiliar self-educated writers to the respectable reading public, but if we think of Kingsley’s authorship of the author-figure Alton Locke as another form of mediation the functionality of their relationship becomes more legible. Rather than a naive attempt to pass off his text as authentic, Kingsley’s use of fictional autobiography seeks to enact a transparent mediation of the voice of a working-class poet, by consequence of which his own authorial voice is deliberately submerged. This dynamic reproduces the hierarchical relationship between middle-class patron and artisan poet discussed by Maidment, but the desire for transparency makes a pointed commentary on the more heavy-handed forms of patronage displayed in the novel itself, where Dean Winnstay persuades Alton to censor his political verse in order to secure publication. Of course, as Maidment and others have argued, it is possible to view Kingsley’s sympathetic mediation as exerting a more subtle control over working-class self-expression, but this should

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not be conflated with the crude acts of manipulation which he explicitly critiques.58 Another way of defining the relationship between the authorial functions of Kingsley and Alton Locke is in terms of Gramsci’s distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘organic’ intellectuals. In ‘Burns and his School’, as noted above, Kingsley’s ‘patronage’ of the self-educated poet supports an organic ideal of working-class cultural development, rather than seeking to elevate such writers to positions of institutionalized privilege, where they become detached from their class affiliation. Similarly, the figure of Alton is an attempt to depict an ‘organic intellectual’, following the Burnsian Romantic paradigm, which dramatizes the difficulty of maintaining this role when confronted with opportunities to achieve a more secure position as a ‘traditional intellectual’ (through the self-censorship of his poetry, for example). While Gottlieb dismisses the result as ‘a middle-class fantasy of the working-class’s inability to retain its organic intellectuals’, designed to re-inscribe the conservative cultural authority of the traditional intellectual, I argue that it should be viewed, rather, as an act of sympathetic mediation by which a traditional intellectual (Kingsley was a representative of the established church) ventriloquized the voice of an organic intellectual, however unconvincing this may be judged in terms of verisimilitude.59 Nothing in Kingsley’s published writings and private correspondence supports the assumption that he sought to denigrate working-class intellectual culture per se. On the contrary, the problematic authorship of the text arises precisely as a result of its organicist account of self-development; an account which wishes to preserve the autonomy of class-determined cultural experience whilst, paradoxically, transcending these divisions through its narrative form. In Alton Locke Kingsley’s conception of the organic intellectual is defined principally through the Carlylean discourse of heroism and hero-worship. Of the countless references and allusions to Carlyle within the novel, the most important, thematically, are those which constellate around the iconographic representation of the hero as man of letters. Drawing upon Carlyle’s reading of Burns in particular, Kingsley suggests that the problem of representing a working-class intellectual hero is partly an epistemological one: how can such a figure be known, how can he be recognized within the domain of cultural visibility? This question is foregrounded in Chapter x (‘How Folks Turn Chartists’) when, returning from his first Chartist meeting, an event marking his initiation into the world of organized working-class politics, Alton expresses surprise at ‘hear[ing] men of my own class – and lower still, perhaps, some of them – speak with fluency

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and eloquence’, and wonders from where they have acquired ‘[s]uch a fund of information – such excellent English’. Alton’s companion, the more experienced and committed Chartist Crossthwaite, is quick to instruct him: From the God who knows nothing about ranks. They’re the unknown great – the unaccredited heroes, as Master Thomas Carlyle would say, whom the flunkeys aloft have not acknowledged yet – though they’ll be forced to, some day, with a vengeance. (108)

Crossthwaite’s rejoinder carries the force of a resounding statement of the obvious: since the capacity for ‘greatness’ is not conditioned by ‘rank’, the intellectual acquirements of the working-class speakers derive from the same – albeit transcendental – source as those belonging to any other class. Yet his remarks also provide an explanation of the sense of wonder which they seek to dispel. It is not inappropriate that Alton should experience such a revelation (though it may be implausible for someone of his position), for, in Crossthwaite’s assessment, the working-class intellectual is defined precisely by his lack of cultural visibility, materializing only in negative terms as the ‘unknown great’ or ‘unaccredited heroes’. To middle-class readers, for whom Alton functions as a conduit in the above passage, the surprise can be presumed genuine.60 Crossthwaite’s appeal to the authority of Carlyle is not the only occasion on which the novel links self-educated workers to the discourse of heroism. In fact, the same phrase – ‘unaccredited hero[es]’ – is invoked on three separate occasions within the text: once to describe the collective character of the Chartist, as above, and twice in singular reference to Alton himself. Alton’s initiation into the collective culture of working-class Radicalism is thus also a moment of self-identification, in which the representative status of Kingsley’s protagonist is implicitly affirmed. Significantly, the phrase is first employed by the Carlylean figure Sandy Mackaye, the Scottish bookseller with a penchant for quoting Carlyle himself. Referring to Alton’s as yet unproven literary talent, Mackaye advises him: ‘Ye’re an unaccreedited hero, the noo, as Thomas Carlyle has it. “But gin ye do weel by yoursel”, saith the Psalmist, “ye’ll find a’ men speak well o’ ye” – if ye gang their gate’ (66). Here, too, the qualifier ‘unaccre[e]dited’ designates a capacity for heroism hitherto unrecognized, and thus outside the domain of public representation. At this point in his narrative, Alton’s social invisibility is, in part, attributable to the stage of development which his talent has reached en route to its eventual manifestation. Yet this process is rendered conditional on the working-class poet’s accommodation of the

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heteronomous demands of a middle-class audience (‘if ye gang their gate’), a warning which ominously prefigures Alton’s future direction. The word ‘unaccredited’, then, hints not only at the problem of visual recognition for working-class authors, but also, more literally, the difficulty of acquiring the necessary social accreditation in order to become representable. This interpretation is supported by the ensuing paragraphs in which Alton receives qualified support for his intellectual development from his ‘Mammonite’ uncle: ‘if you are inclined to help to raise the family name – not that I think much of book writers myself – poor starving devils, half of them – but still people do talk about them – and a man might get a snug thing as newspaper editor, with interest; or clerk to something or other – always some new company in the wind now – and I should have no objection, if you seemed likely to do us credit, to speak a word for you’ (66–7; my emphasis). Alton’s literary career is thus deemed worthy of encouragement on the understanding that the process of becoming visible (writers are often ‘talk[ed] about’) may become a means of acquiring social ‘credit’ for his family. To achieve this goal, however, intellectual development must submit to a crudely economic understanding of the metaphor of accreditation. This, indeed, is the strategy self-consciously pursued by Alton’s cousin George, a Cambridge undergraduate who views cultural acquirements as a transparent tool of social mobility and reflects cynically upon Alton’s ‘high-minded’ appreciation of poetry and art. George Locke is Alton’s figural antithesis, an embodiment of intellectual accreditation derived not only from his association with institutionalized pedagogy, but also from a determination to ensure that no aspect of his cultural attainment should be beyond immediate visual display. Fittingly, the third instance of the term ‘unaccredited hero’ occurs later in the narrative when Alton characterizes George’s response to his own incipient social elevation through the patronage of Dean Winnstay: I had evidently risen immensely in his eyes; and I could not help applying, in my heart, to him, Mr. Carlyle’s dictum about the valet species – how they never honour the unaccredited hero, having no eye to find him out till properly accredited, and countersigned, and accoutred with full uniform and diploma by that great God, Public Opinion. I saw through the motive of his new-fledged respect for me – and yet I encouraged it; for it flattered my vanity. (154)

While Alton now recognizes the corrupt worldliness of those who fail to perceive heroism in ‘unaccredited’ forms, he himself no longer exemplifies the nobility of the heroic type identified by his previous mentors,

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and encountered paradigmatically in the meeting of Chartist intellectuals. Once more, this passage conceives of the process of cultural accreditation through the language of economic exchange, in which the intellectual capital of the poet-hero is re-imagined as a note of financial credit legitimately ‘countersigned’. More overtly, it draws on the metaphor of clothing central to Carlyle’s discussion of heroism from Sartor Resartus, and literalized in Kingsley’s autobiography of a ‘tailor and poet’. Alton’s allusion to ‘Carlyle’s dictum about the valet species’ refers both to the idea that cultural accreditation functions in the manner of an approved code of dress, a clothing of the heroic figure in conventional symbolic forms, and to the wry suggestion that those who participate most intimately in the act of constructing this spectacle are often least impressed by the result. ‘No man is a Hero to his valet-de-chambre’, a dictum attributed to the French historian Jules Michelet, was frequently cited by Carlyle in an ironic context.61 For Carlyle, the proximity of the valet to his master embodies a climate of scepticism towards the possibility of heroism within modern democratic society; yet, rather than endorsing this sceptical perspective as a liberating demystification of the hero’s social construction, he associates it with worldly cynicism of the kind exemplified by Alton’s cousin. Similarly, in Kingsley’s text, the ‘valet species’ refers to those who are incapable of recognizing heroism beyond the conventional ‘accoutrements’ of social status – the sham-heroic figure presented in ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ as ‘advanc[ing] in royal stage-trappings, with measured step, trains borne behind him, trumpets sounding before him’ (183). The figure of the ‘unaccredited hero’ represents, then, both a transparent and precise appropriation of Carlylean discourse. As discussed in Chapter Two, Carlyle sought to distinguish between the ‘great man’ and the ‘noted man’ as differing types of visual embodiment within cultural representations of the ‘hero’. Though it is possible for these types to coincide, as in the case of Napoleon, and hard to separate them absolutely, Carlyle was often minded to locate the symbolic visual mode of ‘greatness’ in that which resists external visual exhibition, or (through an alternative sensory medium) in a ‘silence’ which refuses vocal articulation.62 In his 1838 essay on Scott, Carlyle writes: ‘It is one of the comfortablest truths that great men abound, though in the unknown state. Nay, as above hinted, our greatest, being also by nature our quietest, are perhaps those that remain unknown’ (iv, 155). Here, in reaction against his subject, Carlyle privileges unknown or obscure greatness over the lionized literary celebrity. Unlike Kingsley’s Crossthwaite, Carlyle does not exclusively define such ‘unaccredited’ heroism in terms of social class, but the category evidently

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lends itself to representation of the socially marginalized, as in his invocation of Thomas Gray’s elegiac figure of the ‘mute Milton’ (iv, 149). For Carlyle, however, the very fact that the external vestures of notoriety or fame can be misrecognized for the immanent quality of greatness demonstrates an underlying consent to the value of the latter. In ‘Goethe’s Works’ (1832) he pursues this redemptive argument through a metaphor of financial currency and its symbolic function in determining normative cultural values: All these things, I say, the apparel, the counthood, the existing popularity and whatever else can combine there, are symbols; – banknotes, which, whether there be gold behind them, or only bankruptcy and empty drawers, pass current for gold. But how, now, could they so pass, if gold itself were not prized, and believed and known to be somewhere extant?63

By suggesting that the relationship between the true substance of heroism and conventional markers of social recognition (‘the counthood, the existing popularity’) is analogous to the relationship between ‘gold’ and ‘banknotes’, Carlyle adumbrates a theory of hero-worship in terms of the language of economic credit later employed in Alton Locke. Where Kingsley, however, appears, at first sight, to position the working-class hero outside the field of visual representation demarcated by the process of social accreditation, Carlyle’s anthropological account of the enduring value inscribed within social ‘currency’ suggests that greatness may not be so easily separated from notability. In Alton Locke heroism and hero-worship also become entangled in the response to external visual images, and must therefore confront the theological charge of idolatry. Nowhere is Kingsley’s indebtedness to Carlyle more evident than in his zealous unmasking of the false ideals of heroism into which his narrator and protagonist frequently stumbles. Idolatry is unquestionably Alton’s besetting sin, self-castigated on numerous occasions throughout the text. Its danger is signalled most graphically in an episode set in the Dulwich Picture Gallery (Chapter vi), in which Alton’s susceptibility to ‘everything beautiful in form or colour’ (69) is attached, first, to a Guido Reni painting of Saint Sebastian, and then to Lillian, the middle-class woman who will become ‘the idol of my imagination’ for most of the ensuing narrative (131). The conspicuous elision of these two figures suggests that a common thread linking Alton’s political and aesthetic ideals is a tendency to substitute iconic emblems for the complex desires which stand behind them. Kingsley attempts to explain this characteristic by grounding Alton’s excessive sensitivity to beauty in the material and

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cultural deprivations of his working-class Protestant upbringing; Lillian’s cousin Eleanor (a wiser choice of female mentor) later concludes: ‘I should have known how enchanting, intoxicating, mere outward perfection must have been to one of your perceptions, shut out so long as you had been from the beautiful in art and nature’ (373). Yet, curiously, the novel re-inscribes the theological terms of Alton’s repression by describing his response to the Dulwich Gallery in terms of idolatry. It is here that he first succumbs to the seductive allure of aesthetic icons: a figure of self-sacrifice redolent of the ‘idolatry of painted saints’, on the one hand, and an ‘apparition’ evoking ‘simple admiration – idolatry if you will – of physical beauty’, on the other (70–5). Richard Menke views the painting of Saint Sebastian as both representing Alton’s impending political martyrdom and a ‘powerful figure for . . . [his] connection to high culture’, thus encompassing his divided loyalties.64 In his Autobiography, published two years after Alton Locke, William Jerdan interestingly invoked the figure of Saint Sebastian as an archetype of literary martyrdom, the trials and suffering of professional authorship: the author, he wrote, is ‘the Saint Sebastian of his days, stript and bound, for every cruel hand to shoot an arrow into him’.65 Alton’s subsequent creative development as a poet unfolds through his idolatry and fetishism of such visual objects. His thwarted desire for Lillian leads to an internalization of ‘the living outward idol’ (80) within the imagination; in turn, the poet projects his ‘fancies’ beyond the self, so ‘that I might look at them and talk to them as permanent independent things’. In this account, writing itself becomes a sublimated act of idolatry, a dangerously deluded worship of beauty reproduced within the mind. The same charge, moreover, becomes central to the novel’s critique of Chartism and its attempt to supplant Chartist ideology with the doctrine of Christian Socialism. From his retrospective autobiographical perspective, Alton convicts himself of having superstitiously venerated the aims of the Charter as if it were ‘the idol of political institutions’, a ‘talisman’ created through ‘spirit-compelling spells’ (110–11). Again, it is left to Eleanor Lynedale, the character who comes closest to espousing Kingsley’s proselytizing agenda, to cement this interpretation of Alton’s story: ‘You regarded the Charter as an absolute end. You made a selfish and a self-willed idol of it’ (378). The sin of idolatry, then, is not solely attributed to the social and psychological conditions of Alton’s personal development, but also diagnoses a broader, collective failure of political imagination, of which Alton’s individual case is conceived as paradigmatic. Kingsley, nevertheless, preserves a Carlylean distinction between those idols (‘things seen’) which are fetishized visual surfaces and those which

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‘symbolize’ – express or embody through their external form – a substance worthy of worship.66 The lesson of the Dulwich Gallery episode, and what follows, is not that Alton is wrong to have worshipped images that figure his cultural aspirations, but that he has chosen the wrong object, an ‘outward symbol’ which is not ‘a sacrament of the loveliness within . . . but a hollow mask’ (358). Had he chosen Eleanor instead of Lillian from the beginning, Alton’s ‘idolatry’ would most likely have been characterized as a form of ‘hero-worship’, the non-pejorative term which encapsulates his grateful submission to the former at the end of the novel, and likewise towards Dean Winnstay and the Prussian ambassador earlier in the text. It is clearly not on Kingsley’s agenda to demystify Alton’s idolatrous delusions in order to remake him as a figure of autonomous reason. Rather, he aims to demonstrate Carlyle’s thesis that the capacity for hero-worship is an essential predicate of heroism itself; hence, Alton’s voluntary subordination to his supposed spiritual superiors, an uncomfortable feature of his intellectual development for most modern readers, is presumably intended to illustrate his fitness for the role of working-class hero.67 Kingsley presents the ‘spiritual history’ of his narrator as a process of development from primitive idolatry to more modern, ‘rational’ forms of worship, an autobiographical conversion narrative which inscribes broader phylogenetic implications (355). Like Carlyle’s, Kingsley’s iconoclasm is aimed not at the outright destruction of visual icons, but a discrimination between true and false objects of idolatry. Just as Carlyle emphasized the value of portraits as a heuristic aid for his biographical writings, so Kingsley structures Alton’s intellectual development around scenes which foreground the importance of learning how to read pictorial images insightfully: not only Guido’s Saint Sebastian, but also the landscape by Copley Fielding which Alton overhears being discussed in Chapter xxvi and Raffael’s [sic] cartoon The Miraculous Draught of Fishes which enters his phantasmagorical ‘dream-land’ in Chapter xxxvi. Kingsley took a particular interest in the aesthetic education of the working classes, and in articles for the journal Politics for the People he described picture galleries as ‘the workman’s paradise, a garden of pleasure, to which he goes to refresh his eyes and heart with beautiful shapes and sweet colouring, when they are wearied with dull bricks and mortar, and the ugly colourless things which fill the workshop and the factory’, and proceeded to advocate ‘free admission to all works of art’.68 It seems highly unlikely, then, that the discourse of idolatry in Alton Locke is intended to endorse a suspicion of the value of aesthetic experience per se. It is not only the pictorial images used in Alton Locke which make it a vividly inter-textual novel, but also the numerous literary figures on

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which Alton’s narrative is modelled. Alton is frequently compared with other writers, both real and fictive, the effect being to construct a ‘hero’ out of multiple, and sometimes conflicting, archetypes. According to Gallagher, the radical inter-textuality of Alton Locke is not a sign of advanced literary technique on Kingsley’s part, but rather a desperate attempt to shore up Alton’s fragmented authorial identity by ‘resting it on a supporting network of other writings’. Whilst I agree that Alton may thus be seen as a ‘derivative’ figure, an ‘author making his book out of other books’, this observation takes little account of the significance of the discursive network to which he is linked.69 This network is drawn from three main sources: firstly the writings of Carlyle, secondly the canon of working-class or self-educated poets and autobiographers, and thirdly the novel of literary apprenticeship. As we have already seen, Carlyle’s presence within the novel is both pervasive and premeditated; he appears, both under his own name and in the surrogate form of Mackaye, as an exponent of the doctrine of heroism and hero-worship, a true idol and mentor for Alton’s self-development. At the same time, through his account of Burns, Carlyle is the source of the ‘tragic’ myth of working-class authorship which provides a template for Alton’s later disillusioning experiences. Carlyle’s study of Burns stands behind the interpretation of other working-class writers cited in the text: the poets John Bethune and Willie Thom, though not so much Alexander Somerville. Early in the novel, for instance, the reader finds Alton absorbed in reading a copy of ‘The Life and Poems of J. Bethune’ at Mackaye’s second-hand bookstall, a significant scene as it immediately precedes Alton’s first encounter with his Scottish mentor. In the biographical account of Bethune’s ‘sad history of labour, sorrow, and death’ prefacing his posthumous volume of poems, Alton sees a ‘sad presage of my own’, but is moved to ‘tears of sympathy, rather than of selfish fear’ (32). Bethune is clearly a parallel figure to Alton, one who represents another incarnation of the Burnsian archetype. In ‘Burns and his School’ Kingsley portrayed both John and his brother Alexander Bethune as literary martyrs ‘made perfect by sufferings’: ‘heroes and saints . . . not of the Popish sort, abject and effeminate, but of the true, human, evangelic sort, masculine and grand – like the figures in Raffaelle’s Cartoons, compared with those of Fra Bartolomeo’. Written shortly after Alton Locke, this characterization may have been framed with Alton in mind since it registers precisely the unease of his response to the sacrificial figure of Saint Sebastian, most notably in terms of the questions of gender identity raised by this icon of passively suffering masculinity. The resemblance is further strengthened by Kingsley’s account of how the Bethunes were persuaded to

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purge their poetry of its ‘violent political allusions’ by a respectable ‘mentor’ on grounds of ‘practical economy’.70 Later in the novel, it is Mackaye who reveals the generic pattern of the Burnsian poet’s development in warning Alton of the dangers of social ambition: [W]hy, after a dizen years or so of starving and scribbling for your bread, ye’ll ha’ a chance o’ finding yersel a lion, and a flunkey, and a licker o’ trenchers – ane that jokes for his dinner, and sells his soul for a fine leddy’s smile – till ye presume to think they’re in earnest, and fancy yersel a man o’ the same blude as they, and fa’ in love wi’ one of them – and then they’ll teach you your level, and send ye off to gauge whusky like Burns, or leave ye to die in a ditch as they did wi’ puir Thom. (78)

As with Bethune, the allusions here to Thom and Burns himself are admonitory and prophetic in function, outlining the narrative trajectory that Alton’s experience is likely to follow. It is reasonable to conclude, with Gallagher, that ‘Alton is cut out from a pattern drawn in another fiction’, but the explicitness of this prescribed pattern suggests that it was Kingsley’s intention to position Alton as a representative, or even fungible, figure within the broader context of working-class cultural development – he is but one of ‘an ever-increasing army of martyrs’ (42).71 To be sure, this ‘Burnsian’ paradigm does not fit all of the working-class writers cited in the novel, as the primary source-figure of Thomas Cooper illustrates. Where Alton’s ‘genius’ is marked by a passive endurance of suffering, which makes him appear a weak character even by his own admission, the pertinent facts of Cooper’s life which enter the narrative frame serve, conversely, to promulgate an active, self-reliant negotiation of difficulty. During the episode of Alton’s trial allusions are made to the precedent of Cooper’s heroic legal self-defence in 1842, to which Mackaye responds by remarking that ‘my puir laddie here’s no made o’ that stuff’ (282). On his subsequent imprisonment Alton vows to ‘concentrate all my experience, my aspirations, all the hopes and wrongs and sorrows of the poor, into one garland of thorns – one immortal epic of suffering’ (283) – an obvious allusion to Cooper’s epic ‘prison-rhyme’, The Purgatory of Suicides – but, in fact, he does nothing of the kind. Unlike Kingsley’s source-figure, Alton’s poetic development does not flourish in adversity. The third main source of inter-textual dialogue in Alton Locke is the wider genre of the literary Bildungsroman, a network of texts which includes several of those discussed in previous chapters. Here, there are stronger grounds for presuming that Kingsley’s narrative of Alton’s ‘self-development’ incorporates a middle-class form of subject-formation, as there is no prior body

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of working-class fiction (to my knowledge) which the novel can be seen to engage.72 Indeed, Kingsley goes out of his way to plot Alton’s experience within the recently established conventions of the novel of literary apprenticeship, cramming the text with allusions to a host of comparable narratives. In addition to the expected Carlylean sources – Wilhelm Meister and Sartor Resartus – Alton Locke contains direct references to Ernest Maltravers and Pendennis. When Alton embarks on work as a hack writer for the Weekly Warwhoop (a caricature of Feargus O’Connor’s Chartist newspaper The Northern Star), for example, he becomes ‘Pegasus in Harness’ (the title of Chapter xx), forced by economic necessity to ‘try and serve God and Mammon’ (188). As in Thackeray’s novel, journalism poses a threat not only to the integrity of the writer’s ‘moral sense’ (215), but also, when Alton is required ‘to sit scribbling off my thoughts anyhow in prose’, his poetic vocation (189). In tracing his material development as a writer, Kingsley invites the reader to view Alton’s predicament in similar terms to those of middle-class literary professionals, rather than exclusively defining his experience by social class. Similarly, the self-censorship required of Alton by Dean Winnstay asks to be read not just as indicative of the suppression of working-class literary voices by their anxious patrons, but also of a more endemic experience of professional authorship: ‘But we have each of us to be disenchanted of our dream’, the Dean informs Alton in an expression of world-weary cynicism redolent of Pendennis (180). In Chapter xxv Kingsley engages with another contemporary novel of literary apprenticeship on a more overtly meta-fictional level by having Mackaye present Alton with a copy of Ernest Maltravers, and invite him to draw a moral lesson from the figure of Castruccio Cesarini, the Italian poet whose obsessive desire for literary celebrity leads to insanity. Alton is duly struck by this ‘fearful story’, as with the history of John Bethune previously, but it does not prevent him from pursuing a similar course: in the following chapter, ‘The Triumphant Author’, Alton is shown at the height of his professional success, attending a social gathering of ‘lions’ of the kind satirized in Bulwer’s novel (236). These episodes further demonstrate that Kingsley’s text draws on a much wider body of cultural sources than the paradigm of obstructed workingclass intellectual development which he inherited from Carlyle, seminal though the latter is in shaping the restrictive – and somewhat predictable – outcomes of Alton’s career. Of all the post-Carlylean novelists of the early Victorian period, indeed, Kingsley was probably the most familiar with the broad span of contemporary discourses of ‘self-culture’, ranging from popular autobiographical narratives of self-improvement to the work of Goethe and the German

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Romantic ideal of Bildung. Alton Locke was one of a trilogy of social problem novels that he wrote during the late 1840s and 1850s – the others being Yeast: A Problem (1848) and Two Years Ago (1857) – each of which was preoccupied with the relationship between intellectual self-development and social class. Kingsley was ambivalent, and at times hostile, towards the influence of Goethe on the practice of self-culture, characterizing Wilhelm Meister in the latter novel as solipsistic and ‘merely’ aesthetic: a ‘proud attempt . . . to hang self-poised in the centre of the abyss, and there organize for oneself a character by means of circumstances’. He objects on religious grounds to the autonomous cultivation of the self at the exclusion of acknowledging a dependence on God, but, moreover, suggests that Goethe’s ‘insipid hero’ tacitly benefits from comfortable middle-class conditions whilst proclaiming his freedom from external circumstance: ‘Easy enough it seems for a man to educate himself without God, as long as he lies comfortably on a sofa, with a cup of coffee and a review.’73 Alton himself, as noted earlier, invokes the introspective vocabulary of the Bildungsroman, referring to his ‘self-imposed toil of intellectual improvement’ and ‘inward thirst for mental self-improvement’ at various stages throughout the narrative (30, 42, 53), and this reflexive attention to his own experience may suggest a self-absorption dangerously bordering on what Kingsley saw as the narcissism of the Goethean hero; Alton is retrospectively aware of this peril, as his dismissive comments on the ‘miserable “Ich”’ and ‘selfidolising aesthetics’ of German philosophy make clear (328). Ultimately, though, Alton Locke departs from both the Goethean model of literary apprenticeship and popular narratives of self-improvement by foreclosing on the prospect of teleological completion usually inscribed within these forms (however provisional or compromised their narrative endings may be in practice). Despite his religious conversion by Eleanor in the latter stages of the novel, the subdued closing chapters place greater emphasis on Alton’s tragic demise rather than a triumphant redemption, enabling his story to represent the collective body of ‘unaccredited’ heroes which he encounters near the beginning: Ay; but where are the stories of those who have not risen – of all the noble geniuses who have ended in desperation, drunkenness, starvation, suicide, because no one would take the trouble of lifting them up, and enabling them to walk in the path which nature had marked out for them? (49)

Unlike the hero of the middle-class Bildungsroman, such as Copperfield or Pendennis, Alton is unable to maintain even the most fragile accommodation with existing social conditions, and it remains questionable whether

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his narrative has been written from the standpoint of mature intellectual judgement. At the level of narrative diegesis, Alton’s life is curtailed in the final chapter when the reader discovers from an external source that he has died of typhus fever en route to exile in Texas, a conclusion which reflects the sense of truncated development characteristic of the autobiography as a whole. His death acts as confirmation of the sense of weakness or febrility, which, in gendered terms, translates into the taint of effeminacy pervading Alton’s life-story. Though the disease which causes his decline may be read in realistic terms as further evidence of the determining power of social environment, its broader narrative effect adds to the reader’s consciousness of Alton’s cumulative ‘dissolution of . . . self’, to use Gallagher’s appropriate phrase.74 Alton’s susceptibility to fragmentation is symptomatic of a typology of the creative writer, who, contrary to David Copperfield’s narrative of goal-oriented professional labour, is unable to harness the imagination to productive ends, and is instead left ‘paralysed’ by a desire for passive experience: ‘to sit and observe, and fancy’ (228). In the memorable dream sequence of Chapter xxxvi – perhaps the most frequently discussed episode of the novel in modern criticism – Kingsley gives symbolic expression to the condition of arrested development which distinguishes Alton’s version of the literary Bildungsroman from the majority of his middle-class contemporaries. This elliptical sequence, through which Alton undergoes consciousness as a series of earlier forms of organic life, casts the fragmentation of the self in literal terms as a horrifying loss of individuality: ‘I was not one thing, but many things – a crowd of innumerable polypi; and I grew and grew, and the more I grew the more I divided, and multiplied thousand and ten thousand-fold’ (356). Alton’s preceding quest for intellectual self-improvement is unravelled here in a nightmare of degenerative dissolution carrying punitive undertones. A didactic interpretation of the dream would suggest that Alton must first regress to the primeval origins of consciousness, shedding the accumulated delusions of his cultivated self, in order to develop along a more constructive path of evolutionary progress. However, Alton does not survive to become a ‘Tropic poet’ – the primitivist figure of renewed physical and mental vigour through which Eleanor projects his future literary development in America – his death confirming his existing status as a product of decadent ‘European civilization’ with its ‘physically decrepit races’ (384). The proposed ideological resolution of the novel thus gestures towards an identity for the working-class poet beyond what it presents as the noble but ineffectual Burnsian type, but is unable or unwilling to bring this vision into fruition. The representation of working-class

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authorship encoded within this sequence undoubtedly contains elements of what James Eli Adams terms a ‘conservative social logic’.75 As Adams notes, Kingsley’s aim in writing the novel was to show the undesirability and calamitous consequences of upward social mobility as a corollary of working-class intellectual aspiration. In a letter dated 13 January 1851 he explained: I do not think the cry ‘get on’, to be anything but a devil’s cry. The moral of my book is, that the working man who tries to get on, to desert his class and rise above it, enters into a lie, and leaves God’s path for his own – with consequences.76

It should be acknowledged, however, that Kingsley’s rationale in adopting this stance was somewhat different from that of Robert Southey, writing twenty years earlier in The Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets (1831), who lauded the self-taught poetry of John Jones for its apparent lack of personal ‘discontent’.77 Alton, by contrast, is allowed to express a manifest resentment at the unequal opportunities for intellectual development within class society, yet Kingsley insists on maintaining the autonomy of culture from broader social change. Instead of encouraging the desire to ‘rise’ in society, he sought to facilitate ‘the means of developing’ the ‘latent capabilities’ of working men within their own class milieu by supporting educational and sanitary reform.78 The desired outcome of this project is, indeed, conservative insofar as Kingsley envisaged a diminution of the demand for more radical social change as one of its practical benefits. Nonetheless, his objection to the conflation of material and intellectual ‘getting on’ – the declared ‘moral’ of Alton Locke – cannot be so readily categorized, not least because it was often shared by the contemporary working-class autodidacts and autobiographers on which the novel drew.

c h a p ter s ix

Moving statues The iconography of the ‘printing woman’

In early- and mid-Victorian debates on the development of the literary profession middle-class women writers, even more perhaps than male artisans, occupy an anomalous and uncertain status. The increasingly visible participation of women within the professional publishing culture of the period is no longer in question, as recent critical studies of nineteenth-century female authorship have shown. Linda Peterson points to the inclusion of women in Fraser’s Magazine’s ‘Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, a serial which made female authorship ‘visible to its readership’ in the most graphic sense, as did many other literary galleries of the 1830s and beyond. Typically, however, as Peterson notes, such images consecrated the domestic femininity of the author, even while bearing witness to her professional status. With a small number of exceptions, women writers of the earlier part of the period were represented through specifically gendered iconographic conventions which self-consciously promoted ‘acceptable versions of the female author’.1 The collective counterpart to the publicly sociable male ‘Fraserians’, for example, was Maclise’s sketch of ‘Regina’s Maids of Honour’, published in January 1836, depicting female occupants of the ‘Gallery’ and contributors to the magazine sitting around a drawing room tea-table, an image characterized by Carol Bock as ‘separate-and-definitelynot-equal’.2 More generally, the widespread use of terms such as ‘poetess’, ‘authoress’, and (somewhat later) ‘woman of letters’ serves to indicate the minoritized status of women with respect to the dominant discourse on the literary profession.3 Although female authorship occupied a recognized place within the various genres of print culture through which the productivity of literary work was measured, up until the middle of the century it remained uncommon to represent such work as professional labour. According to Patricia Zakreski, the fictional and autobiographical writings of women themselves preserve a ‘deliberate silence’ about the ‘actual practice of writing’: in contrast to the proliferation of male-authored novels of literary apprenticeship during the 1830s and 1840s, there are, Zakreski 174

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suggests, ‘only a few narratives from the mid-Victorian period that feature an authoress as their heroine’.4 By the 1850s, though, it is possible to discern a more concerted engagement with, or appropriation of, the discourse of literary professionalism. It was during this decade that the first major Victorian auto/biographical narratives of female authorship were produced, texts by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Harriet Martineau which substantially reconfigured the iconic representation of the woman writer from earlier nineteenth-century conventions.5 In this final chapter I consider how these, and other, mid-nineteenthcentury women writers negotiate the difficulties and contradictions inherent in the attempted formulation of a professional identity. Building on Peterson’s study of ‘the entries of individual women into authorship . . . and the development of the woman of letters as a conceptual category during the nineteenth century’,6 the following discussion focusses, on a more restricted historical scale, on the questions of women’s access to the developmental discourse of literary apprenticeship and the cultural visibility of iconic representation. I begin by examining some of the distinctive motifs of female auto/biographical narratives of professional authorship from the late 1840s and 1850s before moving on to consider, in greater detail, Barrett Browning’s epic ‘novel-poem’ Aurora Leigh (1856) within the generic context of the early Victorian Bildungsroman established in previous chapters. The second half of the chapter acknowledges Barrett Browning’s simultaneous engagement with the iconological doctrine of Carlyle, and its embodiment in the heroic figure of the man of letters, as a context for discussing her appropriation of Carlylean thought in the revised female iconography of Aurora, a figure of the ‘printing woman’ who both inherits and transforms a normative statuesque mode of embodying feminine artistic performance.

Parallel currents Just as the late 1840s saw the emergence of working-class autobiography as a distinct sub-genre of contemporary narratives of self-formation, so this period also marks the beginnings of an efflorescence of auto/biographical writing by women, which encompasses some of the most celebrated literary texts of the mid century. Unlike the obscure or anonymous artisan authors of the former, the latter were produced by writers who developed careers of considerable professional recognition, as well as by some who, inevitably, failed in the attempt. One of the earliest literary uses of the word ‘autobiography’ famously occurs in the subtitle of Charlotte Bront¨e’s Jane

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Eyre (1847), a novel which Sharon Marcus has shown may be obliquely connected to the rhetoric of professional authorship. Although, in referential terms, Jane’s first-person narrative recounts her entry into the sphere of non-domestic labour as a governess and teacher, and foregrounds her creative imagination mainly in terms of visual art, it also, performatively, positions her as an author with a capacity for ‘abstracting’ and ‘alienating’ her identity in writing; Marcus cites Jane’s newspaper self-advertisement as an example of the ‘profitable forms of self-alienation’ with which writing is associated in the text, a quasi-professional practice that she compares to ‘Bront¨e’s strategies for advertising herself as the author of Jane Eyre’.7 Over the following decade, a succession of more direct auto/biographical narratives by and/or about professional female writers were composed. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, according to Peterson the first non-fictional ‘life-history’ of a female author to be conceived as such, was written in 1855 (though not published until after her death in 1877), and one of the earliest and most influential biographies of a woman writer, Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bront¨e, appeared two years later.8 In between these two historically significant auto/biographies, Barrett Browning published Aurora Leigh, a generically hybrid text which she variously described as ‘my poem-novel’, ‘a sort of novel-poem’, ‘a sort of poetic art novel’, and ‘an autobiography of a poetess – (not me)’.9 Despite its indeterminate nomenclature, Aurora Leigh is a pivotal example of the mid-century narrative of female professional authorship, bridging the developmental (positivist) schema adopted by Martineau and the agonistic self-division of authorial identity into ‘parallel currents’ promulgated by Gaskell’s interpretation of Bront¨e, as well as the broader distinction between gendered modes of writing which they exemplify. Published in the same year as Jane Eyre was a novel by the now forgotten writer, Rose Ellen Hendriks, entitled The Young Authoress (1847), which should also be recognized as notable in the history of women’s professional self-representation; arguably, it was the first openly avowed novel of literary apprenticeship by a woman writer in the English language. The Young Authoress traces, in three volumes, the formative development of Rosalie de Rochequillon from orphaned childhood to literary genius and professional success, concluding in a companionate marriage and the end of youth. The parallels with a basic narrative outline of Bront¨e’s novel are suggestive, although, unlike Jane, Rosalie cannot be described as a representative middle-class protagonist in the Bildungsroman tradition: the daughter of a French aristocratic e´migr´e, and god-daughter of Charles X, Hendriks’s ‘authoress’ is presented as self-consciously exceptional in terms of both

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gender and class from the outset of the novel. Rosalie’s early struggle for acceptance as ‘an alien, in an unloving aunt’s mansion’ anticipates Aurora Leigh as much as it resembles Jane Eyre, and may also have influenced the former text; both are explicit accounts of the anomalous development of female ‘genius’ and its awkward accommodation within respectable society.10 Rosalie is transparently figured as an autobiographical double for Hendriks, which is not to say that the empirical details of their respective careers correspond more closely than in other novels of the same genre. Rather, Hendriks playfully reflects her ‘real’ authorial identity in the eponymous fictional author, leaving a series of blatant autobiographical clues for readers to detect. In Volume ii, for example, Rosalie composes a tragic opera, Charlotte Corday, which is also the title of one of the previous works attributed to Hendriks (a historical novel published in 1846) on the title page of The Young Authoress; and in the final volume Hendriks nominates herself, amongst more illustrious contemporaries, as one of Rosalie’s literary influences: she ‘seemed always in a wild, fluttering ecstasy of literary hopes and fears – always talking of Dickens, or Bulwer, or Rose Ellen Hendriks’ (iii, 207). This humorously brazen self-projection into the narrative is explicitly announced in the authorial ‘Introduction’ prefacing the novel, in which ‘the Authoress pleads for her second self, and sends forth “The Young Authoress” to the public, to court praise, and to disarm criticism’; here, the ‘Young Authoress’ is both subject and object of the published text, especially given that Hendriks glosses the novel as one of the ‘productions of my early literary days’ (i, iv). Perhaps the most striking element of this text, then, given its date of publication and the generic context outlined above, is the openness with which the author/narrator professes her literary ambition through the autobiographical cipher of the title character. If Jane Eyre can be read as the Bildungsroman of a professional writer manqu´e, The Young Authoress offers a less reticent and disguised counterpart, if also, for this reason, a less persuasive or more risky rhetorical venture. In her ‘Introduction’ Hendriks confesses that ‘for the attainment of fame my ambitious heart has yet to wait patiently’ and this scarcely concealed desire for professional recognition is again reflected in Rosalie’s repeatedly expressed yearning for literary fame (i, iv). Though gently ironized by the narrator, Rosalie’s youthful ‘dream of fame’ is effortlessly realized in what is hard to avoid reading as a narrative of authorial wish-fulfillment: ‘[g]radually, but surely, the young authoress had risen into universal favour’ and become ‘a successful candidate for fame’ (i, 139; iii, 31–2). Hendriks’s alternately brash and melancholy preoccupation with ‘fame’ as the reward of ‘genius’ is

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reminiscent of Bulwer’s fiction as well as the writings of L.E.L., which are liberally cited throughout the text. Rosalie does not appear to experience or betray much anxiety of authorship, being determined to publish under her own name: ‘not affixing my name to the title-page’ she ‘deem[s] . . . a species of cowardice’ (i, 145). The fame which becomes attached to the recognition of the author’s proper name, rather than commercial success and monetary reward, is regarded as the pure object of professional aspiration within the novel; in this respect, it does not portray a ‘realistic’ initiation into the literary profession, as Landon sought to achieve in Ethel Churchill. The ending of The Young Authoress explicitly borrows and revises the matrimonial resolution of Madame de Sta¨el’s Corinne (1807), again strikingly prefiguring Barrett Browning’s more familiar inter-textual narrative. Rosalie’s marriage to Sherburne marks the end of her passage from ‘youth’ to experience and inevitably restricts her previous independence, an outcome which the narrator addresses as a cautionary note to all ‘literary ladies’ (iii, 290): She began her career as a genius, and found that, after all, she was but a woman . . . she began, as many a creature of genius does, relying upon the strength and reputation of her own talents, and ended by the wisest of all reparation for her mistake – namely, acknowledging that man has the superior power of guiding the talents of youth, and that none will do so, as willingly, gently, and efficaciously as he to whom she pledges her faith. (iii, 291)

Yet this is not the complete volte-face with respect to literary aspiration which it initially seems. Hendriks assures the reader that Rosalie does not ‘fall into the too general mistake of married women – abandoning, in married life, the very talents which in single life had captivated her husband’, and that while ‘not always “The Young Authoress,” the authoress she would still continue’ (iii, 291–2). Furthermore, the novel’s closing prospect is of the birth of Rosalie’s first child, who promises to grow into the next generation of female writers, becoming ‘in her turn “The Young Authoress”’ (iii, 294). Hendriks’s antinomy of ‘genius’ and ‘woman’ points, nonetheless, to the central dilemma encountered within most mid-century narratives of female professional authorship, and which differentiates them most obviously from their male counterparts. In Aurora Leigh the tension between the professional and emotional development of the poet-narrator is similarly manifested in Aurora’s growing sense of antagonism between her desires as ‘woman and artist’ (Bk 2, l. 4). Whereas in David Copperfield, as we have

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seen, the hero’s literary success is defined by his ability to move effortlessly between domestic and professional arenas, passing from the intimacy of the conjugal sphere to the impersonality of global fame, the same lack of friction is unobtainable for figures such as Aurora and Rosalie, despite the equally triumphant resolution of their narratives. As readers have often observed, Aurora’s reconciliation with Romney in Book 9 of Aurora Leigh represents, at one level, a retrenchment of her earlier artistic aspirations in favour of a synthesis between her two competing selves, a movement which echoes but also reverses the logic of circular expansion by which Agnes completes the cycle of David’s life: But I who saw the human nature broad At both sides, comprehending too the soul’s, And all the high necessities of Art, Betrayed the thing I saw, and wronged my own life For which I pleaded. Passioned to exalt The artist’s instinct in me at the cost Of putting down the woman’s, I forgot No perfect artist is developed here From any imperfect woman (Bk 9, ll. 641–9)

Where David’s centre of domestic bliss expands outwards to encompass the furthest reaches of his professional identity, Aurora’s artistic ambition seemingly contracts to accommodate her love for Romney. While this is not to endorse some of the more negative critical assessments of the poem’s resolution, Aurora’s apprehension of her suppressed womanly ‘instinct’ hints at a sacrificial dualism which would be inconceivable for her male counterpart.11 A more ‘perfect artist’, Aurora suggests, should arise through the avoidance of ‘putting down the woman’, but it is not entirely certain that her concessions to Romney do not amount to a self-sacrifice of the opposite kind. By comparison with Dickens’s text, the tensions between professional autobiography and domestic romance are less clearly resolved at the end of the narrative. In Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bront¨e the binary logic underpinning the supposedly antagonistic roles of artist/genius and woman is formalized into a principle of narrative organization by which readers are invited to observe the painful splitting of Bront¨e’s subject position. The potentially self-sacrificial interplay of artist or woman becomes, for Gaskell, a means of interpreting and representing Bront¨e’s twofold existence as woman and author – a duality which her subject’s use of the authorial pseudonym, Currer Bell, helps to literalize:

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The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession Henceforward Charlotte Bront¨e’s existence becomes divided into two parallel currents – her life as Currer Bell, the author; her life as Charlotte Bront¨e, the woman. There were separate duties belonging to each character – not opposing each other; not impossible, but difficult to be reconciled.12

While Gaskell is careful here to dispel the suggestion that Bront¨e’s double identity implies an irreconcilable opposition between its component parts, the metaphor of ‘parallel currents’ opens a fissure between two competing narrative strands which is never entirely sealed. Gaskell interprets the biographer’s task as one of articulating her subject’s internal schism, guiding the reader from one persona to the other with, at times, a disconcerting literalness: ‘[l]et us return from Currer Bell to Charlotte Bront¨e’, she announces by way of narrative transition (264). However, she also locates this narrative bifurcation into ‘parallel currents’ within the gendered context of professional authorship: When a man becomes an author, it is probably merely a change of employment to him. He takes a portion of that time which has hitherto been devoted to some other study or pursuit; he gives up something of the legal or medical profession, in which he has hitherto endeavoured to serve others, or relinquishes part of the trade or business by which he has been striving to gain a livelihood; and another merchant or lawyer, or doctor, steps into his vacant place, and probably does as well as he. But no other can take up the quiet, regular duties of the daughter, the wife, or the mother, as well as she whom God has appointed to fill that particular place: a woman’s principal work in life is hardly left to her own choice; nor can she drop the domestic charges devolving on her as an individual, for the exercise of the most splendid talents that were ever bestowed. And yet she must not shrink from the extra responsibility implied by the very fact of her possessing such talents. She must not hide her gift in a napkin; it was meant for the use and service of others. In an humble and faithful spirit must she labour to do what is not impossible, or God would not have set her to do it. (259)

For women, Gaskell suggests, to embark on a literary career is to undertake a peculiarly asymmetrical commitment. Whereas authorship may be practised by men as one amongst a number of other forms of professional labour, the ‘domestic charges’ for which female authorship could potentially substitute turn out to be strictly non-disposable. Literary labour must always be added to the burden of existing work; hence the characteristic doubling of personae within women’s auto/biographical narratives. Yet, as in Aurora Leigh, Bront¨e’s doubleness retains the capacity to be resolved through sacrifice. Gaskell’s avowed desire to exonerate the memory of

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‘Charlotte Bront¨e, the woman’ from the accusations of ‘coarseness’ levelled against the fiction of ‘Currer Bell, the author’ tacitly assumes an anxiety that the former has been subsumed by the latter; arguably, the closing chapters of the biography seek to reverse this impression by interpreting Bront¨e’s marriage to Arthur Nicholls as the terminal point of her professional career. In Martineau’s Autobiography the gulf between professional and domestic narratives is by no means as starkly presented as in Gaskell or Barrett Browning, but remains visible nonetheless. By declaring from the outset the supremacy of ‘intellectual existence’ over ‘anything else’ in her life, Martineau swiftly rules out the possibility of ‘parallel currents’ within the text, but the very decisiveness of this gesture reveals the contours of the alternative narrative which she has chosen to submerge: ‘I have never since been tempted, nor have suffered anything at all in relation to that matter which is held to be all-important to woman, – love and marriage.’13 Martineau is clearly aware of the pressure of one type of narrative overwriting and cancelling out another, more conventional narrative, unlike, for example, Anthony Trollope (with whose equally impersonal style of autobiography Martineau’s has been compared), who chooses rather to maintain a clear separation between his personal and professional lives.14 Whether openly foregrounded or adumbrated through its absence, the motif of ‘parallel currents’ identifies the particular challenge, for women writers of the mid century in negotiating a passage between domestic and professional spheres, and thus also reflects a broader tension between private and public identities. The intensity with which women such as Barrett Browning, Bront¨e, Martineau, and Hendriks meditate on the category of literary fame is especially illustrative of this challenge. Whilst previous chapters have shown that many male authors of the period also held anxieties about the new forms of cultural visibility attained through literary celebrity, contrary to Dorothy Mermin’s assumption, she is nevertheless right to suggest that the ‘idea of fame as a kind of sexualized self-exposure’ raised specific problems for women entering the professional arena.15 In The Young Authoress Hendriks effectively insulates Rosalie’s (and her own) desire for literary fame from suspicion by contrasting it with the ‘bad’ fame embodied by the stage actress Alice Mereton, who becomes the novel’s figure of a ‘fallen’ public woman. In Aurora Leigh ‘fame’ is both contrasted and conflated with ‘love’ as respective aims of the parallel narrative strands of ‘artist’ and ‘woman’. As a traditional measure of artistic ambition fame represents a masculine counterpart to love, the conventional goal of

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feminine self-fulfilment as Martineau observed. For Aurora, fame embodies the ‘approbation of the general race’, a manifestation of impersonal collective opinion, whereas love offers the ‘approbation of a man’, the personal praise which Romney accuses female artists of secretly courting (Bk 5, ii. 65 and 63). Yet, increasingly, Aurora comes to view the pursuit of fame as a sublimated expression of the craving for love, a surrogate object of desire offering inadequate recompense for emotional deprivation: .

To have our books Appraised by love, associated with love, While we sit loveless! is it hard, you think? At least ’tis mournful. Fame, indeed, ’twas said, Means simply love. It was a man said that: And then, there’s love and love: the love of all (To risk in turn a woman’s paradox,) Is but a small thing to the love of one. You bid a hungry child be satisfied With a heritage of many corn-fields: nay, He says he’s hungry, – he would rather have That little barley-cake you keep from him While reckoning up his harvests. So with us; (Here, Romney, too, we fail to generalise!) We’re hungry. (Bk 5, ii. 474–88)

Whereas in David Copperfield the reflected glory of literary fame is intimately bound up with David’s domestic narrative of self-authorization, here Aurora’s critique of the male troping of fame as a rival object and source of love signals an impending retrenchment from her earlier professional ambition. Disturbingly, this has the effect of legitimating Romney’s preconception that abstract concepts fail to inspire the woman artist. Fame is likened by analogy to a grand but indigestible ‘heritage of many cornfields’ – an abstract calculus of material benefits similar to those in which Romney tends to indulge – whereas love promises the tangible, if prosaic, satisfaction of a ‘little barley-cake’. Fame, in other words, leaves Aurora cold – and, more importantly, ‘hungry’. Barrett Browning’s association of the pursuit of fame with ‘hunger’ – an experience of both lack and desire – is familiar from the writings of Carlyle and Bulwer-Lytton, amongst others. In ‘The Hero as King’ Carlyle characterized the ‘morbid’ desire for fame as ‘the emptiness of the man, not his greatness’: ‘[b]ecause there is nothing in himself, he hungers and thirsts that you will find something in him’ (223). As a fantasized source of personal plenitude, fame thus derives from the pathology of hunger of

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which it becomes a symptom. Citing this passage, Leo Braudy has argued that within modern (Christian/Romantic) culture the earlier Classical idea of ‘fame’ as an impersonal medium of civic recognition is replaced by a personalized anxiety about its radical inauthenticity, eliciting an ambiguity already latent in the etymology of the word.16 Aurora Leigh draws with remarkable precision on these compacted lexical and semantic connotations. The metaphor of the ‘heritage of many corn-fields’, for instance, registers in cognate terms the paradoxical state of famine with which Aurora associates the barrenness of fame, and links directly to her castigation of the abstract materialism underpinning Romney’s Fourierist philosophy: mere ‘barley-feeding and material ease’ (Bk 2, i. 477). Thus, by the end of the poem, Barrett Browning insinuates an ironic parallel between the respective flaws of her two major characters: Romney’s misguided attempt to address the problem of material hunger – ‘I beheld the world/As one great famishing carnivorous mouth’ (Bk 8, ii. 395–6) – and the spiritualized hunger for literary fame which Aurora becomes anxious to renounce. The ‘struggle for fame’, in all its manifold forms, can reasonably be claimed as the central, unifying theme of Aurora Leigh, long before the publication of Charlotte Riddell’s novel of the same title.17 In female auto/biographical narratives of the 1850s the ambivalence often attached to fame marks a twofold alienation from the pursuit of professional and personal fulfilment. If, on the one hand, the domestic sphere is incapable of containing women’s literary aspirations, on the other hand success in establishing a professional reputation does not of itself provide personal satisfaction. In a review for The Athenaeum Henry Chorley described the ostensible ‘moral’ of Barrett Browning’s text as ‘the insufficiency of Fame and Ambition, be either ever so generous, to make up for the absence of Love’, an interpretation which gives succour to conservative views of female authorship, but which could just as plausibly be reversed: for Aurora, Love (at least of a conventional hetero-normative type) does not seem entirely sufficient to compensate for the absence of poetic Fame.18 Gaskell must have recognized this ambivalence in the passage from Book 5 of Aurora Leigh from which she selected an epigraph for The Life of Charlotte Bront¨e: O my God, my God . . . thou hast knowledge, only thou, How dreary ’tis for women to sit still On winter nights by solitary fires And hear the nations praising them far off, Too far! ay, praising our quick sense of love, Our very heart of passionate womanhood,

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The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession Which could not beat so in the verse without Being present also in the unkissed lips And eyes undried because there’s none to ask The reason they grew moist. (Bk 5, ii. 434–47)

Aurora’s poignant evocation of the disjunction between her professional and domestic lives – hearing the praise of nations ‘far off’ while sitting at home ‘by solitary fires’ – clearly prefigures the bifurcated narrative form of Gaskell’s ‘parallel currents’. An image which manages to convey both the emptiness of public recognition and the bleakness of domestic solitude, this passage remains ambiguously open to the possibility of fulfilment in both or neither sphere. The explicit detachment between public and private roles is preserved by the irony of their unstated conflation; that, for women writers, fame negates the very quality which it proclaims: ‘our quick sense of love,/Our very heart of passionate womanhood’. Gaskell’s dialogue with Aurora Leigh extends beyond para-textual citation and can, indeed, be viewed as an important source for her biography of Bront¨e. Not only does she refer readers to Barrett Browning’s poem on the title page of the Life, but it is also consciously invoked in the concluding chapter, thus providing an external narrative frame for Bront¨e’s life. On the scene of Charlotte’s funeral in Haworth churchyard, Gaskell reflects that ‘[f]ew beyond that circle of hills knew that she, whom the nations praised far off, lay dead that Easter morning’, returning once more to the disparity between public acclaim and domestic obscurity which forms her subject’s parallel currents (428). Her emphasis on the disconnection between the public notoriety of ‘Currer Bell’ and the increasingly marked solitariness of ‘Charlotte Bront¨e’ dramatizes both the gulf between the normative cultural categories of ‘author’ and ‘woman’ and the alienation from her literary fame which this self-division is thought to have instilled in Bront¨e. This, of course, is not necessarily to endorse the authenticity of Gaskell’s account. Just as Aurora becomes anxious to disavow her earlier aspiration for fame, so Gaskell’s insistence on Charlotte’s aversion to publicity of all kinds could be seen as complicit with the notorious letter in which Robert Southey warns Charlotte against the desire of writing ‘with a view to celebrity’, a goal which he deemed incompatible with the performance of her ‘proper duties’ as a woman (117). Although Gaskell does not seek to admonish or deter women’s entry into the public sphere in the patriarchal manner of Southey, her protective urge to emphasize the domestic virtue of Charlotte’s character leads her to diminish the latter’s professional ambition: hence, the efficacy of Branwell Bront¨e’s fevered ‘craving after fame’ as a means of

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displacing the aspirations of his sisters onto a more familiar male Romantic figure (102, 139). Indeed, on a narrative level, Gaskell’s construction of the broad arc of Charlotte’s passage from obscurity to notoriety and (in prospect) back to domestic seclusion in her marriage to Nicholls reproduces Southey’s proposition that a woman’s desire for celebrity is merely a temporary substitute for domestic affection, disappearing on its arrival. Despite Gaskell’s concern with the effects of literary celebrity on the reputation of professional women, The Life of Charlotte Bront¨e was itself a text which helped to produce the cultural visibility of its subject within the broader context of nineteenth-century biographical discourse. Gaskell’s use of the Romantic biographical trope of obscure genius displays Charlotte’s private self in the very act of resisting public exhibition, thus simultaneously exploiting and eroding accepted social boundaries. Linda Shires draws a useful, if broad, distinction between two types of authorial persona in the Victorian period: one, the model of ‘theatrical self-display’ associated with Dickens and Wilde, the other based on a conspicuous withdrawal from, or refusal of, the public gaze, exemplified by Tennyson.19 Similarly, in the case of Byron, Braudy discusses the efficacy of projecting for public consumption an image of ‘personality’ which appears to recede beneath the surface of visual representation.20 Gaskell’s Bront¨e belongs to this latter type of celebrity insofar as her conscious aversion to public spectacle is held up for the reader’s moral admiration to the point where it becomes a cornerstone of her authorial myth. This is not only to note that Gaskell compiles evidence of her subject’s preference for privacy and anonymity over public recognition: for example, Charlotte’s declaration that ‘[t]he most profound obscurity is infinitely preferable to vulgar notoriety’, or, more impressively, her instruction to a publisher that her reply to a reader’s request for an autograph be postmarked from London so as to prevent the disclosure of Currer Bell’s true identity (266, 225). In addition to gathering and (selectively) quoting from such sources, Gaskell is more imaginatively engaged in publicizing Charlotte’s private self. Her use of landscape, for instance, demarcates a signifying space which connotes the private world of the Bront¨e family, or, more precisely, the dialectic of obscurity and visibility through which readers’ perception of the Bront¨es is filtered. In the topographical tour de force of the opening chapter, narrator and reader follow the road from Keighley to Haworth, moving ever closer to the horizon of ‘wild, bleak moors – grand, from the ideas of solitude and loneliness which they suggest’, before finally penetrating the sanctum of the church in which they discover, at the end of a lengthy catalogue of Bront¨e deaths, the memorial tablet recording the adjacent presence of Charlotte’s bodily

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‘remains’ (13–16). This telescopic narrative viewpoint, simulating the territorial encroachment of the biographer on the innermost core of her subject, enacts a metonymy of place and name which was to prove influential in establishing the cultural myth of the ‘Bront¨e country’. Similar narrative techniques were developed on a broader scale in the popular ‘homes and haunts’ genre of literary biography pioneered by William Howitt during the late 1840s, which later developed into a more recognizably modern discourse of celebrity culture.21 In this topographical mode of biography the ‘private’ space of the author’s home became, paradoxically, the preeminent signifier of her public fame. Harriet Martineau’s preoccupation with the practice of ‘literary lionism’ – a phenomenon of which, alongside Carlyle, she was one of the earliest critical observers – reflects a more unambiguous concern with emerging forms of celebrity from which female authors were by no means exempt. Like Gaskell’s Bront¨e, Martineau presents herself as deeply averse to personal publicity, having experienced a degree of notoriety during the 1830s which equalled that of Currer Bell a decade later. Indeed, Martineau’s decision to incorporate her 1839 London and Westminster Review essay on ‘Literary Lionism’ within her later Autobiography ostensibly arises from a reluctance to revisit this aspect of her professional life; instead of a direct autobiographical account of her experience of celebrity, she offers a more impersonal style of cultural critique. What Martineau objects to in this practice, however, is not her treatment as a figure of public interest per se: she herself takes pride in a career in which her ‘opinions and feelings have been remarkably open to the world’ and, unlike Bront¨e, does not appear to suffer from any anxiety of self-exposure. Rather, it is the fact that literary lionism – like the publication of private correspondence against which she raises a formal ‘interdiction’ in her Introduction to the Autobiography – transgresses normative social boundaries, blurring the interaction of private individuals with public media, which incurs her wrath. This new mode of fame is quite different, she contends, to the acclamation of Petrarch within the agora or to the professional recognition of modern scientists (3, 277). Barrett Browning’s satirical depiction of Aurora’s experience of the predatory gaze of ‘lion-hunters’ in their ‘zoological soir´ees’ follows a similar tack (Bk 3, ii. 384–7). Symptomatic of the ‘frivolous fame’ accompanying Aurora’s early poetic success, lionism is marked by an incongruous transposition of established forms of public representation into the private sphere of society – the most prominent being that of the Classical statue, as I suggest in the final part of this chapter (Bk 3, i. 235). Though Aurora protests the visual objectification imposed by this contemporary manifestation of

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the publicity of private life, at the end of Book 5 she – like Martineau – decides to escape it altogether by leaving London literary society.

‘I too have my vocation’ The generic hybridity of Aurora Leigh has understandably tended to obscure the depth and specificity of its affiliation to the early Victorian novel of literary apprenticeship. Whilst modern critics have not been reluctant to invoke such generic labels as Bildungsroman or Kunstl¨erroman in discussions of Aurora Leigh, this usage has generally been in keeping with the approximate nature of Barrett Browning’s ‘sort of’.22 Since its critical resurrection by ‘second-wave’ feminist criticism in the late 1970s, Aurora Leigh has, indeed, been widely recognized as a densely mediated text, saturated in contemporary cultural debates. In her Introduction to the Woman’s Press edition of 1978, Cora Kaplan memorably characterized Aurora Leigh as ‘a vast quilt, made up of other garments’, and in less figurative terms argued that it ‘should be read as an overlapping sequence of dialogues with other texts, other writers’.23 Kaplan’s primary focus was on Barrett Browning’s engagement with the Condition-of-England debate of the 1840s and 1850s, encompassing both poetry and fiction. Amongst other writings this led her to identify an important source text for Aurora Leigh in Kingsley’s Alton Locke, a novel whose assonant title may not be coincidental. According to Kaplan, Aurora Leigh may be read as ‘a sort of counter-text’ to Alton Locke, which provides an ‘ideal foil’ for Barrett Browning’s purpose since ‘the problems of social identity and self-determination for both working-class men and middle-class women were temptingly parallel’.24 Of equal pertinence to both Aurora’s autobiographical narrative of poetic development and the political concerns centred on the progress of Romney’s philanthropic projects (modelled, in part, on Kingsley’s Christian Socialism), Alton Locke offers a striking contemporary model for the simultaneously inward- and outward-facing character of Barrett Browning’s text. More recently, critical attention has turned to comparisons with Wordsworth’s The Prelude, first published in its epic thirteen Book form in 1850, and with David Copperfield, a novel which Barrett Browning judged Dickens’s ‘most beautiful’.25 This network of generic inter-texts can be extended even further, and defined more precisely, in order to reach a fuller understanding of Barrett Browning’s participation in the contemporary discourse of professional self-formation. In addition to notable similarities with The Young Authoress, Aurora Leigh also borrows significantly from Bulwer’s Ernest Maltravers, most transparently in its reworking of the cross-class

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relationship between Ernest and Alice Darvil in Aurora’s redemption of (and by) Marian Erle. Writing to Mary Russell Mitford in the year of its publication, Barrett praised Ernest Maltravers as ‘a splendid book, whose presence will not pass from me’, an opinion later corroborated by her defence of Bulwer against criticism levelled by Robert Browning in 1845.26 Underlying the specific points of interest to be garnered from such comparative analysis are broader questions about the inter-relationship of genre and gender, as other critics of Barrett Browning have suggested. The fact that Aurora Leigh is so richly comparable to narratives of literary apprenticeship produced by male writers would seem to reinforce Zakreski’s perception of the poem as a female version of the ‘masculine vocation plot’, and to this extent an anomalous or exceptional case within the context of women’s professional self-representation.27 Regenia Gagnier similarly argues against viewing Aurora Leigh as a paradigmatic expression of female subjectivity given that it reflects an adherence to the dominant masculine autobiographical model of the ‘autonomous artistic self’.28 Even within feminist studies, then, the critical emphasis on Barrett Browning’s self-conscious literary ‘ambition’ is not unequivocally a term of approbation, since it can imply an internalization of gendered professional ideology. From a different perspective, though reaching a similar conclusion, Deirdre David claims that Barrett Browning’s ostensibly gynocentric text colludes with patriarchal interests in its ultimate subordination of Aurora’s artistic ambition to Romney’s ethos of social ‘service’.29 These conflicting yet complementary responses to the poem are explicable within the generic framework of the Bildungsroman, whereby the individual pursuit of ‘selfcultivation’ typically exists in tension with ‘a recognition of limitations, a self-imposed restriction of ambition’.30 Like other examples of the genre which I have discussed, Aurora Leigh charts a process in which the aspiring individual undergoes a painful ‘disciplinary’ process that is seen as requisite for her ethical integration within the wider social or professional community, however reluctantly or ironically that discipline is enforced. In this respect, Aurora’s apparent renunciation of artistic self-sufficiency at the end of her narrative is structurally equivalent to the abandonment or modification of equally treasured ‘illusions’ by male protagonists of the literary Bildungsroman, rather than revealing a uniquely feminine propensity for self-sacrifice. Just as much as its predecessors, Aurora Leigh instantiates the Hegelian dialectic between the ‘poetry of the heart’ and the ‘opposing prose of circumstances’ which commentators have long associated with this generic form.31

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The restrictive function of the ‘masculine vocation plot’ has become increasingly recognized in critical studies of the Bildungsroman. Throughout the nineteenth century the social expectations and opportunities of selfdevelopment reflected within this narrative form were rarely made available or deemed appropriate for women, regardless of social class. In a collection of essays on the female Bildungsroman published in 1983 Marianne Hirsch argues that the ‘static’ and ‘ahistorical’ characteristics ascribed to femininity during the period are the very ‘antithesis of Bildung’ as an organicist cultural ideal, hence the necessity for women writers to engage differently with the form.32 Susan Fraiman, in her study Unbecoming Women published a decade later, goes further by subjecting the very category of the Bildungsroman to a thorough ‘ideological analysis’. For Fraiman, the ‘nomination of an English family of texts seen to descend from Wilhelm Meister’, as in the work of Susanne Howe and other mid-twentieth-century criticism, serves to privilege and universalize patterns of social experience which are in fact specifically gendered. The novel of ‘apprenticeship’, to use the term introduced by Carlyle’s translation of Goethe’s text, ‘implies not only youth and inexperience, but also . . . eventual mastery’: a positive linear trajectory of personal development founded on a ‘vocational practice and chronology’ historically reserved for men. In the literary context of the Bildungsroman, however, Fraiman notes that the idea of apprenticeship ‘seems to imply choice’ rather than being ‘born to a particular kind of work and social status’, as in the feudal guild system which the term invokes. Thus, the narrative form of the Bildungsroman gives rise to ‘a mythology of vocational choice’, which draws its empirical social content from the ‘normative, middle-class man whose skills and labor are his own’, and within which there is ‘little space for the middle-class female protagonist’.33 Though Fraiman does not discuss Aurora Leigh, her critique of the Bildungsroman is both supported and challenged by Barrett Browning’s text. The very fact that Aurora’s literary development is self-consciously modelled on masculine archetypes (to the point of explicit references to cross-dressing as is often noted) indicates a dissonance between the gendered assumptions of the genre and the cultural experience of the female protagonist. This can be discerned by the direction of Aurora’s emotional maturation, which differs symptomatically from that of David Copperfield. Whereas David’s development leads him to the self-mastery of professional discipline, Aurora’s requires her self-acknowledgement as a ‘woman’ as well as an ‘artist’; the risk which her narrative seeks to compensate is not that of remaining emotionally adolescent but, rather, of being too disciplined,

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too professional. On the other hand, it is important not to underestimate the rhetorical impact of Aurora’s appropriation of a masculine professional identity. Aurora Leigh demonstrates, if nothing else, that the freedom of mobility and vocational choice accorded to the middle-class male literary apprentice is at least imaginable for women writers, albeit not representative of their historical experience. Aurora’s defiant assertion of her right to determine and pursue her own intellectual vocation during the first major exchange with Romney in Book 2 is perhaps the most striking instance of this dramatic power: Ah, you force me, sir, To be over-bold in speaking of myself: I too have my vocation, – work to do, The heavens and earth have set me since I changed My father’s face for theirs, and, though your world Were twice as wretched as you represent, Most serious work, most necessary work As any of the economists. (Bk 2, ii. 453–60)

This declaration of professional autonomy derives its force from the act of appropriation implied in the adverbial qualifier ‘too’. Here, and elsewhere in the text, Aurora consciously lays claim to narrative conventions from which she is excluded by gender. As Fraiman points out, the ability to travel freely across social and geographical space as a means of enabling self-development through time is a common motif of the Bildungsroman which female characters of the period are less likely to possess, one of her key examples being Maggie Tulliver from George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860). Yet Aurora ends Book 2 by informing Romney of her intention of relocating to the metropolitan centre of the literary profession, thus following in the footsteps of the likes of Copperfield and Pendennis: ‘I go hence/To London, to the gathering-place of souls,/To live mine straight out, vocally, in books’ (ii. 1181–3). For Kaplan, the ensuing depiction of Aurora’s life as ‘an independent author living and working in London’, which occupies Books 3 to 5, is ‘possibly the most “revolutionary” assertion in the poem’, since it demonstrates not ‘that the literary life lived single is romantic or exciting’, but ‘[m]ore subversively and seductively . . . that it is possible, interesting, and productive, a fact that was beginning to be true for the generation of women who came after the mid-century’.34 Whilst it is well-known that Barrett Browning did not herself experience the spatial mobility which she attributes to Aurora as a single woman, Kaplan’s final observation suggests that it would be inaccurate to dismiss

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this fictional representation of female professional autonomy as either fanciful or entirely exceptional. Various models for Aurora’s independence have been suggested, including George Sand and Laetitia Landon, and one should also note its similarities to Harriet Martineau’s contemporary account of her early professional life.35 Martineau, for example, records having made a similar decision in the early 1830s to move from her family home in Norwich to a single garret room in London in order to ‘have any chance in the field of literature’.36 From Book 2 Aurora’s assertion of vocational identity takes the form of a commitment to ‘work’ as unremitting in its iteration as that of David Copperfield. Deirdre David has emphasized Barrett Browning’s adoption of Carlylean rhetoric on the strenuous labour of writing, though her reduction of Aurora’s vision of ‘[m]aking poetry’ to ‘straightforward, unflinching, male work’ underestimates the text’s critical appropriation of masculine authority; the attempt to legitimate poetry as a form of ‘social action’ is, in part, a riposte to Carlyle, as embodied in Romney’s refusal to take Aurora’s poetry seriously enough.37 In her ‘Preface’ to the Poems of 1844 Barrett had already publicly defined her authorship as an act of sincere professional labour, preempting by several years the rhetorical conflation of manual and mental work seen in Dickens’s novel: ‘I have done my work, so far, as work, – not as mere hand and head work, apart from the personal being, – but as the completest expression of that being to which I could attain, – and as work I offer it to the public’.38 As in Copperfield’s autobiographical apologia, Barrett claims here to have performed a type of literary labour which surpasses the mechanical division of ‘hand and head work’, emanating instead from her ‘personal being’ – or the ‘whole self’ as Dickens phrased it. In both cases, the implied assertion is that professional authors both are and are not ordinary workers. That this conception of literary work can be translated into the empirical terms of social class is suggested by a letter to Richard Hengist Horne, in which Barrett revealed: ‘I have worked at poetry – it has not been with me revery, but art [sic]. As the physician and lawyer work at their several professions, so have I, and so do I, apply to mine’.39 Art, work, and middle-class professionalism are rendered virtually synonymous within this account of poetic practice. Despite this embrace of mid-century professional rhetoric, it is interesting to note Barrett Browning’s scepticism towards institutionalized forms of collective identity such as the Guild of Literature and Art. Siding with Thackeray’s opposition to the project, Elizabeth confided to her sister Arabella in June 1851 that she found the activities of the Guild ‘disgusting’ and

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‘would rather starve in the magazines’ than become one of its beneficiaries.40 The immediate context of this observation – an extended political discussion in which she expresses vehement opposition to ‘socialism’ – would suggest that Barrett Browning saw Dickens’s professional society as an example of the type of materialist ‘system’ which she later satirized through the figure of Romney and, conversely, countered with the emphatic ‘individualism’ of Aurora’s poetic development. In this respect, Barrett Browning’s commitment to a heroic ‘masculine’ ideal of self-formation sits uneasily with the broader cultural formation to which this ideal was linked. The axiom that ‘Genius is always individual ’, as she declared in a letter of 1850, remains a constant element of Barrett Browning’s aesthetic and political thought, and Aurora Leigh should be read as a further elaboration of this principle.41 In the context of Barrett Browning’s own career, Aurora Leigh stands as both the culmination of a process of artistic development and a self-conscious reflection on the narrative form through which this process was conceived. As Marjorie Stone records, one of Barrett’s most ambitious earlier projects was an unfinished poem entitled ‘The Development of Genius’ (1826–7), subsequently published in discrete fragments as ‘The Student’, ‘The Poet’s Enchiridion’, and ‘Earth’ (1833): a body of work which already signals her ‘highly self-conscious and overt poetic aspirations’.42 Coming towards the end of her writing life, Aurora Leigh, it may be argued, represents a modernized and professionalized version of the ‘development of genius’ narrative which preoccupied her earlier ‘Romantic’ phase; an extension of individualism energized beyond static iconography through the novelistic flux of the Bildungsroman. Like Kingsley’s Alton Locke, Aurora Leigh is a text manifestly pervaded by the influence of Carlyle’s lectures on ‘The Hero as Poet’ and ‘Man of Letters’. Barrett Browning had previously identified herself as a ‘disciple’ of Carlyle, acknowledging him as ‘the great teacher of the age’.43 Similarly, Aurora’s celebrated defence of epic poetry and the enduring capacity for heroism within the modern age in Book 5 of Aurora Leigh pays homage to his intellectual authority: All actual heroes are essential men, And all men possible heroes: every age, Heroic in proportions, double-faced, Looks backward and before, expects a morn And claims an epos. Ay, but every age Appears to souls who live in’t (ask Carlyle) Most unheroic. (Bk 5, ii. 151–7)

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This passage presents an elegantly balanced reformulation of the inductive circularity of Carlyle’s argument in On Heroes. For Carlyle, as observed in Chapter Two, the roles of hero and hero-worshipper are at once divided by the absolute singularity of the former and elided by the potential accession to heroic status of the latter. Precisely because ‘every age/Appears to souls that live in’t/Most unheroic’, the capacity for hero-worship becomes the defining characteristic of Carlyle’s historical heroes; hence, the apparent gulf between ‘heroes’ and ‘men’ is, in reality, a continuum of reciprocal exchange. Unlike Carlyle in ‘The Hero as Poet’, Aurora does not go so far as to suggest that ‘all men’ have the potential to be poets, but her interpretation of his doctrine attempts to retain both its transcendental and democratic elements (85). The faculty of ‘double vision’ which she exhorts poets to cultivate represents a capacity to perceive the heroic within the prosaic, or the Classical within the modern, and vice versa: ‘To see near things as comprehensively/As if afar they took their point of sight,/And distant things as intimately deep/As if they touched them’ (Bk 5, ii. 185–8). There is a correspondence here with Carlyle’s broader project of re-enchanting the disenchanted world of modernity. Like Carlyle, Barrett Browning defined her intellectual genealogy in terms of a nineteenth-century reaction to eighteenth-century rationalism, the Romantic ‘counter-enlightenment’ to use conventional historiographical labels. In her essay ‘The Book of the Poets’ (1842), for instance, Barrett traces the historical evolution of poetry from Dryden, a poet ‘inspired in his understanding and his senses only; but to the point of disenchanting the world most marvellously’, to Wordsworth, ‘the poet-hero of a movement essential to the better being of poetry’.44 The figure of the ‘poet-hero’ or ‘poet-prophet’ is, of course, borrowed directly from ‘The Hero as Poet’ and later elaborated in Aurora Leigh. As Stone has argued, Barrett Browning’s reliance on the Carlylean model of the heroic poet does not necessarily imply an uncritical receptivity to ‘patriarchal’ thought. Aurora Leigh can be seen as a text which both self-consciously emulates the mid-Victorian tradition of prophetic social criticism and ‘transforms’ that tradition through Barrett Browning’s ‘gynocentric adaptation of its characteristic strategies, and her subversion of the authoritative stance so strenuously asserted by Victorian prophets like Carlyle’.45 This reading is substantiated by the central intellectual debate between Aurora and Romney, an exchange which projects Barrett Browning’s more ambivalent response to the ‘great teacher of the age’. As Stone observes, the figure of Romney bears a pointed resemblance to Carlyle in the manner of his critique of Aurora’s poetic vocation; both of them

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espouse ‘the virtues of labour and action over poetry and song’.46 It is possible to go further by noting the specific echo of ‘The Hero as Poet’ in Romney’s axiom: ‘Here’s an age/That makes its own vocation!’ (Bk 2, i. 275). Romney’s assumption that poetry, understood primarily as aesthetic affect or technical virtuosity, is secondary to the more urgent demands of the historical moment receives powerful confirmation in Carlyle’s lecture: I would advise all men who can speak their thought, not to sing it; to understand that, in a serious time, among serious men, there is no vocation in them for singing it. Precisely as we love the true song, and are charmed by it as by something divine, so shall we hate the false song, and account it a mere wooden noise, a thing hollow, superfluous, altogether an insincere and offensive thing. (91)

For Carlyle, poetry which privileges the formal medium of ‘song’ over the substance of heroic speech is an object of aesthetic idolatry just as pernicious as the antithetical ‘idols of utilitarianism’ towards which Barrett Browning notes his iconoclastic fervour in her 1843 essay for Horne’s The New Spirit of the Age.47 A suspicion of written language itself, evidenced in the view that a ‘Poet in act’ is ‘perhaps still better’ than a ‘Poet in word’, is a discernible undercurrent of ‘The Hero as Poet’, as throughout his writings (105). Indeed, Carlyle’s reverence for heroic authorship is remarkable partly for its indifference to literature as such. Nowhere is this more bizarrely apparent than in his earlier Lectures on the History of Literature, in which the absence of ‘literature’ from the eleventh century is deemed a symptom of a ‘healthy age’: for Carlyle, ‘[t]he point is not to be able to write a book, the point is to have the true mind for it’.48 In response to Carlyle’s apparent denigration of the poetic medium, Barrett insisted, in the letter to Robert Browning acknowledging her discipleship, that ‘song is work, and also the condition of work’.49 Aurora Leigh may be read as an extended gloss on this statement: an attempt to heal the rift between poetry and social labour sustained by Carlyle’s distinction between heroic ‘words’ and ‘acts’, while accepting the terms in which it is phrased. Poetry, in Aurora’s doctrine, mediates between the two opposing extremes of utilitarian and aesthetic idolatry: errors equally manifested in Romney’s conception of politics and art. Aurora repeatedly affirms the immanent value of poetic labour over the public recognition to which it leads: Get leave to work In this world – ‘tis the best you get at all; For God, in cursing, gives us better gifts

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In this respect, David is right to observe that Carlyle’s ‘gospel of work’ provides the common ground on which Aurora and Romney are reconciled at the conclusion of the poem.50 Both figures undergo a process of maturation in which they absorb one of the signal lessons of the Goethean Bildungsroman, namely, that the aspiration for self-cultivation should not transcend the labour that is closest to hand: ‘let us be content, in work/To do the thing we can, and not presume/To fret because it’s little’, as Romney belatedly comes to realize (Bk 8, ii. 732–4). In order to reach this point, however, Romney (and, by implication, Carlyle also) must first be persuaded to alter his preconceptions about the usefulness of poetry, in particular the work of women poets. The Carlylean figure of the poet-hero is also significant in its provision of a language of visual embodiment with and against which Barrett Browning constructs her own female literary icon. Aurora is both endowed with the vatic poet’s capacity as a seer and is herself a luminous presence within the text: an exemplary symbol in Carlyle’s dual sense. That she ultimately achieves the first of these roles is, of course, the triumphant message of Book 9, in which Romney’s loss of material sight is exchanged for her mature poetic vision – a form of prophetic insight to which the material world is no longer sacrificed. This pointed switch of visual positions – Romney moving from a masterful visionary of social reform to a sightless object, Aurora from her visual objectification as a feminine poet to a prophetic seer – leads Angela Leighton to conclude that ‘Aurora has learned to see precisely because she has learned the insignificance of being seen’. Whilst it is important to recognize the shift in access to the power of subjective vision which takes place during the course of the narrative, however, to claim that Aurora (or, for that matter, Barrett Browning) views the condition of ‘being seen’ as ‘insignificant’ seems open to question. The ‘triumphant invisibility’ which Leighton discerns in Aurora’s final location within the text is contradicted by the radiant aura of the poet-prophet, as outlined by Romney:51 Come thou, my compensation, my dear sight, My morning-star, my morning, – rise and shine,

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The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession And touch my hills with radiance not their own. Shine out for two, Aurora, and fulfil My falling-short that must be! work for two, As I, though thus restrained, for two, shall love! Gaze on, with inscient vision toward the sun, And, from his visceral heat, pluck out the roots Of light beyond him. (Bk 9, ii. 907–15)

It would not be entirely accurate to characterize the condition of the poet in this passage as one of seer but not seen, as an invisible creator of the visual field. Rather, Aurora’s symbolic figuration as the ‘morningstar’ imbues her with a luminosity which deliberately obscures a clear distinction between subjective and objective meanings of the word ‘sight’, irrespective of the fact that Romney cannot physically see her. Aurora is here reminiscent of the autonomous, self-illuminating principle of ‘visuality’ by which Carlyle conceives of the symbolic form of the literary icon. Turning to the beginning of Aurora Leigh, we may also note that the text in which this prophetic figure is ultimately apotheosized is itself likened to a reflexive visual icon, a self-portrait painted ‘for a friend,/Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it/Long after he has ceased to love you, just/To hold together what he was and is’ (Bk 1, ii. 5–8). One of numerous references to portraits and other types of painting within the poem, this founding metaphor for Aurora’s autobiographical narrative is another ambiguous form of visual embodiment: a painting apparently designed to reveal its subject to an external other, representing the artist’s own ‘better self’, yet also to remain sheltered from view within the private space of a drawer. Neither triumphantly invisible nor fully exposed to public view, this emblematic icon of the autobiographical text foreshadows the visual manifestation of hidden depth befitting Aurora’s prophetic status, while also acknowledging an anxiety of self-exposure that accompanies her entry into the public realm of literary fame. Barrett Browning would also have been aware of an analogy for the iconicity of the poet drawn from a different visual medium, that of sculpture rather than painting. In ‘The Hero as Poet’, as mentioned in the previous chapter, Carlyle uses a sculptural metaphor to convey the obdurate material conditions within which writers are compelled to embody their labour. Since it is impossible to possess the ‘Thought’ of Shakespeare as a free, self-determining totality, we are forced to accept the fragmented body, or disjecta membra, of a sculpted form revealed by his surviving works (110–11). For Barrett Browning, the medium of sculpture often appears to work differently, signifying an idealized abstraction of the body instead of

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(or in addition to) a material incarnation of the self, yet in Aurora Leigh she too uses the figure of the statue to explore the unavoidable problems of visual embodiment. From the early nineteenth century, female authorship – and, most particularly, the figure of the ‘poetess’ – became closely associated with the public display of statuesque form; hence, Carlyle’s analogy between writing and sculpture is, arguably, of greater consequence for the representation of women’s professional development than it was for the image of male working-class self-culture.

Moving statues To describe the fictional author Aurora Leigh as an ‘iconic’ figure may, at first sight, seem like a trite observation. At best, it might serve as an acknowledgement of the exceptional cultural recognition accorded to Barrett Browning’s text both on its first publication in 1856 and, more recently, since its critical rediscovery as ‘an epic of feminist self-affirmation’.52 The figure of Aurora did, indeed, inspire ‘translation’ into visual form during the nineteenth century, as Rod Edmond points out; the best-known example being Arthur Hughes’s painting, The Tryst, or Aurora Leigh’s Dismissal of Romney (1860), commissioned by the private art patron Ellen Heaton, an admirer of Barrett Browning and later friend of Christina Rossetti.53 At Heaton’s request, The Tryst illustrates the scene from Book 2 of Aurora Leigh in which Aurora rejects Romney’s proposal of marriage in order to pursue an independent career as a professional writer, although, as John Ruskin observed, Hughes also hints at the future reconciliation of the cousins, a more conservative rendering of Aurora’s defiant autonomy than Heaton may have wished for.54 At worst, however, the slippage from literary to visual representation risks ignoring the ways in which Barrett Browning’s poem contests dominant tropes of gender iconography. Aurora herself is surrounded by female icons within the text: most notably, the posthumous portrait of her mother, with its grotesque resemblance to ‘Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite’ (Bk 1, i. 154), but also including Vincent Carrington’s two portraits of Danae, symbolizing ‘Two states of the recipient artist-soul’ (Bk 3, i. 139), and even his painting of Kate Ward posing as an acolyte of Aurora.55 The roles of ‘woman and artist’ are thus self-consciously objectified through the narrative representation of the pictorial medium. In emphasizing Aurora’s troubled alienation from the images of femininity produced by male artists, critics have tended to adopt an iconoclastic (or, in W. J. T. Mitchell’s term, ‘iconophobic’) posture, in which visual embodiment is considered suspect by virtue of its capacity for restricting the

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mobility of the speaking subject.56 When the pervasive presence of visual iconography in Aurora Leigh has been noted, then, it is most commonly judged from a negative standpoint. By contrast, I argue that Aurora’s narrative of professional self-formation supports a more positive account of literary iconicity, even while it attempts to elude capture in reified visual archetypes of the poetess. The fact that Aurora’s implied critique of the iconographical conventions of male portraiture is itself contained within a narrative framework likened to an act of self-portraiture at the beginning of the poem indicates a more complex treatment of visual representation than is often acknowledged. I would also suggest, however, that it is through the medium of sculpture rather than painting that Barrett Browning’s ambivalence towards the conflicting impulses of embodiment and disembodiment, iconicity and iconoclasm, is best encapsulated. While the emblematic form of the portrait has received greater prominence in critical readings of Aurora Leigh, the statue is a more pervasive figural motif and more central to the articulation of its concerns with the relationship between gender and aesthetics. Leighton is one of the few critics to have recognized the importance of the statuesque image in Aurora Leigh, setting it within the context of Barrett Browning’s reworking of the Romantic myth of Corinne (a link first established by Ellen Moers in the 1970s) and her response to the iconography of the ‘poetess’ derived from de Stael’s novel by her most immediate English precursors, Felicia Hemans and Laetitia Landon.57 As Leighton (and, following her, Linda Peterson) has shown, the early-nineteenth-century poetess modelled on Corinne was commonly depicted as a statuesque figure in Classical form, and thus reflexively defined as ‘both subject author and studied object d’art’.58 This is the cultural context of Leighton’s understandable suspicion of attempts to impose visual iconicity on Aurora within the narrative: The temptation to be a statue in a tableau vivant of self-conscious ‘heroinism’ is one which, to the end of the century, lures women into an easy association between the self and the work. This false Pygmalionism disguises the differences between subject and object, poet and lover, so that woman, as a creative subject, becomes her own mournfully static sexual object.59

In Leighton’s reading of the poem Aurora (and through her Barrett Browning) learns to avoid the static postures of this ‘false Pygmalionism’ through a liberating physical mobility. Rejecting the ‘self-conscious statuary’ of the Corinne myth, she contends, Barrett Browning’s ‘heroines have a habit of

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walking rather than standing . . . Aurora’s vocation is to be a poet, not a statue’.60 The key episode on which this reading hinges is Aurora’s self-coronation at the opening of Book 2, a scene which evidently points back to the coronation of Corinne in the Roman Capitol in de Sta¨el’s novel. This scene works through an intricate play of repetition and difference in relation to its source-text, at once announcing Barrett Browning’s debt to Corinne and signalling her departure from it. In the first place, Aurora’s intentionally private act of self-coronation – whether construed as an act of poetic faith, self-consolation, or rampant narcissism – differs crucially from the triumphant public acclamation of Corinne; either one may infer that Aurora’s professional identity does not require the external validation of a male audience or that her version of the female artist, unlike Corinne’s, is unlikely to receive one. Secondly, and by way of corollary, Aurora’s coronation diverges from Corinne’s by failing to enthral the audience which it does, unintentionally, attract: as Leighton notes, Aurora’s ‘moment of triumph has the opposite effect to Corinne’s, for Romney is not impressed’ by what he sees.61 In de Sta¨el’s novel, not only is the individualized male spectator, Oswald, seduced by Corinne’s performance, but it is also made clear that the source of his attraction is, in Moers’s words, ‘not the woman in the genius but . . . the woman of genius at the moment and in the place of her greatest public triumph’.62 Viewed in this context, Aurora Leigh’s coronation scene signifies an ironic disenchantment of the Romantic myth of poetic glory fostered by Corinne. Romney’s uninvited encroachment into the scene jolts Aurora into recognizing a failure of correspondence with her exalted poetic archetype, for better or worse: I stood there fixed, – My arms up, like the caryatid, sole Of some abolished temple, helplessly Persistent in a gesture which derides A former purpose. Yet my blush was flame, As if from flax, not stone. (Bk 2, ii. 60–4)

Here, it is as if Aurora is figuratively turned into a statue by Romney’s frigid gaze, but at the same moment he forces her to become conscious of the absurdity of her own statuesque pretensions, and thus to realize that she is not in fact made of ‘stone’.63 As Leighton suggests, the statuesque ‘heroinism’ of the poetess is mockingly deflated. Yet there is more to be found in this episode than an ironic debunking of the Corinne myth.64 It is worth noting that at the end of the ensuing dialogue (the encounter

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portrayed in Hughes’s The Tryst), Aurora pointedly retrieves the ‘soiled garland’ which she had initially cast aside after Romney’s intrusion to preserve in a drawer, like the manuscript of her autobiography in which this episode is recorded (Bk 2, i. 809). Rather than leading to a conclusive dethronement of the iconic image of the poetess, the episode leaves the reader with a more uncertain impression of the future course of Aurora’s poetic ambition. The aspiration for literary fame, symbolized by the garland, is not so much abandoned as secreted, again signalling the problem of negotiating the boundary between private and public spheres. Moreover, Aurora’s deliberate choice of an ivy wreath, instead of the conventional laurel, makes clear her understanding of the association between fame and death within the Romantic ‘culture of posterity’, as described by Andrew Bennett.65 In this context, the act of self-coronation offers a pre-emptive response to the fact that fame, in its true sense, cannot be empirically experienced by the subject on which it is conferred – only, as in this case, symbolically prefigured, ‘Before my brows be numb as Dante’s own/To all the tender pricking of such leaves’ (Bk 2, ii. 35–6). To attain the recognized reward of poetic achievement, in other words, Aurora must already have died, or, short of this eventuality, signify her readiness for death as the precondition of fame. The figure of the statue is the embodiment of the death-like state simulated by the act of self-coronation, as Romney’s intervention as external witness of the scene both recognizes and undermines. The effect of Romney’s presence on Aurora is, on the one hand, to provoke a Keatsian anxiety about the legitimacy of her aspiration for poetic fame: ‘The tide had caught me at my pastime, writing down/My foolish name too near upon the sea/Which drowned me with a blush as foolish’(Bk 2, ii. 68–71).66 Yet, on the other hand, he essentially confirms the figurative embodiment of fame as a statuesque icon by suggesting that she is incapable of attaining this condition: ‘Keep to the green wreath,/Since even dreaming of the stone and bronze/Brings headaches, pretty cousin, and defiles the clean white dresses’ (Bk 2, ii. 93–6). Here, Romney’s insinuation is not that the statuesque form is unsuited for commemorating heroic achievement, but rather that Aurora is merely playing at becoming a statue. While the image of the statue is thus used to represent the ‘frivolous fame’ which Aurora must learn to avoid, it also remains an important trope for the posthumous fame whose corporeal immobility it serves to imitate. The use of the statue as a signifier of death, or states of death-like rigidity, occurs not only throughout Aurora Leigh, but also in much of Barrett’s earlier poetry, where the conjunction of death and literary fame is

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commonly emblematized through the medium of sculpture. In ‘The Vision of Fame’ (1826), for example, the allegorical figure of Fame offers to accept the poet-speaker’s ‘youthful years,/Merriest that fly’ so that, in exchange, ‘thy sepulchral stone,/Nations may raise’: a Faustian bargain, it later appears, when the body of Fame literally decays before the poet’s eyes, leaving ‘only a bleach`ed skeleton’.67 More positively, in ‘A Vision of Poets’ (1844), a poet who shuns personal celebrity, but wishes to ‘project, beyond the bound/Of mine own life, so lost and found,/My voice, and live on in its sound’ is rewarded after death with palms ‘strown/On his new marble’.68 Here, the materials of the sculpted form – marble and stone – metonymically embody the achievement of posthumous fame, a usage which elides the figurative form of the statue – conceived as a literal reification of the human body – with the non-figurative funerary monument. A similar example of the use of sculptural prosopopoeia can be found in the opening chapter of The Life of Charlotte Bront¨e, when Gaskell encounters the ‘mural tablet’ inscribed with Charlotte’s name in Haworth Church: though not a figurative image of the dead, this funerary monument stands for Charlotte’s bodily ‘remains’ in the same way that Gaskell’s biography will comprise her literary remains, thus evoking the iconic status of the subject (16). The memorial stone is rendered analogous to the portrait of Charlotte reproduced in the frontispiece to Volume 1 of the first edition, as both are to the body of the text in which they are contained. In relation to Aurora Leigh, however, perhaps the most directly comparable use of the association of the statuesque icon with death is in Landon’s poem ‘A History of the Lyre’ (1829), where the Italian poetess Eulalie appears in proximity to a ‘sculptured form’ that represents both her imminent premature mortality and a wistful aspiration for posthumous fame: ‘Yon statue is my emblem’, she informs the speaker of the poem.69 ‘A History of the Lyre’ effectively ends with the poetess turning herself into a statue, a self-consciously ambivalent gesture which reflects an awareness of the limits placed upon women’s professional ambition whilst still registering that desire. In concurrence with Leighton’s reading of the Corinne myth, Peterson describes the figure of Eulalie as ‘frozen into an artistic posture’ and thereby restricted to ‘an immature stage of development’.70 Aurora Leigh differs from these earlier texts by situating the frozen posture of the statuesque poet within the narrative context of personal and professional development. For Peterson, this marks Barrett Browning’s abandonment of the inherited ‘model of the female poet as improvisatrice’ for the Wordsworthian paradigm of organic growth extended to the ‘Victorian woman poet’.71 In stark contrast to Landon’s poetess, and some of Barrett’s earlier poetic heroines, Aurora

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is a figure of the writer who matures, whose career undergoes incremental phases of artistic development. Whether modelled on Wordsworth or the contemporary novel of literary apprenticeship, however, this developmental narrative does not preclude a continuing invocation of the statuesque form, both in relation to the female poet and more generally. If Aurora’s poetic growth can be read as a narrative of emancipation from the strictures of statuesque iconicity, this process is never fully accomplished for the sculptural metaphor is so pervasive and intricately woven into the text as to constitute an alternative structuring principle. As in Romney’s immobilization of Aurora into the ‘caryatid . . . Of some abolished temple’ in Book 2, so, throughout the poem, characters are repeatedly forced to assume statuesque poses or, conversely, released from their rigidity into sudden bursts of animation. The temporal flow of the narrative is interspersed with the atemporal form of the visual icon, a process operating in both directions. In part, this pattern extends Barrett Browning’s critique of the statuesque poetess revealed in her ironic reworking of Corinne. Romney’s unsympathetic gaze is not the only instance of an objectifying spectatorship which threatens to congeal Aurora’s literary development in the likeness of a statue. At one of the ‘zoological soir´ees’ recounted in Book 5, Aurora is compared by Lord Howe to a statue of Pallas Athena in the Vatican, ‘intensely calm and sad,/As wisdom cut it off from fellowship’, the sculptural reference denoting her position within the scene as a publicly exhibited literary lion (Bk 5, ii. 800–01). Aurora immediately rejects the implied passivity of this role by asserting her own agency as a visual subject: ‘ . . . you shall not speak To a printing woman who has lost her place, (The sweet safe corner of the household fire Behind the heads of children) compliments, As if she were a woman. We who have clipt The curls before our eyes, may see at least As plain as men do.’ (Bk 5, ii. 805–10)

In becoming a ‘printing woman’, then, Aurora claims to have removed the obstructions to clear sight associated not only with the private realm of domestic femininity – the occluded space of the familial hearth – but also, conversely, the exhibited figure of the Classical statue whose eyes were commonly regarded as blind. This equation of the statuesque form with blindness recurs later in the same scene when Aurora imagines herself transfigured into a sculptured image by the calculated offence of

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Lady Waldemar’s conversation: ‘She might have gone on talking half an hour/And I stood still, and cold, and pale, I think,/As a garden-statue a child pelts with snow/For pretty pastime’ (Bk 5, ii. 1023–6). Responding with impassivity to this verbal assault, Aurora becomes ‘[t]he blind man [who] walks wherever the dog pulls’ (Bk 5, i. 1028): a blank object of visual definition, behind which lies a consciousness that ‘[b]eing observed,/When observation is not sympathy,/Is just being tortured’ (Bk 2, ii. 866–8). Herein lies the allure of the life of ‘perfect solitude’ to which Aurora later retreats in Italy, an experience of ‘disembodiment/Without the pang’ of death resembling Keats’s ‘posthumous existence’ (Bk 7, ii. 1194 and 1210– 11).72 Aurora’s resistance to visual objectification culminates in Book 7 in a dream of complete freedom from external recognition, which cannot, however, be sustained. It is not just Aurora, though, whose narrative progress is punctuated by moments of ‘arrested development’.73 In Book 4 Aurora’s account of Marian’s self-effacing love for Romney stages an ironic reprise of the earlier coronation scene, with Marian ‘risen self-crowned in rainbow’ (oblivious of whether she herself is loved) and Romney now petrified in the act of voyeuristic intrusion: ‘I think he had been standing in the room/And listened probably to half her talk,/Arrested, turned to stone, – as white as stone’ (Bk 4, ii. 185 and 271–3). Just as Marian’s sanctified act of selfcoronation qualifies the narcissistic connotations of the previous one, so Romney’s statuesque immobility complicates the polarized relationship between aesthetic object and spectator: here, the spectator himself is objectified from the vantage point of a third presence within the scene. Romney, in fact, is ‘turned to stone’ almost as frequently as Aurora herself, though for ostensibly quite different reasons: the medium of stone, and such substances as brass, clay, and marble, are invoked as signifiers of his cold, abstract materialism. It is from a condition of stony inertia that he is emotionally re-animated by Aurora’s poetry in Book 8: ‘You have written poems, sweet,/Which moved me in secret, as the sap is moved/In still March-branches, signless as a stone’ (ii. 592–4). The most salient instance of Romney’s statuesque figuration, however, occurs further into the climactic garden scene in Florence: And, while the moon came suddenly out full, The double-rose of our Italian moons, Sufficient plainly for the heaven and earth, (The stars struck dumb and washed away in dews Of golden glory, and the mountains steeped In divine languor) he, the man, appeared

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Romney’s final, ghostly manifestation as a ‘marble man’ (a phrase echoing Bront¨e’s characterization of St. John Rivers in Jane Eyre, presumably unconsciously) is read by some critics as a definitive reversal of the roles of visual subject and object occupied by Romney and Aurora in the coronation scene of Book 2. Here, it would seem that Aurora’s ‘transformation from being the object of Romney’s gaze to being the subject of her own vision’ is triumphantly completed while, conversely, Romney’s visual pallor reduces him to a state of feminized passivity.74 The narrative precondition of this striking role reversal is, of course, the fact that Romney now appears, for the first time, as someone who cannot see Aurora in the same way that he remains visible to her. Romney’s blindness, long interpreted as an act of authorial emasculation necessary to produce a more equal balance of power within his eventual marriage to Aurora, also appears to be the most graphic sign of his transformation into a statuesque condition of aesthetic objectivity. This interpretation of the encounter between Romney and Aurora in Book 8, however, over-schematizes Barrett Browning’s sculptural metaphor, as the abrupt reversal of the positions of sculptor and statue in line 1103 indicates: ‘As if his mallet struck me from my height/Of passionate indignation, I who had risen/Pale, doubting paused’. Who, in fact, is the sculptor and who the statue in this scene is made suddenly ambiguous, as if Romney, the ‘marble man’ of the preceding lines, now wields the sculptor’s mallet which freezes Aurora into a pallor matching his own. The syntax of the passage allows for the paradoxical conceit that the statue itself is capable of imposing subjective designs on the spectator, in this case by shocking Aurora out of her flawed assumption regarding Romney’s relationship with Lady Waldemar. Similarly, Romney’s blindness should not simply be viewed as an appropriate form of sensory deprivation, used, as Dolores Rosenblum puts it, ‘to effect his removal from the world of appearances, so that Aurora can never be to him an icon of female beauty’.75 While loss of sight may be a fitting punishment for Romney’s myopic materialism, it is also, unsurprisingly, invested with the more positive connotation of access to the power of prophetic vision: ‘Thank God, who made me blind, to make me see!’ (Bk 9, i. 830). Romney’s reduction to the figure of an unseeing statue,

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‘stripped of all/The hues and shapes of aspectable life,/A mere bare blind stone in the blaze of day’ (Bk 9, ii. 568–70), resembles the phenomenal blankness ascribed to Shelley in Barrett Browning’s ‘A Vision of Poets’, a poet-prophet who appears ‘in his white ideal,/All statue-blind’.76 Rather than elevating Aurora to the status of invisible creator and diminishing Romney to an inert object of visual mastery, the extended sculptural analogies of Aurora Leigh lead to a more fluid and unstable negotiation of what Aurora terms ‘living art’. It is certainly important to this process that Aurora should increasingly be recognized as a sculptor more than a statue, though one whose relationship to her aesthetic creations remains affectively open and intimate, rather than coldly detached. This much is suggested by references to the Ovidian myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, in which Aurora’s desire to animate her poetry is directly compared to the sexualized creative energy of the legendary male sculptor: most explicitly in Book 5 when, in a moment of creative anxiety, Aurora ‘wonder[s] if Pygmalion had these doubts/And, feeling the hard marble first relent,/Grow supple to the straining of his arms,/And tingle through its cold to his burning lip,/Supposed his senses mocked’ (ii. 400–04).77 A less obtrusive, but more significant, allusion to this myth can be detected in one of the key passages of Aurora’s poetic manifesto from the same Book: Never flinch, But still, unscrupulously epic, catch Upon the burning lava of a song The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age: That, when the next shall come, the men of that May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say ‘Behold, – behold the paps we all have sucked! This bosom seems to beat still, or at least It sets ours beating: this is living art, Which thus presents and thus records true life.’ (Bk 5, ii. 213–22)

Here, the sculptural metaphor reaches to the heart of Aurora’s aesthetic theory, shaping its central figure of poetic art and thus, self-reflexively, coming to embody Aurora Leigh itself. The act of poetic creation figured in this passage is akin to the moulding for a statue taken from an animate form, as in the common nineteenth-century practice of the life-mask (Barrett Browning herself served as a model for the expatriate American sculptor William Wetmore Story). The ‘burning lava of a song’ represents the material medium in which the ‘impress’ of this form is caught, fluid during the process of moulding but congealing into the durability of stone.

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The model for this literary sculpture is the ‘full-veined, heaving, doublebreasted Age’: a personification of the whole range of contemporary life which Aurora views as the legitimate subject of poetic representation. Thus, the epic poem which is imagined here is akin to a vast organic statue of the modern world, a totalizing figure for the work of art which corresponds in its component limbs to the innumerable instances of statuesque embodiment within the text itself. Just as we have seen individual figures momentarily arrested in statuesque poses, or abruptly released from their rigidity, so Aurora self-consciously conceives of a form of poetry which freezes the movement of organic life into an aesthetic object capable of surviving transmission from the present moment to a future age, but yet which remains miraculously animate, capable of simulating the beating heart of ‘true life’. The ‘full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age’ is one of the more celebrated examples of Barrett Browning’s use of ‘woman’s figure[s]’ in Aurora Leigh, and indicates a distinctly feminized version of the Pygmalion myth.78 In the nurturing ‘paps’ of the maternal body Aurora finds an emblem of the work of art which becomes a source of creative influence on future generations. Later in the poem she explicitly invokes the figure of the sculptor as a model for female artistic achievement in a passage which insists on the value of concrete labour over abstract theory – those who ‘prate of women’s rights’ (Bk 8, i. 829): By speaking we prove only we can speak, Which he, the man here, never doubted. What He doubts is, whether we can do the thing With decent grace we’ve not yet done at all. Now, do it; bring your statue, – you have room! He’ll see it even by the starlight here; And if ’tis e’er so little like the god Who looks out from the marble silently Along the track of his own shining dart Through the dusk of ages, there’s no need to speak; The universe shall henceforth speak for you, And witness, ‘She who did this thing, was born To do it, – claims her license in her work.’ (Bk 8, ii. 829–41)

Again, the focus of attention here has shifted from the poetess’s ascribed role as statuesque icon to her active work as an artistic producer, yet given the autobiographical nature of Aurora’s own art one cannot discount the possibility that what the female sculptor produces is a statue of herself exhibited

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before an external audience. The ambiguous reference of the pronominal phrase ‘your statue’ supports a self-referential doubling of subject and object, from which it could be inferred that the successful sculptor becomes her own statue; if not literally in the form of direct self-representation, then as one who ‘claims her license in her work’, deriving embodiment from what she has produced. The figure of the statue could, in this sense, stand as an icon for the achieved form of Aurora’s autobiographical text. In the earliest recorded reference to Aurora Leigh, from a letter to Robert Browning in February 1845, Barrett Browning wrote of her ambition to write a ‘completely modern’ poem, ‘running into the midst of our conventions, & rushing into drawing-rooms & the like “where angels fear to tread”; & so, meeting face to face & without mask the Humanity of the age’. The insistent modernity of this description hints at the concomitant unmasking of inherited cultural forms which a subsequent letter to Browning (dated 20 March 1845) more fully reveals: ‘The old gods are dethroned. Why should we go back to the antique moulds . . . Let us all aspire rather to Life – & let the dead bury their dead.’79 The rhetoric of iconoclasm which has informed recent critical accounts of Aurora Leigh would seem to echo the modernizing thrust of these comments, and their apparent association of the sculptural form with an outmoded cultural past. Yet a determination to break with the ‘antique moulds’ of art tells only half the story of the poem which Barrett Browning was to write during the ensuing decade. Alongside her commitment to representing the ‘age’ should be recalled Barrett Browning’s attachment to the Classical tradition, out of which the conceit of a hybrid contemporary epic poem (invoking Homer’s Iliad) was born. Of all the Classical arts, according to Hegel’s Aesthetics, sculpture is the one that most fully expounds ‘the classical ideal as such’, and thus, given the currency of this view in the nineteenth century, it is not surprising to learn of Barrett’s declared preference for sculpture over painting in a letter to Browning from June 1846:80 Do you know that statues have more power over me than all the pictures & all the colours thereof which the world can show? . . . Painting flatters the senses & makes the Ideal credible in a vulgar way. But with sculpture it is different – & there is a grand audacity in the power of an Ideal which, appealing directly to the Senses, and to the coarsest of them, the Touch as well as the Sight, yet forces them to receive Beauty through the door of an Abstraction which is a means abhorrent to them . . . Then there is a great deal, of course, in that grand white repose! Like the Ideas of the Platonic system, those great sculptures seem – when looked at from a distance.81

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In this account sculpture embodies the rarified condition of the ‘Ideal’ in a form which is irreducibly, even ‘coarsely’, material. A meeting point of opposites, it is simultaneously more abstract and more concrete in expression than the medium of painting, whose appeal to the senses is more overt but also more illusory. Sculpture is thus envisaged by Barrett Browning as a synthesis of embodied abstraction, an iconic form that yet aspires to a disembodied state. These attributes correspond closely to the conception of sculpture outlined in Hegel’s influential lectures on the fine arts, delivered during the 1820s. For Hegel, ‘the spiritual inner life expresses itself in sculpture only in its existence as body’. This fusion of body and spirit is the source of the conjointly objective and ideal character of Classical sculpture. No reader of Hegel, however, could fail to note the position of sculpture within a larger teleological system of aesthetic development from symbolic to classical to modern (‘romantic’) art. While Hegel insists upon the atemporality of the sculptured form, sharing Barrett Browning’s appreciation of its ‘grand white repose’, he nevertheless seeks to demonstrate its latent (or dormant) mobility. The content of sculpture, he writes, is not ‘spirit as such’, but, rather, ‘the spirit which in its opposite, the body, is just beginning to become conscious of itself’. Hence, the perfect synthesis of body and spirit (form and content) within the Classical art of sculpture already contains the seeds of its future dissolution: ‘the principle of subjectivity which was breaking into the subject matter and the artistic mode of its portrayal’. In Aurora Leigh Barrett Browning places the art of sculpture within a similarly dynamic narrative context, though one in which the protagonist is portrayed in the act of awakening from statuesque embodiment to poetic self-expression, bypassing Hegel’s intermediate art of painting. The transition from the Classical ideal of sculpture to the modern art of poetry is, in both writers, presented as the emergence of a new self-consciousness; though not insignificantly, in the Hegelian schema, epic poetry is the most ‘objective’ (Classical) form of a subjective medium.82 For Barrett Browning, the medium of sculpture provides a peculiarly apt analogy for the complex cultural situation of the mid-Victorian female poet, not only as an emblem of the constricting conventions of gendered authorship which she sought to evade, but also as a necessarily iconic figuration of the heroic model of the poet-prophet to which she aspired. As an art associated with the Classical past, and more specifically with the narrow conception of a feminine poetics to which writers of the early nineteenth century were expected to conform, the sculptured body would appear to obstruct the development of literary modernity of the kind heralded in

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Aurora Leigh, yet by representing the figure of the poetess as a moving statue (in both senses of the adjective), a statuesque icon which assumes animate existence, Barrett Browning dramatizes the very process of transition from one historical era to another.83 The dialectical tension generated by this struggle between modernity and antiquity (‘life’ and ‘death’) is a distinguishing characteristic of Aurora’s narrative of poetic development, as I have sought to demonstrate. Punctuated by recurring moments of iconicity, Aurora’s narrative cannot be said to culminate in an apotheosis of disembodied subjectivity, from which she triumphantly surveys the visual field that she has left behind. Barrett Browning’s Carlylean view of the symbolic status of the poet-hero, coupled with her own abiding preoccupation with the mythology of literary Fame, supports a pursuit of visual embodiment which subtends her ironic awareness of the imprisoning forms which this urge may take. This is not to say that Aurora comfortably inhabits the role of an ‘embodied muse’:84 although, in the end, she may be reconciled to the ‘earthly’, material side of her nature, the developmental paradigm of the narrative – that of the literary Bildungsroman or novel of apprenticeship – enacts the struggle to escape from a static, essentialized representation of the poetess. Aurora tacitly claims the right to professional identity by virtue of her capacity to grow beyond the immature stage of self-formation reached by earlier writers, Barrett Browning’s female Romantic precursors. Neither embodiment nor disembodiment, then, should be conceived as the ultimate goal of this narrative. Rather, in Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning traces the process by which iconic figures of the ‘printing woman’ are constructed, dismantled, and reformulated, and in so doing she creates one of the most enduring icons of mid-nineteenth-century authorship.

Conclusion The disenchantment of the author

This book has sought to demonstrate that the period from the 1820s to the 1850s witnessed the first concerted attempts to establish the collective identity of the literary profession. Numerous figurative expressions imagining this identity occur in the writings of prominent authors during these decades, from G. H. Lewes’s combative image of the ‘Macedonian phalanx’, Thackeray’s humorously fraternal ‘Corporation of the Goosequill’, and Carlyle’s ambivalent ‘shoe-black-seraph Army of Authors’ to the ‘Literary Guilds’, ‘Unions’, and ‘Churches’ envisaged by the likes of Carlyle, Mill, Dickens, and Bulwer-Lytton. Despite their various nuances, these images of collective organization represent a strikingly consistent response to the problem of a ‘disorganic Literary Class’ identified most incisively in Carlyle’s ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’. According to many, though not all, of these writers, the absence of institutionalized structures of professional status cut authors adrift in a disturbingly unregulated, laissez-faire literary marketplace, a world of atomized individuals battling against one other for economic survival. Whether authorship was envisaged as a sacred or secular mission, a disciplined or more ramshackle fellowship, its representation as a corporate body was in itself an attempt to articulate a social phenomenon beyond the disaggregated activity of the market. In its most self-conscious, polemical manifestation, this tendency led to the protoprofessional literary society which Dickens and his associates established in May of 1851, The Guild of Literature and Art, an institution which was designed to offer a model of collective autonomy, combining the ideals of solidarity and independence. Yet this explicit example of a re-imagining of the collective literary profession should also be seen as the culmination of a much broader preoccupation within the print culture of the preceding decades. The proliferation of the genre of collective biography within the early nineteenth century, often featuring biographies of writers, is as significant in this respect as the genre of individual auto/biography was to the construction of singular literary ‘personalities’ during the same period. 210

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The countless series of biographical sketches and literary portrait galleries published in magazines and volume form from the 1820s to the 1840s, as well as the various biographical dictionaries and encyclopaedic projects initiated during this period, make visible a cataloguing of authorship as a collective enterprise on a hitherto unprecedented scale. The distinction commonly made in collective biography between ‘living authors’ and the ‘illustrious dead’ is revealing not only in terms of the differing generic practices within print culture (ephemeral periodicals tended to focus on the living, the dead were considered more suitable for commemoration in books), but also of the differing rhetorical strategies used to support professional recognition and the potential contradictions between them. When Harriet Martineau petitioned for an international copyright agreement on behalf of the ‘Living Authors of England’ in 1836, she was invoking a current constituency made newly visible within the literary magazines of the time. Living authors have the capacity to be assembled into a powerful interest group, as the copyright campaigns of the 1830s and early 1840s demonstrated. But the weakness of such a body lies in the implication that its contemporaneity is also a sign of transience: the merits of living authors have yet to be proved by time. Thus, the canonization of deceased authors also had a distinct part to play in claims for the justice of professional interests. The great authors of the past testify to the slow development and posthumous recognition of achievement, suggesting that immediate popularity is not the surest sign of literary value. This being the case, copyright should be extended to protect and incentivize the author’s deferral of material reward, an argument which received partial endorsement in the reforms of the 1842 Copyright Act. Writers of this period were thus understandably preoccupied with both of the main ‘sorts’ of literary fame identified by Hazlitt: on the one hand, the ‘momentary celebrity’ (a phrase used by Bulwer-Lytton) attached to the circulation of authors within society and print media; on the other hand, the legacy of posthumous fame attached to the creation of enduring literary works both in prospect and actuality. Often perceived as incompatible criteria of literary success, both ‘ephemeral’ and ‘permanent’ modes of cultural visibility were important components in the broader establishment of professional recognition. I have argued that the nineteenth-century development of literary professionalism should be conceived as a narrative of the disenchantment of the author, and that indeed it was understood in precisely these terms by many of the writers who have been discussed. This narrative may, at one level, be mapped onto the broader span of literary and cultural history

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which has been surveyed. Beginning from a transitional period, which in conventional terms falls somewhere between the ‘late Romantic’ and ‘early Victorian’, it may not be surprising that this study has traced a gradual shift from the prevailing early-nineteenth century discourse of literary genius to an increasingly influential mid-century ethos of professional labour. In many ways, the effort to establish professional status was considered by the first generation of Victorian writers to require a concerted relinquishment of outmoded ‘Romantic’ myths of authorship: as a work of demythologization in other words. Numerous fictional narratives of this period reflect on the painful but salutary ‘disenchantment’ of the aspiring author’s naive illusions with regard to the self-sufficiency of natural or inspired genius. Although Thackeray’s satirical History of Pendennis provides the sharpest example of a post-Romantic ‘novel of disillusionment’ centred on the experience of professional authorship, it is far from being a unique case; even Bulwer’s Ernest Maltravers, an opposing text in so many other respects, seeks to demonstrate the necessity of its protagonist’s journey from the ‘Ideal’ to the ‘Practical’ in terms of vocational commitment. In this context, the narrative of disenchantment speaks to a specifically Victorian intellectual pragmatism. Examined more closely, however, the disenchantment of the author becomes a more complex, dialectical process, in which the worldly disillusionment of the literary professional generates a desire to re-enchant and re-consecrate his vocation. Indeed, the very writers that one might choose to exemplify the Victorian ethos of professional labour can often be taken to illustrate a continued adherence to the Romantic ideology of sacralized authorship. The professional identity which early Victorian writers sought to establish through collective recognition involved the sublation of the discourse of inspired genius rather than its abandonment; by preserving elements of the latter within a more practical orientation, the professional author was able to argue his distinctiveness from the mere exponent of literary commerce (the point to which professional pragmatism invariably recedes). Dickens’s and Forster’s rhetorical insistence on preserving ‘The Dignity of Literature’ around the time of their establishment of the Guild is one example of the attempt to infuse worldly professional practices with an aura of sanctified exclusivity. Perhaps the clearest embodiment of this dialectic of disenchantment, though, is the model of heroic authorship derived from Carlyle’s lectures and widely influential throughout the Victorian period. The hero as man of letters, in Carlyle’s account, is both a ‘product of these new ages’ of print communication, with their rationalization and de-mystification of older cultural myths, and a reincarnation of the ‘sacredness’ of the ‘true Literary Man’ (154, 157). Thus, the

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post-Romantic figure of the heroic author preserves a residue of the inspired prophet while foregrounding a commitment to the discipline of work, as well as, in some cases, a struggle against the condition of alienated labour. In many of the texts that I have discussed literary ‘heroes’ are themselves susceptible to disenchantment, their exaltation being a precarious state requiring a constant process of negotiation. Yet, by the same logic, even the most anti-heroic figures of professional authorship produced during the period (Thackeray being the most obvious case in point) fail to dispel entirely a charismatic allure. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the term ‘author by profession’ carried disreputable connotations which it had acquired over the previous century, and despite the strenuous efforts of many early Victorian writers it remained ambiguous as a concept right up to the 1850s (and indeed beyond). During this period, to define oneself as a ‘professional’ author implied some form of accommodation with the commercial enterprise of literary production, yet it also came to incorporate a sense of detachment from the untrammelled operation of the market. As long as the emphasis remained on the former, professional authorship could appear synonymous with the activity of literary hacks, an eighteenth-century model in which writing occupies the status of alienated labour; but when the emphasis was transferred to the latter, the literary professional could assume parity with other, more established professions, a model in which writing acquires the function of symbolic capital. An associated ambiguity concerned the social position and class status of professional authors: should authorship be viewed as an ordinary form of wage-labour (either ‘noble’ or ‘degrading’ depending on one’s perspective) or as a professional service guaranteeing membership of the respectable middle classes? Even in the copyright debates of the period, with their conflicting demands to recognize the author’s private ownership of his work and to defend the public dissemination of texts (without which any proprietorial right would be incapable of yielding exchange value), similar tensions can be discerned.1 A distinctive characteristic of the mid nineteenth century, though, is that these ambiguous questions and conflicting possibilities were still viewed as capable of resolution, or at least of maintaining a relatively harmonious coexistence. By the 1850s the professional author could no longer easily be dismissed as a vulgar tradesman, but, on the other hand, the position of defining professional authority through an outright rejection of market value had not yet been established. Dickens, for instance, saw no real contradiction between the aims of his pseudo-Medieval Literary Guild and an acceptance of commercial success as a normative arbiter of public opinion. In the later

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nineteenth century, this balanced accommodation between opposing views of the literary professional came under more sustained pressure. The struggle between conflicting modes of consecration and disenchantment in Victorian representations of professional authorship is nowhere more evident than in the ‘competition of images’ played out in contemporary print media. Professional recognition was in part achieved through sheer visibility, I have suggested, but the iconography of authorship constructed within periodical and book publications did not amount to a homogeneous collective image. Rather, the various biographical sketch collections and literary portrait galleries that mark the period were rival textual products, not only in a commercial sense but also in reflecting the distinct political and professional ideologies of their producers. Fraser’s ‘Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, for instance, was established by Maginn as an irreverent Tory antidote to the formal panegyric style of biographical portraiture (both visual and verbal) associated with Liberal magazines of the 1820s and 1830s, but this in turn provoked a critical counter-practice (including from one of its own contributors, Carlyle). The authors of these sketches were self-conscious in their construction of literary ‘idols’, which competing sketches were liable to demolish and perhaps put alternative candidates in their place. The widespread (though not universal) reproduction of printed portraits of authors in these collections makes their language of visual affect more concrete and explicable. One of the reasons Carlyle became such a pivotal figure for early Victorian debates on professional authorship is that the doctrine of heroism and hero-worship provides a conceptual explication, as well as a pointed critique, of the popular visual culture of the time. Both idolatry and iconoclasm are necessary and interrelated functions of Carlyle’s biographical practice, the one constituted by way of reaction against the other. Carlyle advocated scepticism towards the illusory world of visual appearances, but at the same time argued against the vain attempt to avoid visual embodiment altogether; his aim as a biographer was to discriminate between ‘true’ and ‘false’ (or less true) forms of idolatry, which he defined as the worship of ‘things seen’. It is striking how deeply this visual imperative pervades verbal representations of authorship in the decades immediately following Carlyle’s lectures. Kingsley’s Alton Locke and Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh are two of the clearest examples of narratives in which the protagonist’s pursuit of professional identity is explicitly mapped onto his or her developing capacity to recognize and embody an appropriate authorial iconicity. In both texts, learning how to avoid imprisonment within damaging or illusory visual archetypes of the poet is seen as a necessary – though, in Alton’s case, sadly

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insufficient – prelude to constructing a more autonomous professional self. Two of the most common visual tropes of authorship during this period are the ephemeral literary lion and the commemorative/posthumous icon. These opposing generic images correspond to a polarization of discourse on literary fame, as noted above in relation to the treatment of living and dead authors. As in popular biographical sketches, so in early Victorian biographical and fictional narratives, authors are located on a spectrum between these two extremes, often by negotiating a path from one mode of visibility to the other. The aspiration of many of these narratives is to shape an image of lasting professional achievement which transcends the temporary, self-destructive phase of ‘literary lionism’, even though on more than one occasion the attempt ends in obstruction and disillusion. The proleptic appeal to a future remembrance (fame awarded by posterity) offers a recognizable means of signalling this aspiration, which proved attractive to writers as diverse as Gaskell and Disraeli. More than this, however, commemorative icons are capable of encoding a deeper professional ideology by virtue of their reflection on the posthumous realization of literary value. Even (or especially) those writers who were most critical of the new culture of literary celebrity, and sought to resist its proliferation of visual mediation, found such counter-images of professional authority difficult to avoid. The novel of literary apprenticeship, or Bildungsroman as it later came to be known, can itself be read as a narrative of image formation in the strongest sense. In the wake of Carlyle’s translation of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship in 1824, and the publication of his own novel Sartor Resartus in the following decade, numerous early Victorian writers went on to produce apprentice novels of varying type and quality. While I have given extended consideration to major individual works within the genre, such as David Copperfield, Pendennis, and Aurora Leigh, the overriding purpose of this discussion has been to examine the ways in which generic form mediates the formulation of professional identity on a broader cultural scale. Novels of literary apprenticeship, we have seen, constitute narratives of professional self-fashioning which draw on both the iconographic and organicist principles of the genre. Professional authorship can be represented as a form of ‘deep’ subjectivity by virtue of the fact that it emerges from an arduous process of personal development, an organic maturation of the self, rather than being merely a static or external posture. At the same time, the formation of professional identity involves the shaping of a concrete image which renders its achievement recognizable within the literary field to which it is addressed. Contrary to some modern critical

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opinion, however, the narrative form of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman does not transparently reflect a uniform ideological content. Rather, the genre developed as a locus of debate between affirmative accounts of professional development and the frequently disillusioning experiences of their protagonists. While it is true that narratives of apprenticeship imply a teleological construction of authority, they are also susceptible to more destabilizing moments of disenchantment, which call into question the normative ethos of the literary profession. Such obstacles to a positive professional identity are often encountered in the disturbing realities of a journalistic sub-culture, which for many writers of the early to mid nineteenth century represented a formative experience of authorship. The model of organic self-development established by the literary apprentice novel has traditionally been associated with a specifically male, middle-class subject, whose roots lie in the Romantic professionalism of Wordsworth’s The Prelude as well as Goethe’s foundational text.2 With good reason, this narrative paradigm may be thought to exclude, or at least to pathologize, representations of female and working-class male authorship which were, in other respects, becoming increasingly visible during the period. Chapters 5 and 6 have, to a degree, disputed this assumption whilst also offering some corroboration. Narrative accounts of literary apprenticeship by (and/or about) women and working-class men are often rendered problematic and contradictory in form by virtue of their authorial attribution or subject-matter, even by comparison with the conflicts typically negotiated in more normative examples of the genre. The process of gradual organic development is disrupted by external interventions or internal flaws which, in some cases, prevent the authorial subject from arriving at maturity. These ruptures of professional development are expressed in parallel iconographic terms in the case of Carlyle’s figure of the ‘tragic’ Burnsian labouring poet and Barrett Browning’s reading of the Romantic poetess modelled on the statuesque figure of Corinne: both are examples of a fragmented or immobilized literary self, unable to attain the completion implied by the ideal of Bildung. Moreover, both female and working-class male authors encounter particular problems in achieving cultural visibility. In Kingsley’s Alton Locke the self-educated poet is capable of aspiring to Carlyle’s heroic role, but only succeeds in obtaining an ‘unaccredited’ status. Conversely, for some (though not all) middle-class women, the pursuit of literary fame risks bringing too much exposure, the passage between domestic and professional spheres signifying a subversive crossing of gendered social boundaries. Nevertheless, women and working-class men participated in the development of professional authorship as an ideological

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construction in ways which have not been fully acknowledged. This is perhaps easier to determine in relation to class, where the idea of ‘self-culture’ as a mode of intellectual and aesthetic education was, from early in the nineteenth century, linked to the broader ethos of self-improvement and self-help. Working-class autobiographers of the 1840s and beyond bear witness to these affiliations even as they sought to differentiate between them, as did some notable middle-class writers such as Dickens. The gendered nature of professional ideology, and the specific forms of developmental narrative underpinning it, are arguably more complex questions which require a more substantial and diverse survey of Victorian women writers in order to provide a fuller assessment. Yet it is at least clear from this study that women such as Martineau and Barrett Browning engaged on both an imaginative and discursive level with the defining tropes of male literary professionalism: the organic development of a mature self and the iconoclastic construction of literary icons. In Charlotte Riddell’s novel A Struggle for Fame (1883), which traces the apprenticeship of a female novelist, Glenarva Westley, from the retrospective narratorial viewpoint of the late Victorian period, the 1850s are presented as a time of innocence and relative stability with regard to the broader context of professional development. Riddell looks back at the decade when her protagonist’s career began as an era when ‘publishers were still plodding slowly and safely along familiar roads; when all the world had not begun to write, and there were still left a small number of persons who read’, before proceeding to show the commencement of the ‘literary revolution’ in the publishing industry which she believes to have taken place subsequently.3 Notwithstanding this later perspective, however, it can be argued that by the end of the 1850s the formation of the Victorian literary profession was essentially complete. This, of course, is not to suggest that the ideal of professional labour associated with the Guild of Literature and Art was universally accepted, or that subsequent changes in the cultural and technological conditions of authorship during the latter half of the century were not important in their own right. The focus of this study, however, has been, in a twofold sense, on the formative stage of professional development, a process which is no longer operative within the same contexts or to the same degree during later decades. Walter Besant’s foundation of ‘The Incorporated Society of Authors’ in 1884, a central locus of professional polemics within the late-Victorian period, offers an instructive case in point. While, in many ways, a more effective professional body than Dickens’s Guild, and a fitting culmination of the persistent attempts to remedy the problem of a ‘disorganic Literary Class’ over the course of the century, the Society of

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Authors rearticulated the key issues of the mid-century debate rather than breaking entirely new ground. Like Dickens, Besant was motivated by a desire to elevate the professional dignity of authorship without sacrificing the commercial principles of the market. He sought both to ‘unite’ authors as a collective body and to establish the ‘Independence of Literature’ from external agencies. This ambition led to the Society’s focus on contractual arrangements between authors and publishers and on further copyright reform, both domestic and international, its overarching conceptual concern being the ‘maintenance, definition, and defence of literary property’.4 As some critics have recognized, Besant’s preoccupation with a proprietorial model of authorship engendered a continued debate and uncertainty over the relationship between professionalism and trade.5 What Besant sought to present as a defence of professional autonomy, using rhetoric similar to Dickens, was viewed by some of his contemporaries, including George Gissing and Henry James, as degraded commercialism. The late-Victorian debate can be distinguished from that of earlier decades by an increasing, though not unprecedented, polarization between ‘high’ and ‘low’ interpretations of professional authority. When Gissing joined the Society of Authors in 1890, he described it disparagingly as a ‘mere gathering of tradesmen’, a charge not so easily levelled against the selfconsciously heroic enterprise of the Guild.6 Criticism of the aggressively material interests of the Society of Authors often came from a supposedly higher order of professional values, whether articulated by gentlemanly publishers or fellow authors. James, for example, responded to Besant’s activities in a letter to Edmund Gosse dated 10 May 1895: The fact is that authorship is guilty of a great mistake, a gross want of tact, in formulating & publishing its claim to be a ‘profession’. Let other trades call it so – & let it take no notice. That’s enough. It ought to have of the professions only a professional thoroughness. But never to have that, & to cry on the housetops instead that it is the grocer & the shoemaker is to bring on itself a ridicule of which it will simply die.7

What is first noticeable here is James’s apparent indifference to the terms ‘profession’ and ‘trade’, the two words being employed interchangeably in a manner reminiscent of Isaac D’Israeli’s early nineteenth-century usage. The professional concerns of the Society are placed on a par with the vulgar trades of ‘the grocer & the shoemaker’, a comparison which possibly alludes to the unashamedly materialist self-image of Trollope’s posthumously published Autobiography. Nevertheless, the letter retains a more positive notion of ‘professional thoroughness’ by which James adumbrates

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the standard to which his own authorial practice is held. While plainly averse to the word itself, James implicitly adheres to a normative understanding of the enhanced value of professional labour, which his own career developed new strategies for representing. Both James and Gissing can be viewed as exponents of a form of dedicated artistic professionalism which sees itself as alienated from the pragmatic social ends of establishing a collective professional interest, though is, in practice, not unwilling to benefit from the latter.8 Whereas the formative early Victorian phase of professional development saw the emergence of the novel of literary apprenticeship, the late Victorian period witnessed a comparable proliferation of the literary manual. Framed as conduct-books aimed at a readership of aspiring writers, literary manuals express a more instrumental, rationalized relationship between the youthful apprentice and professional master. This genre became prominent during the 1880s and 1890s, coinciding with the professional consultancy service offered by the Society of Authors. Besant’s proselytizing work on behalf of the Society often took the form of professional advice to literary aspirants, for example his 1884 lecture on ‘The Art of Fiction’ which provoked James’s famous critical riposte under the same title. Besant argued for the need to develop systematic ‘rules’ of fictional composition in order to bolster the artistic stature of the novelist, which he saw as diminished by the lack of professional association and training.9 Likewise, Trollope fashioned his Autobiography in the form of a literary manual, or vade mecum, which dispensed practical advice to the ‘young aspirant’ on the most effective procedures for producing successful novels, based on the hard-won experience of his own career.10 In New Grub Street (1891) Gissing satirized the genre of the literary manual as a parasitical commercial enterprise which even incompetent writers could successfully exploit. The failed novelist Whelpdale resurrects his career by writing an ‘author’s Guide’ and setting up in business as a ‘literary advisor’, before going on to establish the mass-market newspaper Chit-Chat.11 New Grub Street could no doubt be viewed as a more authentic late-nineteenth century equivalent of the early Victorian narratives of literary apprenticeship examined in this book, as could the work of Riddell and other novelists of the period. The thoroughly mechanical, depersonalized routines of literary production which New Grub Street documents, however, suggest the difficulty which Gissing and his contemporaries had in maintaining the organic model of self-formation which underpins all but the most sceptical apprentice novels of the 1830s and 1840s. While earlier narratives of apprenticeship were far from naively optimistic about the material exigencies of professional

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authorship, as I have shown, they nonetheless started from the premise that self-development leads to an enhanced cultural authority and the capacity for social integration (whether or not its potential was, in any given case, successfully achieved). In Gissing’s late Victorian Bildungsroman, by contrast, this normative affirmation of the development of a professional self has demonstrably dwindled, irrespective of whether the literary ‘professional’ is for or against the literary market. By the end of the nineteenth century, it could be argued, the disenchantment of the author had gone too far; its dialectical bond with the hero as man of letters had been broken.

Notes

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1 Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 101. 2 See the ‘Preface’ to A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland; Comprising Literary Memoirs and Anecdotes of their Lives; and A Chronological Register of Their Publications, With the Number of Editions Printed: Including Notices of Some Foreign Writers Whose Works Have Been Occasionally Published in England. Illustrated by A Variety of Communications From Persons of the First Eminence in the World of Letters (London: Henry Colburn, 1816), viii. 3 Ibid., vii. 4 See Annette Wheeler Cafarelli, Prose in the Age of Poets: Romanticism and Biographical Narrative from Johnson to De Quincey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. 112 and 129. Cafarelli provides valuable information on the wider genre of biographical portraiture in early nineteenth-century periodicals, as does David Higgins in Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 60–1. 5 Ibid., p. 2. 6 Most recently, Linda H. Peterson has observed that Fraser’s ‘Gallery’ is ‘usually considered the first important attempt to represent the professional author’, a claim which draws on earlier readings by Nigel Cross and Judith L. Fisher. See Peterson, Becoming A Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market (Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 14; Cross, The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 90–2; and Fisher, “‘In the Present Famine of Anything Substantial”: Fraser’s “Portraits” and the Construction of Literary Celebrity; or, “Personality, Personality Is the Appetite of the Age”’, Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 39 (2), 2006, pp. 98, 100, 123. 7 See Joseph Harding’s ‘Appendix to Preface’ in Edmund Lodge, Portraits of Illustrious Personages of Great Britain. Engraved from Authentic Pictures in the Galleries of the Nobility and the Public Collections of the Country. With Biographical and Historical Memoirs of their Lives and Actions (London: Harding, Mavor and 221

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10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19

20 21 22

Note to Pages 3–7

Lepard, 1823–34), Vol. 1, p. 13; and Maginn’s sketch of Lodge, No. lxxviii in ‘The Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, Fraser’s Magazine, Vol. 14, 1836, p. 595. The satirical depiction of rival magazine editors, such as the New Monthly Magazine’s Thomas Campbell, is observed by Peterson as an example of the ‘Gallery’s’ professional self-promotion, while its emphasis on transient reputation is discussed in relation to literary celebrity by Fisher. See Becoming a Woman of Letters, p. 20 and ‘“In the Present Famine of Anything Substantial”’, p. 102. Henry F. Chorley, ‘Preface’ to The Authors of England. A Series of Medallion Portraits of Modern Literary Characters, Engraved From the Works of British Artists, by Achille Collas. With Illustrative Notices by Henry F. Chorley (London: Charles Tilt, 1838), v–vi. Richard Hengist Horne, ‘Preface to the First Edition’ in A New Spirit of the Age (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1907), xix. See Andrew Sanders, Dickens and the Spirit of the Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 39. William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age or Contemporary Portraits, ed. E. D. Mackerness (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1991), p. 109; and Horne, A New Spirit of the Age, p. 51. Horne, A New Spirit of the Age, xix. Thomas Powell, The Living Authors of England (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1849), p. 2. See the ‘Preface’ to Men of the Time: A Dictionary of Contemporaries, Containing Biographical Notices of Eminent Characters of Both Sexes. Eighth edition, revised by Thompson Cooper (London: George Routledge, 1872), iii. Sanders provides useful information on this text in Dickens and the Spirit of the Age, pp. 32–3. ‘Preface’ to Men of the Time, iv. See Victor Bonham-Carter’s account of the aims of the short-lived ‘Society for British Authors’, founded in 1843 with the support of Dickens, in Authors by Profession [Vol. 1] (London: The Society of Authors, 1978), p. 81. Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto xi in Byron: Complete Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page (Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 795. Census information is based on the accounts of W. J. Reader, Professional Men: The Rise of the Professional Classes in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), pp. 147–53; and Patrick Leary and Andrew Nash, ‘Authorship’ in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain Volume vi 1830–1914, ed. David McKitterick (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p 173. Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 16. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., pp. 36–7. Bennett notes, for example, how Coleridge argued in Biographia Literaria (1817) that the ‘inward assurance of permanent fame’

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led ‘men of the greatest genius’ to sacrifice their ‘immediate reputation’. The term ‘celebrity’, while not merely a synonym for ‘reputation’, came to be distinguished from the idea of posthumous fame in homologous terms: for an account of the nineteenth-century genealogy of the word ‘celebrity’, see Nicholas Dames, ‘Brushes with Fame: Thackeray and the Work of Celebrity’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, June 2001, Vol. 56 (1), pp. 24–8. See Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 434. William Hazlitt, ‘On Different Sorts of Fame’ in Selected Writings, ed. Ronald Blythe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 162. Ibid., p. 163. Ibid., p. 164. William Hazlitt, ‘The Periodical Press’ in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt [Vol. 16], ed. P. P. Howe (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1933), p. 220. Mill wrote in his 1836 essay ‘Civilization’ that ‘literature is becoming more and more ephemeral: books, of any solidity, are almost gone by; even reviews are not now considered sufficiently light; the attention cannot sustain itself on any serious subject, even for the space of a review-article’. See John Stuart Mill, Essays on Politics and Society, ed. J.M. Robson (University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 135. For a wide-ranging consideration of ‘celebrity culture’ during the Romantic period, see Tom Mole, ed., Romanticism and Celebrity Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2009). See Claire Pettitt, Patent Inventions – Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 4; and Jennifer Ruth, Novel Professions: Interested Disinterest and the Making of the Professional in the Victorian Novel (Ohio State University Press, 2006), chapter 2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘To William Wordsworth, composed on the night after his recitation of a Poem on the growth of an individual mind’ in The Poetical and Dramatic Works of S.T. Coleridge [Vol. 1] (London: William Pickering, 1844), p. 208. See Catherine Seville, Literary Copyright Reform in Early Victorian England: The Framing of the 1842 Copyright Act (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 18– 20. For further details of Wordsworth’s support for copyright reform, see The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyther [Vol. iii] (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 305 and 319. Richard Cronin, Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–1840 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), p. 4. Paul B´enichou, The Consecration of the Writer, 1750–1830, tr. Mark K. Jensen (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), p. 133. Ben Knights, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 9. For an account of the relationship between Coleridge’s theory and Carlyle’s doctrine, see Knights, The Idea of the Clerisy, pp. 68, 74, and 91.

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37 Cronin, Romantic Victorians, p. 259. 38 In the tradition of critical theory, the term derives from the work of the sociologist Max Weber, whose account of the ‘disenchantment of the world’ (Entzauberung der Welt) influenced later twentieth-century theorists, such as Theodor Adorno and Pierre Bourdieu. In his lecture ‘Science as a Vocation’ (1917) Weber defines this process as the developing apprehension that life is no longer governed by ‘mysterious, unpredictable forces, but that, on the contrary, we can in principle control everything by means of calculation’: see The Vocation Lectures, tr. Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004), p. 13. Disenchantment, in the sociological sense, is thus synonymous with the rationalization of traditions of magical thought; ‘demystification’ is an alternative English translation of the original German expression: see Richard Swedberg, The Max Weber Dictionary: Key Words and Central Concepts (Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 62–3. 39 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), pp. 121, 127, 130. 40 See Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 146; and Charles Kingsley, ‘Thoughts on Shelley and Byron’, Fraser’s Magazine, November 1853, pp. 305, 316, and 318. 41 See Pettitt, Patent Inventions, p. 12. Conversely, Jennifer Ruth tends to position the Victorian ‘professional’ author in binary opposition to the ‘image of the Romantic genius’: see Novel Professions, p. 73. 42 Mark Rose, ‘The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship’ in Of Authors and Origins: Essays on Copyright Law, ed. Brad Sherman and Alain Strowel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 30. For a more extended elaboration of this argument, see also Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1993). 43 Rose, ‘The Author as Proprietor’, p. 51. 44 On this point see Brian Goldberg, The Lake Poets and Professional Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2007), especially chapter 7; and Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change 1770–1830 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 45 Isaac D’Israeli, The Calamities and Quarrels of Authors: with some inquiries respecting their moral and literary characters, ed. The Right Hon. B. Disraeli, M.P. (London: Routledge, 1860), pp. 4 and 7–9. The Calamities of Authors was originally published separately in 1812. 46 In the revised edition of 1840 D’Israeli recounts Byron’s fascination with the original version of the study, An Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character, expressed in personal correspondence which led him to publish a first revised text in 1818, The Literary Character, illustrated by the History of Men of Genius, drawn from their own feelings and confessions. See D’Israeli, The Literary Character; or the History of Men of Genius, Drawn from their own feelings and confessions; Literary Miscellanies; and an inquiry into the Character of James the First (London: Routledge, Warnes, and Routledge, 1859), p. 5. Andrew

Note to Pages 11–14

47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54

55

56 57 58 59

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Bennett has aptly remarked that ‘D’Israeli’s work constitutes both a scattered and unsystematic social history of the author and, as might be suggested by the fact of Byron’s fascination with his work, a model of authorship’: see Romantic Poets and The Culture of Posterity, p. 51. D’Israeli, The Calamities and Quarrels of Authors, p. 5. D’Israeli, The Literary Character, pp. 27 and 69. Ibid., pp. 19–20, 89–90, and 93. Hazlitt follows this statement with an assertion that ‘Art is genius, and genius cannot belong to a profession’: see ‘The Catalogue Raisonn´e of the British Institution’ (1816) in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt [Vol. 18], p. 109. The passage is quoted in Mary Jean Corbett’s Representing Femininity: MiddleClass Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Autobiography (Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 27. [G. H. Lewes,] ‘The Condition of Authors in England, Germany, and France’, Fraser’s Magazine, Vol. 35, March 1847, p. 285. See the ‘Introduction’ to E. J. Clery, Caroline Franklin, and Peter Gartside, eds, Authorship, Commerce, and The Public: Scenes of Writing, 1750–1850 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 10. See [John Chapman] ‘The Commerce of Literature’, The Westminster Review, New Series. Vol. i, 1852, pp. 511–54; and ‘The Profession of Literature’, The Westminster Review, Vol. ii, 1852, pp. 507–31. Chapman, ‘The Profession of Literature’, pp. 520–4. Jerdan responded to this criticism in a Prefatory Chapter to Volume 2 of his Autobiography, also titled ‘The Profession of Literature’: see The Autobiography of William Jerdan, With His Literary, Political, and Social Reminiscences and Correspondence During The Last Fifty Years [3 vols] (London: Arthur Hall, Virtue, & Co., 1852). Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 17, 42, and 56. For congruent historical accounts of the relationship between professional and commercial values, see Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London and New York: Routledge, 1989) and Reader, Professional Men. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, p. 43. See also Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society, p. 86; and J. W. Saunders, The Profession of English Letters (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), pp. 225–6. See Gaye Tuchman with Nina E. Fortin, Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 35. Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society, p. 121. Poovey examines this ambiguity in her influential discussion of Dickens’s David Copperfield: see Uneven Developments: the Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian Britain (London: Virago Press, 1989), chapter 4. Corbett makes a similar point in Representing Femininity, p. 56; and, more recently, Ruth, though strongly disputing Poovey’s insistence on the professional author’s ‘mystification’ of labour, also recognizes his liminal status between mental and manual work: see Novel Professions, chapter 2.

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Note to Pages 14–17

60 See Rose, Authors and Owners, p. 1; and, for Saunders’s dissenting view of copyright history, see Authorship and Copyright (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 138–9. Bradley Deane argues persuasively that the controversy over copyright reform in the 1830s and 1840s ‘demonstrates that at the beginning of the Victorian period, the Romantic representation of a personalized, author-centred literary value coexisted with a potent counter-argument that maintained the relative inconsequence and interchangeability of writers’: see The Making of the Victorian Novelist: Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), p. 41. 61 Seville, Literary Copyright Reform in Early Victorian England, pp. 6 and 19. 62 William Wordsworth, ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth [Vol. iii], p. 83. 63 See Pettitt, Patent Inventions, p. 4. 64 See Deane, The Making of the Victorian Novelist, pp. 39–44. 65 Seville, Literary Copyright Reform in Early Victorian England, p. 153. 66 See Pettitt, Patent Inventions, chapter 4; and Daniel Hack, The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2006), chapters 1 and 3. 67 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, ed. Carl Niemeyer (Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. 154. 68 Hack, The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel, p. 192n. 69 The definition of ‘genius’ offered by Donald E. Pease in Sean Burke, ed., Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern (Edinburgh University Press, 1995), pp. 267–8. The Marxian term ‘non-alienated labour’ is used to similar effect in Poovey’s analysis of David Copperfield: see Uneven Developments, p. 125. 70 Edwin Paxton Hood, The Literature of Labour; Illustrious Instances of the Education of Poetry in Poverty (London: Partridge and Oakey, 1851), pp. 24–6. 71 Ibid., p. 15. 72 See Hack, The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel, p. 68. 73 Wheeler Cafarelli, Prose in the Age of Poets, p. 2. See also Joseph W. Reed, Jr., English Biography in the Early Nineteenth Century 1801–1838 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966). 74 On this development, see Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 2– 3. 75 See Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown, p. 268. 76 Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 79. 77 Mill, ‘Civilization’ in Essays on Politics and Society, p. 133. 78 Peter Wagner, ed., Icons-Texts-Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), p. 16. W. J. T. Mitchell similarly emphasizes the hybrid (visual-verbal) nature of ‘iconology’, the study of images, in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 1–2. 79 This definition of ekphrasis was coined by James Heffernan and is cited by Wagner in Icons-Texts-Iconotexts, p. 14.

Note to Pages 18–26

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80 Lodge, ‘Preface’ to Portraits of Illustrious Personages of Great Britain, p. 2. 81 [William Maginn,] ‘Edmund Lodge, ESQ’, No. lxxviii, ‘Gallery of Literary Characters’, Fraser’s Magazine, p. 595. 82 Cross, The Common Writer, pp. 91–2. 83 Nancy Weston has argued that Maclise’s portraits ‘generally attempted to celebrate his subjects while Maginn’s biographical sketches almost always attempted to ridicule them’. While this oversimplifies the relationship between portrait and biography in the opposite direction, it nonetheless suggests the problem with conflating the two media. See Nancy Weston, Daniel Maclise: Irish Artist in Victorian London (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), p. 82. 84 Judith Fisher usefully focuses on the ‘Gallery’s’ depiction of male dandies and (un-)domestic women as anti-types to its preferred model of the disciplined masculine professional author, but over-emphasizes its idealization of the latter: see ‘“In the Present Famine of Anything Substantial”’, p. 123. 85 Patrick Leary suggests the former, reading the ‘Gallery’ as a transitional Romantic–Victorian text; Linda Peterson tends towards the latter, arguing that the ‘Gallery’ is ‘ambiguous as to whether literature is in fact a profession’ and ‘more likely to look back nostalgically to pre-professional gatherings of intellectuals’: see ‘Fraser’s Magazine and the Literary Life, 1830–1847’, Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 27 (2), Summer 1994, p. 106; and Becoming a Woman of Letters, pp. 17–18. 86 [William Maginn], ‘Sir Walter Scott’, No. vi, ‘The Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, Fraser’s Magazine, Vol. ii (10), November 1830, p. 412. 87 See Thomas Carlyle, ‘Sir Walter Scott’ (1838) in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays [Vol. iv] (London: Chapman and Hall, 1888), p. 137. 88 [William Maginn], ‘Edward Lytton Bulwer, ESQ’, No. xxvii, ‘The Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, Fraser’s Magazine, Vol. vi (31), August 1832, p. 112. 89 See Higgins, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine, p. 164n; and Peterson, Becoming a Woman of Letters, p. 230n. 90 ‘Edward Lytton Bulwer’, No. V, ‘Living Literary Characters’, New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, Vol. 31 (121), January 1831, p. 449. 91 See Chorley, The Authors of England, pp. 45 and 80. 92 See The Gallery of Portraits; with Memoirs [6 vols] (London: Charles Knight, 1833–6). For further details on Knight’s involvement in this publication, see Anderson, The Printed Image, p. 70. 93 Chorley, The Authors of England, pp. 23 and 87. 94 See [Thomas Carlyle], ‘The Baron von Goethe’, No. xxii, ‘The Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, Fraser’s Magazine, Vol. V (26), March 1832, p. 206; and [William Maginn], ‘Thomas Carlyle, ESQ’, No. xxxvii, ‘The Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, Fraser’s Magazine, Vol. vii (42), June 1833, p. 706. 95 See George Gilfillan, A Gallery of Literary Portraits [First Series] (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1845), Advertisement and p. 442. Gilfillan published two further Galleries in 1850 and 1854.

228

Note to Pages 26–8

96 See [James Grant], Portraits of Public Characters [Vol. ii] (London: Saunders and Otley, 1841), pp. 144–61. 97 For a discussion of Carlyle’s symbolic theory of the value of portraits, see Paul Barlow, ‘The imagined hero as incarnate sign: Thomas Carlyle and the mythology of the “national portrait” in Victorian Britain’, Art History, Vol. 17 (4), 1994, pp. 517–45. 98 See Grant, Portraits of Public Characters [ii], p. 161; and Gilfillan, A Gallery of Literary Portraits, p. 131. 99 For Lauster, the term ‘physiology’ designates a ‘sociological’ method of ‘reading “character” as professional or avocational “type”’, whereas ‘physiognomy’ is the more general practice of interpreting character through visual signs: see Sketches of the Nineteenth Century: European Journalism and Its Physiologies, 1830–1850 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 88. 100 Ibid., p. 268. 101 See Douglas Jerrold, ‘The “Lion” of a Party’ in Heads of the People: or, Portraits of the English, drawn by Kenny Meadows; with original essays by Distinguished Writers [Vol. i] (London: Robert Tyas, 1840), pp. 33–40; and William Thackeray, ‘The Fashionable Authoress’ in Heads of the People [Vol. ii] (London: Robert Tyas, 1841), pp. 73–84. 102 For an extended discussion of the genealogy of ‘lionism’ as a cultural practice, see Richard Salmon, ‘The Physiognomy of the Lion: Encountering Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century’ in Mole, ed., Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, pp. 60–78. 103 Jerrold, ‘The “Lion” of a Party’ in Heads of the People [i], pp. 33–4. 104 H[arriet]. M[artineau]., ‘Literary Lionism’, The London and Westminster Review, Vol. xxxii (11), April 1839, p. 261. 105 See entry for ‘John-a-nokes’, Oxford English Dictionary Online. Bulwer-Lytton also gave the name Nokes to a fictive literary character marked by the sense of being ‘never sufficiently esteemed’: one of the three representative types of modern author discussed in his critical study, England and the English [1833] (London: Routledge, 1874), p. 92. 106 For further details of Martineau’s petition, see Peterson, Becoming a Woman of Letters, p. 37. 107 Martineau, ‘Literary Lionism’, pp. 263, 281. 108 See Harriet Martineau, Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography [Vol. i] (London: Virago, 1983), p. 375. 109 See also Thackeray’s sketch ‘The Lion-Huntress of Belgravia’ (1850) for a further example of the stereotypically gendered practice of lionism in The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray. Volume VI. Contributions to Punch (London: Smith, Elder, 1909), pp. 179–91. 110 See Thackeray, ‘The Fashionable Authoress’ in Heads of the People [ii], p. 77; and Lewes, ‘The Condition of Authors’, p. 285. 111 Thackeray, ‘The Fashionable Authoress’ in Heads of the People [ii], p. 80. This statement is also discussed in the context of literary professionalism by Pettitt in Patent Inventions, p. 210.

Note to Pages 30–3

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112 This formulation is derived from Michael Newbury’s account of the professionalization of authorship in mid-nineteenth-century America: see Figuring Authorship in Antebellum America (Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 3. 113 See Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 3, 85, 95, 126, and 151. 114 See Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, tr. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 50 and 84. 115 See Siskin, The Work of Writing, pp. 124–9. 116 See Corbett, Representing Femininity, pp. 34–5. 117 Rosemary Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800–1860 (London: Libris, 1994), p. 22. 118 Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘Sartor Resartus: Philosophical Conflict, Positive and Negative Eras, and Personal Resolution’ (1891), tr. Murray Baumgarten and Evelyn Kanes, Clio, Vol. i (3), 1972, p. 60. For a later discussion of Carlyle’s pivotal role in the cultural exportation of the German Bildungsroman, see G. B. Tennyson, ‘The Bildungsroman in Nineteenth-Century English Literature’ in Medieval Epic to the Epic Theater of Brecht, ed. Rosario Armato and John M. Spalek (University of South Carolina Press, 1968), p. 139. 119 Ashton is one of several critics to have argued that in Sartor Resartus Carlyle ‘identified his own life’ with Goethe’s, thus internalizing the process of maturation which he traced in an external sequence of texts: see The German Idea, p. 89. See also Carlyle’s introductory essay on Goethe in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels, Translated From The German of Goethe [Vol. i] (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899), pp. 24–5. 120 See Carlyle, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship [Vol. i], pp. 44–5. 121 Ibid. [Vol. ii], pp. 128–9. 122 On the ‘anachronistic’ institutional model of the Society of the Tower, see W.H. Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: ‘Bildung’ from Humboldt to Thomas Mann (Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 95. For the argument that Bildung was conceived by Goethe and other Weimar Classicists of the late eighteenth century as a ‘form of social discipline that requires personal resignation’, see Todd Kontje, The German Bildungsroman: History of a National Genre (Columbia: Camden House, 1993), p. 7. 123 The idea of establishing a ‘collective guild’ for authors was mooted by Mill in his 1836 essay ‘Civilization’ and briefly, but influentially, considered by Carlyle in ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’: see Essays on Politics and Society, p. 138; and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, pp. 165–6. See also Bulwer’s article ‘Proposals for a Literary Union’, The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, Vol. 35, 1832, pp. 418–21. 124 Carlyle, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, p. 85. 125 Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 38–9. On the word Bildung, see also Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, tr. revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1999), p. 11.

230

Note to Pages 33–6

126 For discussion of the critical history of the term Bildungsroman in Germany, see Kontje, The German Bildungsroman, p. 15; and James Hardin, ed., Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), ‘An Introduction’. 127 See Carlyle, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, p. 20; and Robert Terrell Bledsoe, Henry Fothergill Chorley: Victorian Journalist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 40 and 299. 128 See M. M. Bakhtin, ‘The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel)’ in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, tr. Vern W. McGee and ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), p. 24; and also Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, tr. Albert Sbragia (London and New York: Verso, 2000). 129 Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown, p. 391. 130 Randolph P. Shaffner, The Apprenticeship Novel: A Study of the ‘Bildungsroman’ as a Regulative Type in Western Literature with a Focus on Three Classic Representatives by Goethe, Maugham, and Mann (New York: Peter Lang, 1984), p. 27. See also Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974). 131 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 13. 132 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art [Vol. ii], tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 1092. 133 For discussion of Hegel’s statement in relation to the Bildungsroman, see Jeffrey L. Sammons and Hartmut Steinecke in Hardin, ed., Reflection and Action, pp. 51 and 77–8; and Martin Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse (Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 20–2. 134 See Susanne Howe, Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen: Apprentices to Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930), pp. 10, 130, and 164. 135 For the characterizations of Sartor Resartus, see Tennyson, ‘The Bildungsroman in Nineteenth-Century English Literature’, p. 143 and Corbett, Representing Femininity, p. 43; on ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’, see Hack, The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel, p. 68. 136 See The Athenaeum, No. 1188, 3 August 1850, pp. 805–7; No. 1193, 7 September 1850, pp. 944–6; No. 1204, 23 November 1850, pp. 1209–11; and No. 1206, 7 December 1850, pp. 1273–5. 137 The popularity of the genre continued throughout the nineteenth century. Graham Law has compiled a list of forty ‘novels of authorship and publishing’ written between 1842 and 1899, and acknowledges that it is ‘far from comprehensive’. See ‘The Professionalization of Authorship’ in The Oxford History of the Novel in English Volume Three: The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820–1880, ed. John Kucich and Jenny Bourne Taylor (Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 49. 138 See, most notably, Hack, The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel, chapter 3 and Pettitt, Patent Inventions, chapter 4.

Note to Pages 36–41

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139 See Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 33–4. The seminal example of this reading is Poovey’s Uneven Developments, chapter 4. 140 Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in NineteenthCentury England (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 167 and 174. 141 Gagnier, Subjectivities, p. 151. 142 Joyce notes the influence of Carlyle on ‘worker intellectuals’ such as the poet and diarist, Edwin Waugh: see Democratic Subjects, pp. 48, 77, and 81. 143 See Marianne Hirsch, ‘Spiritual Bildung: The Beautiful Soul as Paradigm’ in Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland, eds, The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1983), p. 27. 144 See Kontje, The German Bildungsroman, p. 103; and Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation, p. 137. 145 See Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 5. 146 See Hirsch, ‘Spiritual Bildung’ in Abel, ed., The Voyage In, p. 23. 147 The original source of this statement is Dilthey’s Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung [Experience and Poetry] (1906), quoted in Tennyson, ‘The Bildungsroman in Nineteenth-Century English Literature’, p. 136. 148 Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse, p. 12. 149 See Redfield, Phantom Formations, pp. 53–4. CHAPTER 2 THOMAS CARLYLE AND THE LUMINOUS AUTHOR 1 Thomas Carlyle to Jane Baillie Welsh, 20 December 1824, The Carlyle Letters Online. 2 On Carlyle’s role in bridging Romantic and Victorian ideas of literary authority, see David Riede, ‘Transgression, Authority, and the Church of Literature in Carlyle’ in Victorian Connections, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), pp. 88–9. For accounts of Carlyle’s masculinization of literary work, see James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 6; and Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge University Press, 1995), chapter 1. 3 Thomas Carlyle to Jane Baillie Welsh, 9 January 1825, The Carlyle Letters Online. 4 Thomas Carlyle to Jane Baillie Welsh, 20 December 1824, The Carlyle Letters Online. 5 Ibid. 6 ‘Boswell’s Life of Johnson’ in Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays [Vol. iii], p. 86. Subsequent references to this edition will occur parenthetically in the main text, as appropriate.

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7 Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (London: Chapman and Hall, 1858), p. 41. 8 Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 106. 9 Two Note Books of Thomas Carlyle, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (Mamaroneck, N.Y.: Paul p. Appel, 1972), p. 223. 10 Ibid., p. 258. See also Bulwer-Lytton, ‘Proposals for a Literary Union’, pp. 418– 21. 11 Two Note Books of Thomas Carlyle, p. 263. 12 Riede provides a helpful account of Carlyle’s remodelling of Romantic figures of the sacred author during the early part of his career, though, despite recognizing his ‘self-conscious ambivalence about his status as a “man of letters”’, he tends to reduce Carlyle’s position to a reified idealism: see ‘Transgression, Authority, and the Church of Literature in Carlyle’, pp. 89, 96, 102, and 108–9. For a discussion of Carlyle’s place in the broader nineteenth-century tradition of postulating the priestly vocation of secular intellectuals, see Knights, The Idea of the Clerisy in The Nineteenth Century, chapter 3. 13 Thomas Carlyle to Macvey Napier, 8 October 1831, The Carlyle Letters Online. For other references by Carlyle to this project, see TC to John A. Carlyle, 31 July 1832; TC to Macvey Napier, 25 August 1832; and Two Note Books of Thomas Carlyle, p. 245. Brief critical references to the proposed ‘Essay on Authors’ can be found in Louis Dudek, Literature and the Press: A History of Printing, Printed Media, and Their Relation to Literature (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1960), p. 205; and Riede, ‘Transgression, Authority, and the Church of Literature in Carlyle’, pp. 100–1. 14 Thomas Carlyle to Alexander Carlyle, 14 January 1832 and Thomas Carlyle to John A. Carlyle, 16 February 1832, The Carlyle Letters Online. 15 Carlyle’s Unfinished History of German Literature, ed. Hill Shine (New York: Haskell House, 1973), p. 1. 16 Ibid. 17 On Carlyle’s desire to establish new sources of ‘authority’ and ‘order’ within the Literary World, see Knights, The Idea of the Clerisy, p. 83; and Riede, ‘Transgression, Authority, and the Church of Literature in Carlyle’, passim. The Carlylean hero is often viewed as one such locus of authority, being the ‘one fixed point in modern revolutionary history’ according to Carlyle: see On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, p. 15. 18 Carlyle’s Unfinished History of German Literature, pp. 2–5. Carlyle was similarly sceptical of Talfourd’s Copyright Bill in Chartism, where he views it as an attempt to remedy the effects of laissez-faire within the literary sphere, but as essentially continuing the same principle through its concern with consolidating individual property rights. 19 On Coleridge’s detailed elaboration of the ‘clerisy’, see Knights, The Idea of the Clerisy, p. 68. 20 Glimpses of Carlyle’s changing attitude towards lecturing can be found in his correspondence, especially in the following: TC to John A. Carlyle, 30 May

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1837; TC to Margaret A. Carlyle, 23 December 1837; TC to Alexander Carlyle, 8 April 1840; TC to Alexander Carlyle, 22 April 1840; TC to Thomas Ballantyne, 11 May 1840; TC to Charles Redwood, 8 December 1840, The Carlyle Letters Online. Thomas Carlyle, Lectures on The History of Literature, ed. J. Reay Greene (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1892), p. 2. Although this transcribed text does not carry Carlyle’s full authority, the phrasing is clearly redolent of its imputed source. Carlyle, for instance, described one of Cromwell’s autograph-letters as ‘all luminous as a burning beacon’: see Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches With Elucidations [Vol. i] (London: Chapman and Hall, 1897), p. 77. For an account of the symbol as ‘autotelic’, meaning self-contained or immanent, within Romantic aesthetics, see Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, tr. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 161. See Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown, p. 282. Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘On Visuality’, Journal of Visual Culture, 2006, 5 (1), pp. 54– 55, 65, and 68. Carlyle’s well-known essay ‘Biography’ (1832) was first published in the following number of Fraser’s Magazine. Maginn’s contributions to ‘The Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’ were written in a tone which Miriam Thrall has characterized as ‘vulgar iconoclasm’: see Rebellious Fraser’s: Nol Yorke’s Magazine in the Days of Maginn, Thackeray, and Carlyle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), p. 24. [Thomas Carlyle], ‘Baron Von Goethe’, No. xxii, ‘The Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, Fraser’s Magazine, Vol. v(26), March 1832, p. 206. The text of this article (minus Maclise’s image) was reprinted as ‘Goethe’s Portrait’ in Carlyle’s Critical and Miscellaneous Essays [iii], pp. 34–5. See, for instance, ‘The Hero as Priest’ in Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, p. 121. See [William Maginn], ‘Sir Walter Scott’ No. vi. ‘The Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, Fraser’s Magazine, Vol. ii(10), November 1830, p. 412. By the 1830s, the celebrated pleasure gardens of Vauxhall in London were seen as a rather vulgar popular attraction, famous for their illuminations, rather than a place of fashionable resort, as they had been in the late eighteenth century. ‘Baron Von Goethe’, No. xxii. ‘The Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, p. 206. The term ‘heterotelic’ is borrowed from Todorov, who uses it to distinguish alternative modes of representation to the ‘autotelic’ form of the Romantic symbol, specifically allegory: see Theories of the Symbol, p. 161. ‘Baron Von Goethe’, No. xxii. ‘The Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, p. 206. A similar thought is expressed in the essay ‘Goethe’s Works’, also written in 1832, where Carlyle remarks that ‘Goethe’s figurativeness lies at the very centre of his being’ (iii, 153). See Paul Barlow, ‘The imagined hero as incarnate sign’, pp. 523, 525, and 542.

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34 The National Portrait Gallery in England was not established until 1859, and in Scotland not until 1887, long after Carlyle’s initial support for the project. 35 For a useful list of contemporary portrait galleries featuring Carlyle, see the bibliography to Richard Garnett’s Life of Thomas Carlyle (London: Walter Scott, 1887). 36 [William Maginn], ‘Thomas Carlyle, Esq’, No. xxxvii.‘Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, Fraser’s Magazine, Vol. vii(42), June 1833, p. 706. 37 See Edmund Lodge, Portraits of Illustrious Personages of Great Britain [Vol. 1], p. 2. 38 See Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography [Vol. 1], p. 386; and Garnett, Life of Thomas Carlyle, p. 177. 39 Wheeler Cafarelli observes that ‘[t]he genre of collective biography was especially amenable to serialization in the periodical press and to the lecture circuit (as Emerson and Carlyle were later to discover)’: see Prose in the Age of Poets, p. 114. 40 Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, p. 55. Subsequent references to this edition will occur parenthetically in the main text, as appropriate. 41 On the conflict between iconophilia and iconoclasm within the Christian tradition, see David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (The University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 385; and Alain Besanc¸on, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, tr. Jane Marie Todd (The University of Chicago Press, 2000), passim. 42 For the latter argument, see Riede, ‘Transgression, Authority, and the Church of Literature in Carlyle’, pp. 112–13; and Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism From The Spectator to Post-Structuralism (London and New York: Verso, 1996), pp. 45–6. 43 On the progressive rationalization of the hero in Carlyle’s historical schema, see Eloise M. Behnken, Thomas Carlyle: ‘Calvinist without the Theology’ (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1978), pp. 25–6. 44 Carlyle acknowledges the latter as a source for his conception of the spiritual vocation of the man of letters during the course of the lecture. See Johann Gottlieb Fichte, ‘Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation’, tr. Daniel Breazeale in Philosophy of German Idealism, ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1987), pp. 1–38. 45 In his previous lecture series on The History of Literature, Carlyle diminished the significance of print even more emphatically by privileging instead the originary communicative potential of speech: ‘[Print] is one very great fact productive of important results for mankind, and one which has not clearly unfolded itself yet, but it was by no means a wonderful invention, it was quite a corollary from another great art, writing, a much more wonderful achievement, yet comparatively insignificant too, compared with that gift of speech, that power which man has of expressing his meaning by certain sounds’ (Lectures on The History of Literature, p. 101). 46 See David Amigoni, Victorian Biography: Intellectuals and the Ordering of Discourse (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 43.

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47 Ibid., p. 64. For the classic account of Carlyle as Victorian ‘sage’, see John Holloway, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (London: Macmillan, 1953); Carol T. Christ provides a more recent analysis of Carlyle’s deployment of ‘sage discourse’ in ‘“The Hero as Man of Letters”: Masculinity and Victorian Nonfiction Prose’ in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power, ed. Thais E. Morgan (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 19–31. 48 Eagleton, The Function of Criticism from the Spectator to Post-Structuralism, p. 46. 49 See Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History, ed. K.J. Fielding and David Sorensen (Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 356. 50 Martineau, ‘Literary Lionism’, pp. 262 and 270. 51 On 20 July 1824 Carlyle wrote his sister Margaret, ‘Meister is getting to be a small lion in London; the papers are puffing, and the people are reading him’. Fourteen years later, on 9 March 1838, he described himself as ‘lecturing, like a lion’: see The Carlyle Letters Online. In the early decades of the century the term ‘lion’ was used indiscriminately to denote the celebrity attached to either persons or things, but by 1840 the debate around the practice of ‘lionism’ was more clearly focussed on the treatment of celebrated individuals. 52 TC to Margaret A. Carlyle, 24 February 1840, The Carlyle Letters Online. 53 TC to Thomas Ballantyne, 11 May 1840, The Carlyle Letters Online. In ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ the fire-fly is from ‘the Island of Sumatra’ rather than from Surinam. 54 Carlyle’s emphasis on Scott’s mediated cultural visibility echoes Maginn’s biographical sketch for Fraser’s ‘Gallery’, as discussed in Chapter One. 55 This distinction is derived from Goethe according to Behnken: see Thomas Carlyle: ‘Calvinist without the Theology’, p. 42. 56 Norma Clark reads ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ as ‘a remarkable resolution of the dilemmas that had perplexed’ Carlyle since the beginning of his career in terms of forging a masculine professional identity: see ‘Strenuous Idleness: Thomas Carlyle and the man of letters as hero’ in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800, ed. Michael Roper and John Tosh (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 41. James Eli Adams broadly supports this reading but makes the important qualification that ‘“the hero as man of letters” is a far more anxious, complex, and unstable norm of gendered identity than most recent criticism allows’: see Dandies and Desert Saints, pp. 6 and 25–6. 57 See Carol T. Christ, ‘“The Hero as Man of Letters”: Masculinity and Victorian Nonfiction Prose’, p. 20. 58 On Carlyle’s shift from literary to socio-historical concerns at the end of the 1830s, see Rosemary Ashton, The German Idea, p. 99. 59 Carlyle’s reservations about Wilhelm Meister were partly moral and partly aesthetic. In a Note Book entry he reports feeling ‘instructed, disgusted,

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moved and charmed’ by the novel’, a likely allusion to its relatively frank sexual content: see Two Note Books of Thomas Carlyle, p. 32. In a letter to Jane Baillie Welsh, he declared that Meister was ‘worth next to nothing as a novel . . . [b]ut for its wisdom, its eloquence, its wit; and even for its folly, and its dullness, it interests me much’: see 15 April 1824, The Carlyle Letters Online. For the former, see Thomas Carlyle, Wotton Reinfred in Last Words of Thomas Carlyle (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1892), pp. 1–148. The classic account of Carlyle’s appropriation of German literature and philosophy, in Sartor Resartus and elsewhere, is Charles Frederick Harrold, Carlyle and German Thought: 1819–1834 (Hamden and London: Archon Books, 1963). For a more recent study, which takes issue with Harrold in some respects, see Elizabeth M. Vida, Romantic Affinities: German Authors and Carlyle: A Study in the History of Ideas (University of Toronto Press, 1993). Ashton includes a chapter on Carlyle in her broader study of cultural transmission, The German Idea. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, pp. 150–1. Subsequent references to this edition will occur parenthetically in the main text, as appropriate. Harrold notes that ‘parts of Sartor Resartus are patterned directly after Wilhelm Meister’, and further suggests that Teufelsdr¨ockh’s ‘conversion’ narrative is modelled on an autobiographical experience which Carlyle interpreted in the light of Goethe’s ‘life-history’. See Carlyle and German Thought, pp. 5, 41, and 48. Corbett, Representing Femininity, p. 54. Harrold, Carlyle and German Thought, pp. 6 and 206–7. CHAPTER 3 THACKERAY AND THE NOVEL OF LITERARY APPRENTICESHIP

1 This point is made by W. H. Bruford in relation to the historical context of the German Bildungsroman: see The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation, p. 95. 2 Ibid. 3 See Maurice Beebe, Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce (New York University Press, 1964), pp. 79–80. The most comprehensive survey of this field is still one of the earliest: Suzanne Howe’s Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen: Apprentices to Life (1930). A more recent study, Rosemary Ashton’s The German Idea (1980), provides a brief sketch and useful bibliographical details of ‘novels of “apprenticeship”’ written ‘on Carlyle’s model’ (p. 22). 4 See Benjamin Disraeli, Contarini Fleming: A Psychological Romance (London: Peter Davies, 1927), ‘Preface’ (1845), ix. 5 Ibid., pp. 190–1. 6 Ibid., p. 361. 7 Howe was probably the first critic to note the particular emphasis placed on ideas of action, work, and practicality in the British apprentice novel, viewing

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the genre as a fusion of Goethe and Carlyle: see Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen, p. 10. The point is developed by Beebe in Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts, pp. 80–4; and discussed within a broader generic context in Martin Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, p. 35 and James Hardin, ed., Reflection and Action, xxv and p. 61. Disraeli, Contarini Fleming, pp. 361–3. See [Edward Bulwer Lytton], ‘Asmodeus at Large, No. V’, The New Monthly Magazine, Vol. xxxv (139), July 1832, p. 27. Lord Lytton, Ernest Maltravers (London: Routledge, 1873), pp. 7–9. All subsequent references to this edition occur parenthetically in the main text. See Edwin M. Eigner, The Metaphysical Novel in England and America: Dickens, Bulwer, Melville, and Hawthorne (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 2, 5, and 9. See Margaret F. King and Elliot Engel, ‘The Emerging Carlylean Hero in Bulwer’s Novels of the 1830s’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 36 (3), December 1981, pp. 291–2. Lord Lytton, Alice; or, The Mysteries (London: Routledge, 1873), pp. 172, 237, and 265. Carlyle’s satire of the Dandy as a ‘visual object’ and figure of ‘Self-Worship’ was primarily targeted at Bulwer’s Pelham, the archetypal ‘fashionable novel’ of the period. See Sartor Resartus, pp. 207–9. See George Henry Lewes, Ranthorpe, ed. with an introduction and notes by Barbara Smalley (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974), pp. 25 and 28. All subsequent references to this edition occur parenthetically in the main text. See also George Henry Lewes, The Life of Goethe (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1875). Lewes, ‘The Condition of Authors in England, Germany, and France’, p. 285. Bulwer-Lytton, ‘Literature Considered as a Profession’, The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, Vol. 32 (127), July 1831, pp. 227 and 230. Bulwer-Lytton, ‘Proposals for a Literary Union’, The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, Vol. 35, 1832, pp. 418–21. For these and other details of Thackeray’s residence in Weimar and acquaintance with Goethe, see Harold Strong Gulliver, Thackeray’s Literary Apprenticeship (Valdosta: Folcroft Library Editions, 1934, repr. 1979), pp. 30–5 and 68. See S. S. Prawer, Breeches and Metaphysics: Thackeray’s German Discourse (Oxford: Legenda, 1997), pp. 463, 404, 402, and 79. The poem ‘Sorrows of Werther’ can be found in Ballads and Miscellanies, Volume xiii of The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray (London: John Murray, 1913), p. 78. See Marianne Hirsch, ‘The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions’, Genre, Vol. 12, 1979, pp. 302 and 300. See Georg Luk´acs, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, tr. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971),

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Note to Pages 76–9 pp. 75 and 136. By no means all students of the Bildungsroman have accepted these distinctions: Martin Swales, as noted earlier, claims that the English version is more ‘concerned to find a certain practical accommodation between the hero and the social world around him’ than the German novel in The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, p. 35; and Marc Redfield, while recognizing that the ‘affirmative’ model of the Bildungsroman is countered by its use as ‘a privileged form of disenchantment through narrative’, argues that, on close scrutiny, all Bildungsromane are, to varying degrees, ‘anti-Bildungsromane which interrogate the possibility of recuperating Bildung through negation’ : see Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman, pp. 64 and 203. Thackeray picked out the ‘bombastic’ dedication of Ernest Maltravers for particular ridicule in his Times review of 30 September 1837: ‘Can any man, however disposed to be serious or just, read this pompous dedication, and refrain from a giggle?’ (5) The phrase ‘lost . . . illusion’ is a contraction of Pendennis’s remark in Chapter xxvii of Pendennis: ‘I have lost many an illusion and ambition, but I am not without hope still’, a formulation which transcribes a statement on the hero of Lewes’s novel verbatim: ‘He had lost his ambition, he had lost his illusions’ (118). See William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis, ed. John Sutherland (Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 345. All subsequent references to this edition occur parenthetically in the main text. Sutherland considers Thackeray’s reading of Ranthorpe in his introduction to this edition (xi), and Robert Colby offers a more extended account of similarities between the two novels in Thackeray’s Canvass of Humanity: An Author and His Public (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979), p. 291. In her edition of Ranthorpe Smalley notes that Lewes sent Charlotte Bront¨e a copy of Illusions Perdues in 1847 (362). Thackeray’s familiarity with Balzac from his time as a French correspondent for English periodicals during the early 1840s is suggested by Gulliver in Thackeray’s Literary Apprenticeship, p. 133. Honor´e de Balzac, Lost Illusions, tr. Herbert J. Hunt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 80, 245, 266, 270, 317, 252, 314, and 316. See Suzanne Howe, Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen, p. 205. This phrase significantly rewrites Carlyle’s translation of Wilhelm Meister’s ‘Happy season of youth’: see Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels [Vol. 1], p. 85. See Lord Lytton, England and The English, p. 226. See, especially, William Hazlitt, ‘On Different Sorts of Fame’, p. 164; but also ‘The Periodical Press’ in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt [Vol. 16], pp. 219–20. Lewes, ‘The Condition of Authors in England, Germany, and France’, pp. 288– 90. See [James Grant], Joseph Jenkins; or, Leaves From The Life of a Literary Man [3 vols] (London: Saunders and Otley, 1843), Vol. 1, pp. 6 and 73. All subsequent references to this edition occur parenthetically in the main text.

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32 See Thomas Miller, Godfrey Malvern (London: T. Miller, 1844), pp. 91 and 119. All subsequent references to this edition occur parenthetically in the main text. 33 Robert B. Brough, Marston Lynch; His Life and Times, His Friends and Enemies, His Victories and Defeats, His Kicks and Halfpence. A Personal Biography. With Portrait and a Memoir of the Author by George Augustus Sala (London: Ward and Lock, 1860), p. 313. All subsequent references to this edition occur parenthetically in the main text. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick claims that it was Thackeray, in his trilogy of Pendennis novels (written between 1848 and 1862), who ‘half invented for English literature and half merely housetrained’ the concept of ‘bohemia’ originally developed in France: see Epistemology of the Closet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 193. 34 See Carlyle, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels [Vol. i], pp. 44–5. 35 On the general character of Thackeray’s ‘iconoclasm’, see Colby, Thackeray’s Canvass of Humanity, p. 50. 36 See Anthony Trollope, Thackeray (London: Macmillan, 1895), p. 108; Georg Luk´acs, The Historical Novel, tr. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962), p. 202; Mario Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, tr. Angus Davidson (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 207; and Peter L. Shillingsburg, Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and W. M. Thackeray (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992), p. 23. 37 Ian Ousby, ‘Carlyle, Thackeray, and Victorian Heroism’, The Year-Book of English Studies, Vol. 12, 1982, pp. 152–4. 38 On the intellectual dialogue between the two lecture series see Ousby, ‘Carlyle, Thackeray, and Victorian Heroism’, p. 162; Colby, Thackeray’s Canvass of Humanity, p. 318; and Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom, 1847–1863 (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 144. On Thackeray’s attendance of On Heroes, see Catherine Peters, Thackeray’s Universe: Shifting Worlds of Imagination and Reality (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 195. 39 Seemingly at odds with Thackeray’s anti-heroic remarks on Fielding, for example, is his panegyric on the ‘genius’ of Pope. See W.M. Thackeray, The Four Georges and the English Humourists (Phoenix Mill: Alan Sutton, 1995), pp. 160 and 185. 40 See Ray, Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom, pp. 41 and 144. 41 George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 156 and 165. For a similar assessment of Thackeray’s fiction as a form of realism that practises disenchantment through its awareness of mimetic illusion, see Jack P. Rawlins, Thackeray’s Novels: A Fiction that is True (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1974). 42 Shillingsburg, Pegasus in Harness, p. 24. 43 For an account of the orchestrated campaign against Bulwer in Fraser’s Magazine, see Thrall, Rebellious Fraser’s, pp. 69–70. On Thackeray ‘obsessive animosity’ toward Bulwer, see Allan Conrad Christensen, Edward

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Bulwer-Lytton: The Fiction of New Regions (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976), p. 227. W. M. Thackeray, The Memoirs of Mr Charles J. Yellowplush: Sometime Footman in Many Genteel Families (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1997), pp. 106 and 119. Ibid., pp. 120 and 130. See ‘A Box of Novels’ (1844) in Miscellaneous Essays, Sketches and Reviews. The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray Volume XXV (London: Smith, Elder, 1891), p. 60. ‘Jerome Paturot. With Considerations on Novels in General. In a letter from M. A. Titmarsh’ in Miscellaneous Essays, Sketches and Reviews, p. 21. ‘A Brother of the Press on the History of a Literary Man, Laman Blanchard, and the Chances of the Literary Profession’ in Miscellaneous Essays, Sketches and Reviews, p. 88. Laman Blanchard, Sketches from Life; with a Memoir of the Author by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, Bart. [Vol. i] (London: Henry Colburn, 1846), vi–vii and xli. Ibid., xl. ‘A Brother of the Press’, pp. 88–90, 95, and 99. See Laman Blanchard, ‘Novel Writing and Newspaper Criticism’, Monthly Chronicle, Vol. 5, January 1840, pp. 33–4. Bulwer’s ‘Memoir’ quotes personal correspondence from Blanchard in which he expresses a desire to ‘escape from the hurried compositions intended for the day, into what I may call my inner self, and there meditate something that may verify your belief in the promise of my early efforts’: see Blanchard, Sketches from Life, xxii. See Blanchard, Sketches from Life, vii–viii; and Thackeray, ‘A Brother of the Press’, p. 100. John Sutherland has also remarked on Thackeray’s ‘uncompromisingly laissez-faire position’ in this essay: see the ‘Explanatory Notes’ to his edition of Pendennis, p. 1039. The figure of ‘Pegasus in harness’ refers to a poem by Friedrich Schiller of the same title which, not coincidentally, Bulwer included in his 1844 selection of translated texts: see The Poems and Ballads of Schiller, tr. Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Bart. (London and New York: Frederick Warne and Co., 1887), pp. 179–81. Antonia Harland-Lang points out this telling allusion in her study Thackeray and Bohemia (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2010). William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘Our Batch of Novels for Christmas, 1837’ in Stray Papers: Being Stories, Reviews, Verses, and Sketches (1821–1847), ed. Lewis Melville (London: Hutchinson, 1901), pp. 293–4 and 299. Review of Ernest Maltravers, The Times, Saturday 30 September 1837, p. 5. Extracts from this review are also reproduced in an appendix to Gulliver’s Thackeray’s Literary Apprenticeship. Ibid. Ousby suggests that both Thackeray and Carlyle came to hold Byron as an example of ‘Romantic self-indulgence’: see ‘Carlyle, Thackeray, and Victorian Heroism’, p. 153. More specifically, Thackeray portrays Byron as a figure whose rebellious poetic impulse reflects a perverse sublimation of healthy appetitive

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desires, an idea expressed, for example, in his essay ‘Memorials of Gormandising’ (1841). For a broader account of Byron’s reception, see also Samuel C. Chew, Byron in England: His Fame and After-Fame (London: John Murray, 1924). Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, p. 146. See Thackeray, ‘Sorrows of Werther’ in Ballads and Miscellanies, p. 78. See Craig Howes, ‘Pendennis and the Controversy on the “Dignity of Literature”’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 41 (3), December 1986, p. 283. Modern critics have differed as to whether, or how far, Pen’s story should be read as a narrative of the development of a ‘serious’ writer, albeit one who may not have reached artistic fulfilment by the end of the novel. On the one side, Sutherland suggests that ‘“literature” is merely a stepping-stone for Pen’ en route to a presumed career in politics (Thackeray, Pendennis, xviii), and John Gross complains that Pen is more a figure of a ‘representative gentleman’ than of a professional writer: see The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of English Literary Life Since 1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p. 21. On the other side, Barbara Hardy views Pen’s ‘artistic growth’ as commensurate with the formative consciousness of a ‘realistic novelist’ such as Thackeray himself, a reading influenced by the retrospective knowledge of Thackeray’s use of Pen as a narratorial persona in subsequent novels: see The Exposure of Luxury: Radical Themes in Thackeray (London: Peter Owen, 1972), p. 89. Likewise, Colby takes Pen seriously as an autobiographical figure of the Thackerayan artist, though his assertion that the novel traces an ‘evolution of the author as hero’ stretches credibility: see Thackeray’s Canvass of Humanity, p. 300. For some critics Chapter 41 is pivotal in establishing a more constructive account of the professional writer than the satirical emphasis on Pen’s ‘prose labour’ has previously suggested. John R. Reed, for example, argues that the discussion of Walter Lorraine signals Pen’s growing ‘ability to discipline his feelings and his talents, and transform painful personal experience into an artistically satisfying novel’: see Dickens and Thackeray: Punishment and Forgiveness (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995), p. 364. With similar effect, Howes reads Chapter 41 as a response to criticism of Thackeray’s barbed satire of the literary profession in earlier numbers of the serial, ‘showing just how art’s creative dimension adapts itself to survive with integrity in the world of commerce’: see ‘Pendennis and the Controversy on the “Dignity of Literature”’, p. 288. To my mind, however, these are unduly sanguine accounts of a fictive novel whose quality is at no point rendered self-evident within the text, even for Pen himself. The self-reflexive or meta-textual capacity of the discussion on Pen’s novel has been previously recognized. Patrick Brantlinger, for example, describes Walter Lorraine as ‘the double or analogue for Thackeray’s novel’ in The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 123. More precisely, John Sutherland surmises that ‘the plot of Lorraine is the plot of

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the first half of Pendennis’ in Thackeray at Work (London: The Athlone Press, 1974), p. 48. Judith L. Fisher similarly suggests that Thackeray’s fictional dandies were ‘modelled after real-life dandies’ of the period, such as Bulwer, Disraeli, and Alfred D’Orsay. She also points out Walter Lorraine’s pun on the hero of Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel, Walter Deloraine: see Thackeray’s Skeptical Narrative and the ‘Perilous Trade’ of Authorship (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 81 and 133. For details of Thackeray’s published reviews of Grant’s writings, see Gulliver, Thackeray’s Literary Apprenticeship, pp. 79 and 86; on the Punch parody, see The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Volume II: 1841– 1851, collected and edited by Gordon N. Ray (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 139. Howe excludes both Thackeray and Dickens from consideration on the general grounds that their characters develop ‘more by accident than design’: see Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen, p. 14. Buckley more specifically dismisses Pendennis as a ‘true’ Bildungsroman in Season of Youth, p. 28. Jean Sudrann, ‘“The Philosopher’s Property”: Thackeray and the Use of Time’, Victorian Studies, Vol. x (4), June 1967, p. 364. Michael Lund also considers the tension between the form of the Bildungsroman and Thackeray’s assertion of the stability of identity, but, in addition, suggests that the original serial format of Pendennis would have ‘significantly expanded and deepened’ the reader’s sense of Pen’s personal development through time. See Reading Thackeray (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), pp. 39–51. Fisher, Thackeray’s Skeptical Narrative and the ‘Perilous Trade’ of Authorship, pp. 24 and 103–4. Colby similarly observes that the name ‘Pendennis’ connotes a representative figure of the man of letters: see Thackeray’s Canvass of Humanity, p. 284. Dorothy Mermin, however, suggests that it encodes a specifically gendered reference to the normative masculinity of this figure: see Godiva’s Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830–1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 46. Thackeray explicitly invokes ‘the author of Tom Jones’ as a model of the ‘Natural in our Art’ in his 1850 Preface to Pendennis (lvi). For further discussion of the representation of eighteenth-century authors in Pendennis, see Colby, Thackeray’s Canvass of Humanity, p. 305. See Lewes, ‘The Condition of Authors in England, Germany, and France’, p. 286. Nigel Cross, The Common Writer, p. 110. For an account of the influence of Pendennis on the ‘bohemian’ journalists of the mid-Victorian period, their affiliations to Dickens, and subsequent dispute with Thackeray, see P. D. Edwards, Dickens’ ‘Young Men’: George Augustus Sala, Edmund Yates and the World of Victorian Journalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), pp. 29, 66, and 78. Ray also discusses the ‘romance’ of Thackeray’s

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literary bohemia as it appeared to some contemporaries, and his discomfort with this interpretation. See Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom, pp. 115 and 310.

CHAPTER 4 DICKENS AND THE PROFESSION OF LABOUR 1 Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 223–4. 2 Dickens’s involvement with The Guild of Literature and Art is described in John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens [Vol. 2] (London: J. M. Dent, 1966), pp. 68–73. On the perceived affinity between Dickens’s representation of the professional author in David Copperfield and Carlyle’s figure of the ‘hero as man of letters’, see Mark Cronin, ‘The Rake, The Writer, and The Stranger: Textual Relations between Pendennis and David Copperfield’, Dickens Studies Annual, Vol. 24, 1995, pp. 232–3; and Shillingsburg, Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and W.M. Thackeray, p. 68. 3 See Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London and New York: Verso, 1983), p. 116. 4 See The Morning Chronicle [London], Thursday, 3 January 1850, p. 4; and [John Forster], ‘Encouragement of Literatuer by the State’ [sic], The Examiner, 5 January 1850, p. 2. 5 The Letters of Charles Dickens Volume Five 1847–1849, ed. Graham Storey and K.J. Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 289. 6 See John Forster, The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848), viii. 7 [John Forster,] ‘The Dignity of Literature’, The Examiner, 19 January 1850, p. 35; see also William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘The Dignity of Literature’ in The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray [Vol. 13], pp. 629–33. 8 The Speeches of Charles Dickens: A Complete Edition, ed. K. J. Fielding (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988), p. 137. 9 See Lund, Reading Thackeray, p. 76. 10 Ibid., p. 73. 11 See Cronin, ‘The Rake, The Writer, and The Stranger’, p. 215. Details of comparative reviews of the two novels can be found in Lund, Reading Thackeray, p. 72; and Geoffrey Tillotson and Donald Hawes, ed., Thackeray: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 111–35. 12 See Cronin, ‘The Rake, The Writer, and The Stranger’, pp. 226–7 and 232–3; and also Mark Cronin, ‘Henry Gowan, William Makepeace Thackeray, and “The Dignity of Literature” controversy’, Dickens Quarterly, Vol. 16 (2), June 1999, pp. 107–11. Similar accounts of the divergence between Thackeray and Dickens on the ‘dignity of literature’ can be found in Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Vintage, 1999), p. 569; Reed, Dickens and Thackeray, p. 307; and Shillingsburg, Pegasus in Harness, pp. 18 and 68. 13 See Cronin, ‘Henry Gowan, William Makepeace Thackeray, and “The Dignity of Literature” controversy’, p. 109.

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14 See J. W. Kaye, ‘Pendennis: The Literary Profession’, North British Review, Vol. 13 (26), August 1850, pp. 344–5. 15 Thackeray, ‘The Dignity of Literature’, p. 379. 16 Thackeray, The Four Georges and The English Humourists, p. 228. 17 Most biographical accounts have suggested that Thackeray turned to writing as a profession partly as a result of the loss, through speculation, of his inherited fortune. See, most notably, Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, pp. 162–249. 18 See Karl Marx, Results of the Immediate Process of Production (1863–6) in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy [Vol. 1], tr. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 1044. 19 See Jennifer Ruth, ‘Mental Capital, Industrial Time, and the Professional in David Copperfield’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 32 (3), 1999, pp. 303– 30. 20 See William Makepeace Thackeray, The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family, ed. Andrew Sanders (Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 937. 21 See The Autobiography of William Jerdan [Vol. ii], pp. 2, 7, 4, 6, 7, 35, and 42. Jerdan notes John Chapman’s Westminster Review article on the first volume of the Autobiography, also titled ‘The Profession of Literature’ (a text discussed earlier in this study), in Volume iii, p. 305. For a fuller account of Jerdan’s career, see Susan Matoff, Conflicted Life: William Jerdan, 1782–1869: London Editor, Author and Critic (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2011). 22 Charles Dickens, ‘In Memoriam: W. M. Thackeray’ in Miscellaneous Papers [Vol. i] (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprint, 1983), p. 52. 23 Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Jeremy Tambling (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 560. All subsequent references to this edition occur parenthetically in the main text. 24 For a similar emphasis on the anti- or post-Romantic aspects of Dickens’s novel, see Ruth, ‘Mental Capital, Industrial Time, and the Professional in David Copperfield’, pp. 303 and 319. Ruth offers a persuasive counter-argument to the view that David embodies a straightforwardly ‘idealized’ conception of the artist: for the latter position, see Gail Turley Houston, ‘Gender Construction and the Kunstlerroman: David Copperfield and Aurora Leigh’, Philological Quarterly, Vol. 72 (2), Spring 1993, pp. 213–36. 25 See Poovey, Uneven Developments, p. 100. 26 Ibid., p. 122. 27 Marx, Selected Writings, p. 80. 28 The relationship between David’s literary work and the normatively female sphere of domestic labour, epitomized by the figure of Agnes, is explored at length by Poovey: see Uneven Developments, pp. 122–5. 29 Kaye, ‘Pendennis: The Literary Profession’, p. 356. 30 Ibid., pp. 361–2. 31 Ibid., pp. 358–9. 32 David’s use of the figure of the ‘navigator’ is reminiscent of Ford Madox Brown’s painting Work (1852–65), in which the analogy between manual and

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mental forms of labour is suggested through the juxtaposition of a figure of the writer, in this case modelled explicitly on Thomas Carlyle, and a group of navvies engaged in excavating a sewer. Ruth, ‘Mental Capital, Industrial Time, and the Professional in David Copperfield’, p. 303. Here I refer not only to Poovey’s reading, but also to Gareth Cordery’s more explicitly Foucauldian ‘unmasking’ of David’s complicity with capitalist ideology in ‘Foucault, Dickens, and David Copperfield’, Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 26 (1), 1998, pp. 71–85. Jeremy Tambling, for instance, makes the familiar observation that Uriah’s ‘writhing’ hands are a ‘signifier of masturbation’ in his ‘Introduction’ to the current Penguin edition of David Copperfield (xvi). See Simon Edwards, ‘David Copperfield: The Decomposing Self’ (1985) in John Peck, ed., New Casebooks: David Copperfield and Hard Times (Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1995), p. 77. See Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society, p. 390. See Siskin, The Work of Writing, pp. 116 and 223; and also Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism, pp. 41–2. Larson herself derives the terms ‘technicality’ and ‘indetermination’ from the work of the French sociologists, H. Jamous and B. Peloille. See Ruth, ‘Mental Capital, Industrial Time, and the Professional in David Copperfield’, p. 320. For a discussion of David’s habit of retrospection and its challenge to his ostensible credo of professional and emotional self-discipline, see Robin Gilmour, ‘Memory in David Copperfield’, Dickensian, Vol. 75, 1975, pp. 30– 9. See [Charles Dickens], Prospectus of a New Endowment In Connexion with an Insurance Company, for the Benefit of Artists and Men of Letters (Whitefriars: Bradbury and Evans, 1851), p. 3. Charles Dickens, ‘The Guild of Literature and Art’ in Miscellaneous Papers [Vol. i], p. 328. See Daniel Hack, ‘Literary Paupers and Professional Authors: The Guild of Literature and Art’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, Vol. 39 (4), 1999, p. 699. Thackeray’s opposition to the Guild was made plain in a letter to Forster, where he declared: ‘I don’t believe in the Guild of Literature . . . I think that is against the dignity of our profession’: quoted in Cronin, ‘Henry Gowan, William Makepeace Thackeray, and “The Dignity of Literature” controversy’, p. 108. On these points, see Dickens, Prospectus of a New Endowment, p. 9; and Miscellaneous Papers [Vol. 1], pp. 324–7. The Prospectus for The Guild of Literature and Art is reprinted in The Letters of Charles Dickens: The Pilgrim Edition Volume Six 1850–1852, ed. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Nina Burgis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 852–5. According to the editors of the Pilgrim Edition, it was drafted ‘mainly’ by Forster and Bulwer-Lytton.

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Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens [i], p. 382. Dickens, Miscellaneous Papers [Vol. 1], p. 329. Dickens, Prospectus of a New Endowment, pp. 4–8. The Letters of Charles Dickens [Vol. 6], p. 259. The Speeches of Charles Dickens, p. 213. See Forster, The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith, p. 69. Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens [i], p. 75. Forster, The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith, p. 697. Forster reports Dickens as naming his eighth child after Henry Fielding in 1849 ‘in a kind of homage to the style of work he was now so bent on beginning’. The eighteenth-century ‘style’ is clearly reflected in the list of possible titles for David Copperfield drawn up at around this time. See Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens [ii], pp. 77–8. Thackeray famously invokes the precedent of Tom Jones in his 1850 ‘Preface’ to the first volume edition of Pendennis (lvi). See L.E.L. [Laetitia Landon], Ethel Churchill: or, The Two Brides [Vol. iii] (London: Henry Colburn, 1837), p. 106. See Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Not So Bad As We Seem; or, many sides to a character in The Dramatic Works of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton (London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1860), pp. 458 and 440. See Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright, pp. 59–62. Ibid., p. 114. Not So Bad As We Seem, pp. 492–3. Prospectus of a New Endowment, p. 11. See John Stuart Mill, ‘Civilization’ in Essays on Politics and Society, p. 138. See Emile Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, tr. Cornelia Brookfield (London and New York: Routledge, 1957), p. 19. Quoted in J. A. Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (London: The Athlone Press, 1976), p. 33. Prospectus of a New Endowment, p. 12. The analogy may have been suggested by the fact that Joseph Paxton, architect of the Crystal Palace, was also involved in the stage design for Not So Bad As We Seem. See Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 663. See Hack, ‘Literary Paupers and Professional Authors’, pp. 699–704. Not So Bad As We Seem, p. 462. Graham Law similarly concludes that the Guild ‘smacked unmistakably of oldfashioned aristocratic patronage’: see ‘The Professionalization of Authorship’, p. 42. This remark is quoted by Hack in ‘Literary Paupers and Professional Authors’, p. 708 and also in Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 663. Lewes, ‘The Condition of Authors in England, Germany, and France’, p. 285. Larson, The Rise of Professionalism, pp. 14 and 56. In the notes to his 1996 Penguin edition Tambling suggests that the opening sentence of the novel (‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must

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show.’) has a specifically Carlylean resonance, implying David’s (future) status as a ‘hero as man of letters’ (856). As early as 1898, however, George Gissing argued that David was ‘[d]ecidedly . . . not “the hero of his own story”’: see Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (London: Blackie, 1898), p. 101. Murray Baumgarten, ‘Writing and David Copperfield’, Dickens Studies Annual, Vol. 14, 1985, p. 46. See Garrett Stewart, Dickens and the Trials of Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 138; and William C. Spengemann, The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 128. See Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens [ii], p. 105. See Spengemann, The Forms of Autobiography, p. 130. Alexander Welsh similarly notes that ‘in this novel about the “progress” of a writer, every writer but the hero – or his muse – writes wildly or hopelessly’. See Welsh, From Copyright to Copperfield: The Identity of Dickens (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 116. Alexander Welsh, ‘Writing and Copying in the Age of Steam’ in Kincaid and Kuhn, eds., Victorian Literature and Society, p. 37. Letter to William Bradbury, 14 March 1850, The Letters of Charles Dickens [Vol. 6], p. 64. See David Saunders, Authorship and Copyright, pp. 138–9. Shillingsburg, Pegasus in Harness, pp. 110–1. Rose, Authors and Owners, p. 114. Dickens’s frustration over the lack of an international copyright agreement would not have applied directly to a British colonial territory such as Australia. For an account of his concern with the issue in its primary Anglo-American context, see Welsh, From Copyright to Copperfield, chapter 3. D. A. Miller’s Foucauldian trope of the ‘open secret’ acknowledges David’s paradoxically visible invisibility, though his reading of the novel does not consider the issue of David’s increasing fame: see The Novel and the Police (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 209–15. See Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (1821) in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Alasdair D.F. Macrae (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 233. CHAPTER 5 BROKEN IDOLS

1 Hood, The Literature of Labour, pp. 15 and 18–9. 2 Ibid., pp. 24–6. Perhaps the closest comparison to Hood’s equation of writing with forms of manual labour can be found in Anthony Trollope’s posthumously published Autobiography (1883), with its provocative comparisons between writing novels, baking bread, and shoemaking, which take Thackerayan iconoclasm to the next level. Despite such rhetoric, though, Trollope, like Dickens,

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was concerned to maintain the middle-class respectability of the literary profession, and would be unlikely to have shared Hood’s more radical understanding of the category of socially-productive labour. See Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, ed. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page (Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 105–8 and 121. See, for example, the arguments made by Regenia Gagnier in Subjectivities, pp. 28, 31 and 115; and, before her, Martha Vicinus in The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Working-Class Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1974), pp. 109 and 140. A counter-view is offered by David Vincent in Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London: Europa Publications Limited, 1981), pp. 37, 194–5 and 198. Christopher Thomson, The Autobiography of an Artisan [5 parts] (London: Chapman Brothers, 1846–7), p. 20. See The Autobiography of Samuel Bamford. Volume One. Early Days, ed. W. H. Chaloner (London: Frank Cass, 1967), pp. 25–34; and The Life of Thomas Cooper. Written By Himself (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1872), pp. 282–3. The Purgatory of Suicides: A Prison-Rhyme was later collected in The Poetical Works of Thomas Cooper (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1877). Patrick Brantlinger, The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832– 1867 (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 75. See Vicinus, The Industrial Muse, pp. 109, 121 and 140, and also her essay ‘Chartist Fiction and the Development of a Class-Based Literature’ in The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition, ed. H. Gustav Klaus (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982), p. 13; Gagnier, Subjectivities, pp. 42–3, 115 and 140; and Nan Hackett, XIX Century British Working-Class Autobiographies: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: AMS Press, 1985), pp. 3, 5 and 10. See Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, p. 37; also pp. 158–60, 164, 194–5 and 198. The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated Critical Bibliography. Volume 1: 1790–1900, ed. John Burnett, David Vincent, and David Mayall (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1984), xvi–xvii. Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects, pp. 86, 167 and 174. See [G.L. Craik], The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties; Illustrated by Anecdotes (London: Charles Knight, 1830–1), Vol. 1, pp. 381, 134 and 98; and Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, p. 149. Craik, The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties, Vol. 1, p. 264. The allusion here is to D’Israeli’s The Calamities of Authors. Ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 387 and 96 and Vol. 2, pp. 218–9. Charles Knight, ‘Introduction’ to [Thomas Carter], Memoirs of a Working Man (London: Charles Knight & Co., 1845), viii and xi, viii and ix. See Carter, Memoirs of a Working Man, pp. 216, 228, 67 and 233. [Alexander Somerville], The Autobiography of a Working Man, By ‘One Who Has Whistled At the Plough’. (London: Charles Gilpin, 1848), p. 218.

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17 See Thomson, The Autobiography of an Artisan, pp. 288, 319, 377, 386, 322, 298, 20 and 26. 18 See Hood, The Literature of Labour, p. 89. 19 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help, With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance, ed. Peter W. Sinnema (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 17 and 19–21. For information on the origins of the book, see the editor’s Introduction to this volume, xi–xii. 20 Ibid., pp. 21, 28, 39, 37, 90–1, 99, 263–4 and 273. 21 Cross, The Common Writer, p. 138. For biographical accounts of the careers of Cooper and Miller, see Robert J. Conklin, Thomas Cooper the Chartist (1805–1892) (Manila: University of the Philippines Press, 1935); J. S. English, Thomas Miller (1807–1874). A List of his Works, and Books About Him, in the Local Collection (Gainsborough: Gainsborough Public Library, 1966); and P. M. Ashraf, Introduction to Working-Class Literature in Great Britain Part II: Prose (no bibliographical information, 1979). 22 Vicinus, ‘Chartist Fiction and the Development of a Class-Based Literature’, p. 13. 23 The Life of Thomas Cooper, p. 146. 24 See Conklin, Thomas Cooper the Chartist, p. 47. 25 Thomas Cooper, Letters to Young Working Men (1849) in Thoughts at Fourscore, and Earlier. A Medley (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1885), pp. 189 and 166. 26 See Vicinus, ‘Chartist Fiction and the Development of a Class-Based Literature’, p. 13. 27 See Cooper, Thoughts at Fourscore, and Earlier, p. 201. 28 Rosina’s reference to Miller is cited by Conklin in Thomas Cooper the Chartist, p. 36. On the idea of a ‘Burns syndrome’, see Vicinus, The Industrial Muse, p. 141. 29 Cross, The Common Writer, pp. 136 and 141. 30 Ashraf, Introduction to Working-Class Literature in Great Britain Part II, p. 52. 31 Cross, The Common Writer, pp. 138–9. 32 Ibid., p. 129. See also Bamford, The Autobiography of Samuel Bamford. Volume One, pp. 289–90; and Cooper, The Life of Thomas Cooper, p. 42. 33 See Paul Thomas Murphy, Towards a Working-Class Canon: Literary Criticism in British Working-Class Periodicals, 1816–1858 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994), p. 146. 34 For Hegel’s account of sculpture as the medium most adequately expressing the objectivity of artistic form, see Aesthetics [Vol. 2], pp. 701–91. 35 See Dr Currie, The Life of Burns, With His Correspondence and Fragments (London: J. F. Dove, 1826) and Allan Cunningham, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Burns (London: James Cochrane & Co., 1836), p. 2. 36 [Charles Kingsley], ‘Burns and his School’, North British Review, Vol. xvi (No. xxxi), Nov. 1851, pp. 154 and 157. 37 Charles Kingsley, ‘Alexander Smith and Alexander Pope’ (1853), Miscellanies [Vol. i] (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1859), p. 287.

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38 See Kingsley, ‘Burns and his School’, pp. 149, 156 and 175. 39 Ibid., p. 164. 40 For Gramsci’s well-known distinction between ‘organic’ and ‘traditional’ intellectuals, see Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and tr. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), pp. 5 and 15. 41 See Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, p. 2. 42 The phrase is from Richard Menke’s essay, ‘Cultural Capital and the Scene of Rioting: Male Working-Class Authorship in Alton Locke’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 28 (1), 2000, p. 97. 43 ‘The Autobiography of a Chartist’, The Times, Friday, 18 October 1850, p. 3. 44 [W. E. Aytoun], ‘Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 68 (421), Nov. 1850, pp. 593–4. 45 Robert Bell, ‘A Chartist Novel’, Bentley’s Miscellany, Vol. 28, Nov. 1850, p. 560. 46 ‘A Triad of Novels’, Fraser’s Magazine, Vol. 42, November 1850, p. 577. 47 Evan M. Gottlieb, ‘Charles Kingsley, The Romantic Legacy, and The Unmaking of the Working-Class Intellectual’, Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 29 (1), 2001, p. 62. 48 See Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 90–1, 93 and 96. 49 See Cross, The Common Writer, p. 152; and Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet. An Autobiography, ed. Elizabeth A. Cripps (Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 278. All subsequent references to this edition will be made parenthetically in the main text. 50 Carter, Memoirs of a Working Man, x. ´ 51 See Louis Cazamian, Kingsley et Thomas Cooper: Etude Sur Une Source D’Alton Locke (Paris: Soci´et´e Nouvelle De Libraire et D’Edition, 1903). Other scholars to have commented on the relationship between Kingsley and Cooper in the context of Alton Locke’s source material include Brenda Collums, Charles Kingsley: The Lion of Eversley (London: Constable, 1975), pp. 101–2; Conklin, Thomas Cooper the Chartist, pp. 335–7; Allan John Hartley, The Novels of Charles Kingsley: A Christian Social Interpretation (Folkestone: The Hour-Glass Press, 1977), p. 63; and Robert Bernard Martin, The Dust of Combat: A Life of Charles Kingsley (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), pp. 112–3. 52 See Cooper, The Life of Thomas Cooper, pp. 60, 67 and 70. 53 See Conklin, Thomas Cooper the Chartist, pp. 401 and 414; Cooper, The Life of Thomas Cooper, pp. 334–6, 350 and 368; and Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life, ed. By His Wife [Vol. i] (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1878), pp. 378, 382, 387 and 396. 54 Cooper, The Life of Thomas Cooper, p. 370. 55 Cross, The Common Writer, p. 154. 56 See Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, pp. 29 and 180. 57 Brian Maidment, ‘Essayists and Artisans: The Making of Nineteenth-Century Self-Taught Poets’, Literature and History, Vol. 1 (1), 1983, p. 84.

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58 Gottlieb seems to do just this by arguing that the Dean’s attempt to strip Alton’s poetry of its political content ‘repeats, albeit in slightly parodic form, the basic message of Kingsley’s text’: see ‘Charles Kingsley, The Romantic Legacy, and the Unmaking of the Working-Class Intellectual’, p. 60. 59 See Gottlieb, ‘Charles Kingsley, the Romantic Legacy, and the Unmaking of the Working-Class Intellectual’, p. 58. Menke also presents Kingsley as unsympathetic to the autonomy of ‘working-class culture’: see ‘Cultural Capital and the Scene of Rioting’, p. 97. 60 The interpellation of middle-class readers within scenes of working-class life was a common strategy of ‘Condition of England’ novels, with which Alton Locke is usually grouped. On this point, see Gagnier, Subjectivities, p. 114. 61 The version of the dictum quoted here is taken from ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (183). Similar examples, however, may be found in essays on Burns (1828) and Schiller (1831): see Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays [i], p. 195, [ii], p. 184. 62 See Thomas Carlyle, ‘Goethe’s Works’ in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays [iii], pp. 120–4 63 A likely source text for Carlyle’s use of the metaphor of currency and value here are the lines, ‘The rank is but the guinea’s-stamp,/The Man’s the gowd for a’ that’, from Burns’s famous song ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ that’ (1795), a text which both Carlyle and Kingsley quote directly in ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ and Alton Locke, respectively. See The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, ed. Andrew Lang (London: Methuen & Co., 1896), pp. 580–1. 64 Menke, ‘Cultural Capital and the Scene of Rioting’, pp. 93–6. 65 Jerdan, The Autobiography of William Jerdan [Vol. ii], pp. 36–7. 66 Worship, in Carlylean etymology, derives from ‘worthship’: see Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, p. 196. 67 Throughout his 1840 lecture-series Carlyle collapses the binary distinction between ‘hero’ and ‘hero worshipper’ by defining his chosen heroes in terms of their own capacity for worship, or ‘transcendent wonder’ (9), of the presence of God within Nature. 68 See Kingsley, Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life [i], pp. 168 and 176. 69 Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, pp. 108–9. 70 Kingsley, ‘Burns and his School’, pp. 175–6. For further discussion of Bethune as a model for Alton Locke, see Brian Maidment, ed., The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1987), p. 138. 71 Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, p. 108. 72 While some authentic Chartist novels of the period, such as Thomas Martin Wheeler’s Sunshine and Shadow: A Tale of the Nineteenth Century (serialized in The Northern Star in 1849–50), employ narratives of individual character development in conjunction with socio-historical analysis and ideological polemic,

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Note to Pages 171–6 it is difficult to place them within the genre of the Bildungsroman with any conceptual precision. See Ian Haywood, ed., Chartist Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 65–200. See Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago (London: Macmillan, 1906), pp. 128, 130 and 432–4. According to Thomas Hughes, Kingsley viewed Goethe’s influence as producing much ‘talk about genius and high art’ and an inability to ‘do’ things: a response not dissimilar to that of Carlyle at times. See Thomas Hughes, ‘Prefatory Memoir’ (1879) in Kingsley, Alton Locke [Vol. i] (London: Macmillan & Co., 1881), p. 42. Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, p. 107. Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, pp. 163–4. Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life [i], p. 247. See Robert Southey, The Lives and Works of The Uneducated Poets, ed. J.S. Childers (London: Humphrey Milford, 1925), p. 12. Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life [i], p. 247. CHAPTER 6 MOVING STATUES

1 See Linda Peterson, Becoming a Woman of Letters, pp. 20–21. 2 Carol A. Bock, ‘Authorship, the Bront¨es, and Fraser’s Magazine: “Coming Forward” as an Author in Early Victorian England’, Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 29 (2), September 2001, p. 247. 3 Peterson attributes the first usage of the term ‘woman of letters’ to Julia Kavanagh’s English Women of Letters, published in 1863: see Becoming a Woman of Letters, p. 4. ‘Authoress’ and ‘poetess’ were in common usage much earlier in the century. 4 Patricia Zakreski, Representing Female Artistic Labour, 1848–1890: Refining Work for the Middle-Class Woman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 98. 5 Peterson also argues that the ‘mid-to late 1850s . . . proved a pivotal moment in defining the professional woman of letters’, though her focus here is mainly on the writing of Anna Jameson: see Becoming a Woman of Letters, p. 45. 6 Ibid., p. 9. 7 Sharon Marcus, ‘The Profession of the Author: Abstraction, Advertising, and Jane Eyre’, PMLA, Vol. 110 (2), March 1995, pp. 209–13. 8 On the significance of Martineau’s Autobiography, see Peterson, Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politcs of Life Writing (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999), p. 216. In Becoming a Woman of Letters Peterson judges Gaskell’s biography to be ‘the most influential account of women’s authorship in the Victorian period’ (p. 151). 9 For Barrett Browning’s private characterizations of Aurora Leigh, see (in the order given above) The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Her Sister Arabella [Vol. i], ed. Scott Lewis (Waco, Texas: Wedgestone Press, 2002), p. 542; The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1845– 1846 [Vol. i], ed. Elvan Kintner (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

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Press, 1969), p. 31; The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning [Vol. ii], ed. Frederic G. Kenyon (London: Smith, Elder, 1897), p. 228; and the Norton Critical Edition of Aurora Leigh, ed. Margaret Reynolds (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1996), p. 330. All quotations from Aurora Leigh will be taken from this edition but cited by Book and line reference in parentheses. See Rose Ellen Hendriks, The Young Authoress (London: John & Daniel Darling, 1847), Vol. i, p. 70. All subsequent references to this edition occur parenthetically in the main text. For a brief biographical account of Hendriks, see Norma Clarke’s note in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online). For example, in Gilbert and Gubar’s account of the reconciliation of Aurora and Romney, the former comes to occupy ‘the role of dutiful handmaiden to a blind but powerful master’: see Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 576–9. Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bront¨e, ed. Elisabeth Jay (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), pp. 258–9. All subsequent references to this edition occur parenthetically in the main text. Peterson highlights the significance of Gaskell’s trope of ‘parallel currents’ by contrast with the alternative mid-nineteenth-century justification of female authorship as ‘an extension of woman’s maternal or domestic duties’. See Becoming a Woman of Letters, p. 142. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography [Vol. i], pp. 69 and 131. All subsequent references to this edition occur parenthetically in the main text. Peterson views Martineau’s autobiography as ‘more public and professional than any before Anthony Trollope’s Autobiography (1883) or George Sala’s Life and Adventures (1895)’: see Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography, p. 70. See Mermin, Godiva’s Ride, xiv and p. 20. See Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown, passim, but especially pp. 161–4, 386, and 448. See Mrs. J. H. [Charlotte] Riddell, A Struggle for Fame: A Novel [3 vols] (London: Richard Bentley, 1883). See H. F. Chorley, The Athenaeum, 22 November 1856 in Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (Norton edition), pp. 403–4. Linda Shires, ‘The Author as Spectacle and Commodity: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Thomas Hardy’ in Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, ed. Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), p. 202. In contrast with Bront¨e, Barrett Browning, according to Shires, was a writer attracted to spectacle, though aware of its capacity to manipulate. See Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown, pp. 401–6. See William Howitt, Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets [2 vols] (London: Richard Bentley, 1849); and for an example of the later

254

22

23 24 25

26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Note to Pages 187–91 development of the genre, Edmund Yates, ed., Celebrities at Home [3 vols] (London: Office of The World, 1877–9). For a discussion of the ‘homes and haunts’ genre of biography, see Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), pp. 117–8. Critics who have described Aurora Leigh as either a Bildungsroman or Kunstl¨erroman (or both) include Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, pp. 19 and 575; and Dorothy Mermin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry (University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 184. Cora Kaplan, ‘Introduction’ to Aurora Leigh and Other Poems (London: Woman’s Press, 1978), pp. 5 and 16. Ibid., pp. 29–31. Angela Leighton characterizes Aurora Leigh as a ‘woman’s Prelude . . . concerned to chart the origins and development of the woman poet’s mind’ in Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1986), p. 118. Similar accounts of Barrett Browning’s revision of Wordsworth’s narrative of poetic development can be found in Corbett’s Representing Femininity, p. 64, and Peterson’s Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography, p. 121. Barrett Browning’s response to David Copperfield, as well as other male ‘portrait[s] of the writer’ such as Alton Locke, is discussed by Marjorie Stone in Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 179–202; Houston presents a schematic contrast between the two texts in ‘Gender Construction and the Kunstlerroman: David Copperfield and Aurora Leigh’, pp. 213–36. See Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford, pp. 22–3; and The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1845–1846 [Vol. i], p. 155. See Zakreski, Representing Female Artistic Labour, p. 113. See Gagnier, Subjectivities, p. 217. Dorothy Mermin claims that Aurora is unique amongst female protagonists of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman in following a ‘male pattern of development’: see Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry, p. 212. See Deirdre David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot (Houndmills: The Macmillan Press, 1987), pp. 143–58. See Kontje, The German Bildungsroman, p. 61. See Chapter One note 133 above. See Marianne Hirsch, ‘Spiritual Bildung’ in Abel et al., ed., The Voyage In, pp. 23 and 27. Fraiman, Unbecoming Women, pp. 2–6. See Kaplan, ‘Introduction’ to Aurora Leigh, p. 36. Kaplan points to Sand’s notoriously independent lifestyle as well as her real name (Aurore Dudevant) as indicators of her influence on the poem in her ‘Introduction’ to Aurora Leigh, p. 23. Peterson, on the other hand, proposes Landon as the key source for details of Aurora’s professional life in London, though she views Landon’s career as reflecting a broader trend for female

Note to Pages 191–7

36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55

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authors in the early Victorian period: see Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography, pp. 122–3. See Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography [Vol. i], p. 154. See David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy, pp. 156 and 116. ‘Preface’ to Poems (1844) in The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning [Vol. i], ed. Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1900), pp. 148–9. Quoted by Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke in their ‘Critical Introduction’ to The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning [Vol. vi], xiii. This notwithstanding an earlier letter (December 1850) to the same recipient lamenting as ‘a national disgrace that literary men are not more sustained in England’: see The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Her Sister Arabella [Vol. i], pp. 362 and 384. See The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning [Vol. i] (1897), p. 468. Stone, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, pp. 52–3. See the letter dated 17 February 1845 in The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning [Vol. i], p. 24. Similar references to Carlyle can be found in Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Letters to Her Sister, 1846–1859, ed. Leonard Huxley (London: John Murray, 1929), p. 34; The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning [Vol. ii], p. 25; and Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford, p. 116. See also ‘Contributions Toward an Essay on Carlyle’ (1843), written for Horne’s New Spirit of the Age, in The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning [Vol. vi], pp. 312–21. See ‘The Book of the Poets’ in The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning [Vol. vi], p. 285. Stone, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, pp. 137–8 and 145. Ibid., p. 147. See The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning [Vol. vi], p. 313. Carlyle, Lectures on the History of Literature, pp. 48 and 74. The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning [Vol. i], p. 24. In a subsequent letter to Browning, dated 13 August 1845, Barrett criticized Carlyle’s biography of Cromwell for privileging ‘dumb heroic action as opposed to speech and singing’ (433). See David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy, p. 156. See Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing against the Heart (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), p. 91. See Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 575. See Rod Edmond, ‘“A Printing Woman Who Has Lost Her Place”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh’ in Tess Cosslett, ed., Victorian Women Poets (London and New York: Longman, 1996), p. 122. For a detailed account of the commission of Hughes’s painting and the subsequent private commentary which it received, see Rosalie Mander, ‘The Tryst Unravelled’, Apollo, Vol. 79, 1964, pp. 221–3. For critical discussion of the function of portraiture in Aurora Leigh, see Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, pp. 18–9; Margaret Reynolds, ‘Allusion

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56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Note to Pages 198–204

in the Verse-Novel: Experimental Bricolage’ in Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (Norton Edition), pp. 555–6; and Dolores Rosenblum, ‘Face to Face: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and Nineteenth Century Poetry’ in Cosslett, ed., Victorian Women Poets, pp. 91–4. See Mitchell, Iconology, pp. 112–3. For Moers’s discussion of the influence of Corinne on Victorian women’s writing, see Literary Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1977), pp. 263– 319. Leighton’s observation on Landon’s The Improvisatrice (1824) in Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart, p. 59. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., pp. 81 and 88–9 Ibid., p. 88. Moers, Literary Women, p. 275. For the scene under question, see Madame de Sta¨el, Corinne, or Italy, tr. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 21–35. A ‘caryatid’ is a sculptured figure designed for display within Classical temples, which, according to Hegel, was the earliest public use of statuary. See Hegel’s Aesthetics [Vol. ii], p. 702. Barrett Browning expressed admiration for Corinne earlier in her career: see the letter to Hugh Boyd dated 9 June 1832 in Elizabeth Barrett to Mr Boyd: Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Hugh Stuart Boyd, Introduced and edited by Barbara P. McCarthy (London: John Murray, 1955), p. 176. Isaac D’Israeli’s poem ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (1790) contains the line ‘So close allied the LAUREL to the YEW’, while in Barrett’s earlier ‘To a Poet’s Child’ (1833) the emblem of the laurel is metamorphosized into a cypress. See Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity, pp. 53 and 65. An apparent allusion to the epitaph devised by Keats and subsequently inscribed on his gravestone: ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’. The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning [Vol. i], pp. 120–1. Ibid. [Vol. ii], pp. 337 and 343. L.E.L., ‘A History of the Lyre’ in Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds, eds., Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 55. See Peterson, Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography, pp. 119 and 116–7. Ibid., pp. 121–2. See Keats’s letter to Charles Brown dated 30 November 1820 in Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 398. Peterson, Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography, p. 116. See Helen M. Cooper, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Woman and Artist (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 154–5; and also Leighton, Victorian Women Poets, p. 90. See Rosenblum, ‘Face to Face: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and Nineteenth Century Poetry’ in Cosslett, ed., Victorian Women Poets, p. 95.

Note to Pages 205–17

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76 See ‘A Vision of Poets’ in The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning [Vol. ii], p. 325; and The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett [Vol. i], p. 142. 77 For an extended discussion of the prevalence of the Pygmalion and Galatea myth in nineteenth-century culture, and its implications for female artists in particular, see Gail Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth (Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially chapter 1. 78 For a discussion of Barrett Browning’s use of the ‘woman’s figure’, see Kaplan, ‘Introduction’ to Aurora Leigh (Woman’s Press), pp. 5 and 15–16. David objects to this prevailing interpretation of Barrett Browning’s gynocentric poetics, claiming instead that she ‘favours active, phallocentric images for poetic creation’. See Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy, p. 116. 79 The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett [Vol. i] pp. 31 and 43. For Barrett Browning’s characterization of Aurora Leigh as ‘intensely modern, crammed from the times’, see The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning [Vol. ii], p. 112. 80 See Hegel, Aesthetics [Vol. ii], p. 708. 81 The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett [Vol. ii], pp. 762– 3. 82 See Hegel, Aesthetics [Vol. ii], pp. 703, 713, 792, and 1093. Hegel’s insistence on the atemporality of the sculptural form explicitly debars the representation of momentarily arrested figures, ‘as if, in the middle of a movement or an action, they had been frozen or turned to stone by a Gorgon’s head’ (740). From this perspective, many of the sculptural figures in Aurora Leigh evidently lack the ‘repose’ of Ideal form, a fact which is suggestive of their often ironic or iconoclastic function within the narrative. 83 In this light, a fitting source for the symbolic function of Aurora Leigh may be Michelangelo’s sculpture Aurora, which represents the allegorical female figure of dawn awakening after the sleep of evening. Barrett Browning would have encountered this statue in its original setting on the tomb of the Medicis in Florence. 84 For this alternative perspective on the embodiment/disembodiment struggle within the poem, see Joyce Zonana, ‘“The Embodied Muse”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and Feminist Poetics’ in Aurora Leigh (Norton Critical Edition), pp. 520–33.

CONCLUSION 1 See Seville, Literary Copyright Reform in Early Victorian England, p. 8. 2 For an extended discussion of Wordsworth’s ‘romantic professionalism’, see Brian Goldberg, The Lake Poets and Professional Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2007), chapter 7. 3 Riddell, A Struggle for Fame, Vol. ii, p. 69 and Vol. iii, p. 157.

258

Note to Pages 218–19

4 See Walter Besant, The Society of Authors. A Record of Its Action from Its Foundation (The Incorporated Society of Authors, 1893), pp. 4, 33–4, 38 and 40. For a fuller account of the Society’s activities, see Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession, chapters 6 and 7. 5 See John Goode, ‘The Art of Fiction: Walter Besant and Henry James’ in Tradition and Tolerance in Nineteenth-century Fiction: Critical Essays on some English and American Novels, ed. David Howard, John Lucas, and John Goode (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 250; and also Stuart Culver, ‘Representing the Author: Henry James, Intellectual Property and the Work of Writing’ in Henry James: Fiction as History, ed. Ian F.A. Bell (London: Vision Press, 1984), pp. 119–22. 6 Quoted in the ‘Introduction’ to Marysa Demoor, ed., Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880–1930 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 5. 7 Henry James to Edmund Gosse, Friday, 10 May 1895 (Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds). This unpublished letter is quoted in Michael Anesko’s ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (Oxford University Press, 1986), viii. 8 Like Gissing, James was himself a member of the Society of Authors and through the mediation of their mutual friend Gosse consulted Besant’s advice on the use of the literary agent A.P. Watt. 9 See Walter Besant, The Art of Fiction (London: Chatto and Windus, 1902), pp. 11, 34, and 36. 10 See Trollope, An Autobiography, p. 211. 11 George Gissing, New Grub Street, ed. Bernard Bergonzi (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 249 and 494.

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Index

Adams, James Eli, 173 Amigoni, David, 56 Anderson, Patricia, 226 Anstey, Thomas, 46 Ashraf, P.M., 149 Ashton, Rosemary, 31 Athenaeum, The, 35, 183 authorship and consecration, 8–9, 24, 43, 46, 56, 71, 74, 103, 212 and cultural visibility, 17, 19, 30, 61, 133, 161–4, 185, 214 and literary apprenticeship, 30–1, 62 and Literary Guilds, 9, 32, 43, 67, 125 and literary hacks, 92–3, 100, 103, 109, 123, 213 and literary portrait galleries, 2–3, 5, 17–19, 22, 24, 26, 47, 211 and originality, 130–2 and professional identity, 6, 11–12, 18, 43–4, 71, 73, 120–1, 128, 210 and professional reform, 13, 31, 36, 102, 119, 120–2 and the man of letters, 39, 41, 54–7, 212 and women writers, 28, 37, 62, 72, 174, 179 and working-class writers, 36–7, 135–6, 139, 148–9, 151–2, 154, 168 dead authors, 1, 6, 211 living authors, 1–6, 28, 211 Aytoun, W. E., 156 Babbage, Charles, 130 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 33 Balzac, Honor´e de, 75, 82 Illusions Perdues, 76–7, 79, 100 Bamford, Samuel, 138, 151 Barlow, Paul, 50 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 175, 181, 187, 191, 194, 216–17 Aurora Leigh, 37, 175–209, 214–15

‘Book of the Poets, The’, 193 ‘Development of Genius, The’, 192 Poems (1844), 191 ‘Vision of Fame, The’, 201 ‘Vision of Poets, A’, 201, 205 Baumgarten, Murray, 128 Beebe, Maurice, 68 Bell, Robert, 157 B´enichou, Paul, 8 Bennett, Andrew, 6, 200 Bentley’s Miscellany, 157 Berman, Marshall, 103 Besant, Walter, 218–19 Bethune, Alexander, 168 Bethune, John, 155, 168–70 Bildungsroman, 16, 30, 33, 38, 66, 75 and novels of apprenticeship, 31, 33–5, 64, 66–9, 71, 75, 89–90, 95, 169, 176–7, 187–8, 215, 219 and novels of disillusionment, 75–6, 82 and organic development, 30, 32, 65, 97–9, 172 and self-formation, 68–71, 118, 137 and ‘Werterism’, 70, 72, 90, 146 and women, 37, 77, 189–90 Blackwood’s Magazine, 156 Blanchard, Laman, 87–8, 93 Sketches from Life, 86 Bock, Carol, 174 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 164 Bourdieu, Pierre, 9, 13 Brantlinger, Patrick, 138 Braudy, Leo, 7, 17, 34, 47, 183, 185 Bront¨e, Branwell, 184 Bront¨e, Charlotte, 37, 179–81, 184–6 Jane Eyre, 175–7, 204 Brough, Robert Marston Lynch, 79, 81–2 Browne, Hablot K., 149 Browning, Robert, 188, 194, 207 Bruford, W. H., 229, 236

274

Index Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 3, 7, 14, 19, 22, 31–2, 34–5, 43, 59, 66–9, 71, 75, 77–8, 81, 84–6, 88, 90, 93, 97, 99, 121, 126, 136, 178, 182, 210–11 Alice, 69–70 England and the English, 78 Ernest Maltravers, 31, 69–71, 73–4, 76, 78, 80, 87, 89, 94–5, 121, 170, 187, 212 Lady of Lyons, The, 91 ‘Literature Considered as a Profession’, 74 Not So Bad As We Seem, 15, 123–7, 131 ‘Proposals for a Literary Union’, 74 Bulwer-Lytton, Rosina, 148 Burnett, John, 141 Burns, Robert, 37, 53, 55, 57–60, 72, 137, 139, 144–5, 151–6, 169 Byron, Lord, 3, 6, 10–11, 24, 27, 64, 70, 90, 139, 151, 185 Don Juan, 5 Carlyle, Thomas, 7, 9, 14–15, 18–19, 24, 26, 31–40, 43, 46–7, 49, 67–8, 70, 74, 79, 83–4, 90, 137–8, 142, 145–6, 151–2, 155, 161–8, 170, 175, 186, 189, 191, 194–5, 210, 212, 214, 216 and Goethe, 62–3 and portrait galleries, 50–1 and Robert Burns, 152–5, 158, 161, 168, 216 and visuality, 47, 49–53, 196 Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 41–2, 45 Chartism, 42 ‘Corn-Law Rhymes’, 139, 144, 160 ‘Essay on Authors’, 43 ‘Goethe’s Portrait’, 49–50, 75 ‘Goethe’s Works’, 62, 165 ‘Hero as King, The’, 182 ‘Hero as Man of Letters, The’, 15, 35, 37, 41, 43, 46, 52–9, 62, 65, 126, 152–3, 164, 192, 210, 212 ‘Hero as Poet, The’, 52–3, 153, 155, 192–4, 196 History of German Literature, 44–5 Lectures on the History of Literature, 46, 194 On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 26, 46–7, 49, 51–2, 54, 56, 58, 61, 83, 192 Sartor Resartus, 10, 31, 35, 44, 63–9, 71, 77, 164, 170, 215 ‘Signs of the Times’, 42 ‘Sir Walter Scott’, 60–1, 164 ‘State of German Literature, The’, 42 Wotton Reinfred, 63 Carter, Thomas Memoirs of a Working Man, 142–3, 158 Cazamian, Louis, 159 Chapman, John, 12

275

Chatterton, Thomas, 72 Chorley, Henry Fothergill, 3, 183 Authors of England, 3–4, 24 The Lion, 33 Christ, Carol T., 62 Clare, John, 136, 144 Coleridge, S.T., 8–9, 39, 43, 46 Collas, Achille, 24 collective biography, 1–2, 5, 16, 144, 210 Congreve, William, 123 Conklin, Robert, 147, 159 Cooper, Fenimore, 60 Cooper, Thomas, 36, 136–7, 140, 146–8, 151, 159, 169 Letters to Young Working Men, 148 Life of Thomas Cooper, The, 147, 160 Purgatory of Suicides, The, 138, 169 copyright reform, 8, 14, 24, 45, 124, 131, 133, 211, 218 Corbett, Mary Jean, 30, 64 Craik, G. L., 146, 148 Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties, The, 141–4 Cronin, Mark, 105–6 Cronin, Richard, 8–9 Cross, Nigel, 18, 100, 147–9, 151, 158–9 Cunningham, Alan, 154 Curll, Edmund, 123–4 Currie, James, 154 D’Israeli, Isaac, 10–11, 109, 142, 218 Dante Alighieri, 52–3 David, Deirdre, 188, 191, 195 De Quincey, Thomas, 39 de Sta¨el, Germaine Corinne, 198–9, 202 Deane, Bradley, 14 Defoe, Daniel, 123 Dickens, Charles, 4–5, 11–12, 14, 16, 36, 46, 66, 77, 81–2, 84, 86, 101, 103, 110, 121, 123–4, 135–6, 146, 185, 192, 210, 213, 217 and ‘The Dignity of Literature’, 104–9, 113, 212 and the Royal Literary Fund, 122, 124, 127 David Copperfield, 35–6, 101–2, 105–6, 110–37, 142, 145, 149, 178–9, 182, 187, 189, 191, 215 ‘Guild of Literature and Art, The’, 120–1 Prospectus of a New Endowment, 120–1, 125–6 ‘Dignity of Literature, The’, 36, 73, 102–6, 109–10, 116, 118, 122, 127, 135, 212 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 31, 33, 37–8 disenchantment, 9, 13, 34–5, 38, 41, 82, 84, 96, 124, 170, 199, 211–12, 216, 220 Disraeli, Benjamin, 31, 35, 67, 75, 81, 215 Contarini Fleming, 68–9, 71

276

Index

Dryden, John, 193 Durkheim, Emile, 126 Eagleton, Terry, 57 Edinburgh Review, 43 Edmond, Rod, 197 Edwards, Simon, 117 Eigner, Edwin, 69 Eliot, George, 31, 37 Mill on the Floss, The, 190 Elliott, Ebenezer, 139 Engel, Elliot, 70 Erickson, Lee, 42 Examiner, The, 103 fame and biography, 186 and lionism, 27–8, 53, 57–61, 170, 186, 215 and literary celebrity, 6, 17, 132–3, 211 and posterity, 5–8, 11, 22, 78, 85, 88, 97, 200–1, 211, 215 and women writers, 178, 181–4 Fichte, Johann, 55 Fielding, Copley, 167 Fielding, Henry, 83, 86, 99, 123 Fisher, Judith, 98 Flaubert, Gustave, 75 Forster, John, 66, 102–5, 107, 109–10, 121, 123, 129, 135, 212 ‘Dignity of Literature, The’, 104 Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith, 122 Life of Charles Dickens, 122 Foucault, Michel, 1 Fraiman, Susan, 37, 189–90 Fraser’s Magazine, 2–3, 12, 20–1, 47, 49, 58, 73, 75, 84–5, 89, 157, 174, 225 Froude, J.A., 31 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 34 Gagnier, Regenia, 36, 140, 188 Gallagher, Catherine, 158, 168–9, 172 Garnett, Richard, 51 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 37, 175, 186, 215 Life of Charlotte Bront¨e, The, 176, 179–85, 201 genius, 10–11, 15, 72, 91–2, 142, 192 Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar, 256 Gilfillan, George, 26–7 Gissing, George, 218–19 New Grub Street, 219–20 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 9, 26, 34–5, 40, 42, 47, 49–51, 53, 55, 58, 65–9, 72, 74, 76, 90, 95, 146, 155, 170, 189 Chaos, 75 Dichtung und Wahrheit, 68

Sorrows of Young Werther, 62, 64, 70, 75 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 31–5, 37, 39, 58, 62–71, 75, 79, 82, 90, 97, 99, 144, 170–1, 215–16 Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre, 62 Goldberg, Brian, 224 Goldsmith, Oliver, 104, 110, 122–3 Gosse, Edmund, 218 Gottlieb, Evan, 158, 161 Gramsci, Antonio, 156, 161 Grant, James, 26 Joseph Jenkins, 79–80, 95 Gray, Thomas, 165 Great Exhibition, The, 126 Guild of Literature and Art, The, 36, 46, 103, 105, 120–7, 191, 210, 217 Hack, Daniel, 14–16, 120, 127 Hackett, Nan, 140 Harrold, Charles Frederick, 65 Hazlitt, William, 2–4, 7–8, 11–12, 17, 39, 78, 211 ‘On Different Sorts of Fame’, 7 ‘Periodical Press, The’, 7 Spirit of the Age, The, 2–3 Heaton, Ellen, 197 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 34 Aesthetics, 34, 154, 207–8 Hemans, Felicia, 198 Hendriks, Rose Ellen, 181 Young Authoress, The, 176–8, 181, 187 Hirsch, Marianne, 37, 75–6, 189 Hogg, James, 136, 144 Homer, 207 Hood, Edwin Paxton, 145 Literature of Labour, The, 15–16, 135–6, 144 Horne, Richard Hengist, 191 The New Spirit of the Age, 3–4, 194 Household Words, 120–1 Howe, Susanne, 34, 77, 97, 189 Howes, Craig, 93 Howitt, William, 186 Hughes, Arthur, 197, 200 iconography and female authorship, 174–5, 195–200, 208, 216 and iconoclasm, 18–19, 24, 52–3, 165, 167, 214 and literary martyrdom, 166, 168–9 and physiognomy, 27, 155 and sculpture, 196–208 and the fragmented self, 154–5, 172 and working-class authorship, 137, 153, 155, 216 Incorporated Society of Authors, The, 217–19

Index James, Henry, 218 Jerdan, William, 12 Autobiography, 109–10, 166 Jerrold, Douglas, 86 Heads of the People, 27–8 Johnson, Samuel, 15–16, 41–2, 53, 55, 99–100, 110 Jones, John, 173 Jonson, Ben, 145 journalism, 76–7, 88, 216 and bohemia, 81–2, 94–5, 101, 114 and Grub Street, 40, 46, 87 and literary apprenticeship, 77–80 and the periodical press, 7, 40, 78, 84, 86–7, 114 Joyce, Patrick, 36, 141 Kaplan, Cora, 187, 190 Kaye, J. W., 106, 113–14 Keats, John, 203 King, Margaret, 70 Kingsley, Charles, 10, 151–2, 161 Alton Locke, 35, 37, 137–8, 147, 156–73, 187, 192, 214, 216 ‘Burns and his School’, 154–6, 160–1, 168 Two Years Ago, 171 Yeast: A Problem, 171 Kittler, Friedrich, 30 Knight, Charles, 24, 142–3, 158 Knights, Ben, 9 Landon, Laetitia, 178, 191, 198 Ethel Churchill, 123, 178 ‘History of the Lyre, A’, 201 Larson, Magali Sarfatti, 12, 117, 128 Lauster, Martina, 27 Leighton, Angela, 195, 198–9, 201 Leopardi, Giacomo, 72 Levine, George, 84 Lewes, G.H., 31, 35, 66–8, 75, 84–5, 97, 100, 210 ‘Condition of Authors in England, Germany, and France, The’, 12, 28, 73, 78, 128 Ranthorpe, 31, 71–3, 76, 80, 151 Lintot, Bernard, 123 Literary Gazette, 109 Lockhart, John, 152 Lodge, Edmund, 2–3, 26, 51 Portraits of Illustrious Personages of Great Britain, 2, 17 London Magazine, 2 Luk´acs, Georg, 75–6, 82–4 Lund, Michael, 105 Maclise, Daniel, 2, 18–19, 22, 47, 49–50, 75, 174 Madox Brown, Ford, 244 Maginn, William, 2, 84, 92

277

‘Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters, The’, 2–3, 18–19, 22, 24, 26, 47, 49, 51, 174, 214 Maidment, Brian, 160 Marcus, Sharon, 176 Martineau, Harriet, 14, 37, 61, 175, 181, 186, 211, 217 Autobiography, 28, 51, 176, 181, 186, 191 ‘Literary Lionism’, 27–8, 58–9, 186 Marx, Karl, 109 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 112 Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels Communist Manifesto, The, 102–3 Mayall, David, 141 Mayhew, Henry, 157 Meadows, Kenny, 27–8 Men of the Time, 5 Menke, Richard, 166, 250 Mermin, Dorothy, 181 Michelet, Jules, 164 Mill, John Stuart, 7, 17, 32, 125, 210 Miller, Hugh, 136 Miller, Thomas, 146–8 Godfrey Malvern, 79–82, 92, 147, 149, 151 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 47 Mitchell, W. J. T., 197 Mitford, Mary Russell, 188 Moers, Ellen, 198–9 Mole, Tom, 17 Moore, Thomas, 39 Morgenstern, Karl von, 33 Morning Chronicle, 88, 103–4, 108, 157 Murphy, Paul, 151 New Monthly Magazine, 2, 22–4, 69, 74 Newbury, Michael, 229 Nicoll, Robert, 136, 144, 155 North British Review, 106, 154 Northern Star, The, 170 O’Connor, Feargus, 170 Ousby, Ian, 83 Pease, Donald E., 226 Penny Magazine, 143 Perkin, Harold, 13, 117 Peterson, Linda, 174–6, 198, 201 Petrarch, 186 Pettitt, Claire, 8, 10, 14 Politics for the People, 167 Poovey, Mary, 13, 15, 111–12, 114 Pope, Alexander, 123–4, 154 Powell, Thomas Living Authors of England, 4 Prawer, S. S., 75

278

Index

Praz, Mario, 83 professionalization, 9–10 and domesticity, 112–14, 134, 181 and female authorship, 175–6, 178, 180, 217 and ideology, 103, 117–18, 128–9 and literary labour, 12–16, 64, 99, 106, 119, 126–7, 134–5, 180, 191 and literary manuals, 219 and the market, 13, 42, 54, 74, 91–4, 126–7, 210, 213 Punch, 27, 95 Raphael, 155, 167 Redfield, Marc, 33, 38 Reni, Guido, 165, 167 Reybaud, Louis Life of Jerome Paturot, 86 Riddell, Charlotte, 219 A Struggle for Fame, 183, 217 Riede, David, 43 Rose, Mark, 10, 14, 124, 131 Rosenblum, Dolores, 204 Rossetti, Christina, 197 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 53, 55 Royal Literary Fund, 119–20, 122, 124, 127 Ruskin, John, 197 Ruth, Jennifer, 8, 109, 115, 118 Sala, George Augustus, 101 Sand, George, 191 Sanders, Andrew, 4 Saunders, David, 14 Schiller, Friedrich, 39, 70, 99 Scott, Walter, 3–4, 16, 18–19, 22, 49, 60, 84, 135, 146 self-culture, 141–2, 144–5, 148, 155, 170 and labour, 145–6, 148, 195 and ‘organic intellectuals’, 156, 161 and working-class autobiography, 137–44, 157, 159–60, 171, 217 and working-class professional authors, 146–8 Seville, Catherine, 8, 14 Shaffner, Randolph, 34 Shakespeare, William, 52, 86, 145, 153, 155, 196 Hamlet, 90 Shelley, Percy, 10, 70, 72, 133, 151, 205 Shillingsburg, Peter, 83–4, 131 Shires, Linda, 185 Siskin, Clifford, 15, 30, 32, 38, 117–18 Smiles, Samuel Self-Help, 141–6

Smith, Alexander, 154 Smollett, Tobias, 123 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 24, 140, 142–3, 146 Somerville, Alexander, 168 Autobiography of a Working Man, The, 143, 158 Southey, Robert, 39, 184–5 Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets, The, 173 Spengemann, William, 129 Sta¨el, Madame de Corinne, 178 Stewart, Garrett, 129 Stone, Marjorie, 192–3 Strauss, David Friedrich, 159 Sudrann, Jean, 98 Swift, Jonathan, 123–4 Talfourd, Thomas, 8, 14, 45 Tennyson, Alfred, 138, 185 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 36, 40, 66–8, 74, 77, 81–2, 85–6, 89, 112, 116, 120, 124, 127, 136, 146, 149, 191, 210, 213 and Goethe, 75 and heroism, 83 ‘Brother of the Press on the History of a Literary Man, A’, 86–9 ‘Dignity of Literature, The’, 104, 108 English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, 15, 83, 108, 123 ‘Fashionable Authoress, The’, 27–8 History of Pendennis, 35, 67, 73, 75–6, 79–84, 88–115, 118–19, 121, 123, 135, 137, 170, 212, 215 Memoirs of Mr Charles J. Yellowplush, 85, 88 Newcomes, The, 109 ‘Sorrows of Werther’, 75, 91 Thom, William, 155, 168–9 Thomson, Christopher, 138 Autobiography of an Artisan, The, 143 Times, The, 89, 156 Train, 81 Trollope, Anthony, 83, 181 Autobiography, 218–19 Tuchman, Gaye, 13 Vicinus, Martha, 140, 147–8, 152 Vincent, David, 140, 142, 160 Wagner, Peter, 17 Walpole, Robert, 124 Watkins, John and Fredric Shobal

Index Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain, 1 Weber, Max, 224 Welsh, Alexander, 130 Westminster Review, 12, 27, 58, 60, 186 Wetmore Story, William, 205 Wheeler Cafarelli, Annette, 2, 16 Wheeler, Thomas Martin, 252 Wilde, Oscar, 185

279

Wordsworth, William, 3, 8, 10, 14, 16, 24, 39, 72, 135, 193, 202 Prelude, The, 30, 35, 64, 118, 187, 216 Wortley Montagu, Mary, 123 Yates, Edmund, 101 Zakreski, Patricia, 174, 188 Zonana, Joyce, 258

cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture General editor Gillian Beer University of Cambridge Titles published 1. The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill Miriam Bailin, Washington University 2. Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age edited by Donald E. Hall, California State University, Northridge 3. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art Herbert Sussman, Northeastern University, Boston 4. Byron and the Victorians Andrew Elfenbein, University of Minnesota 5. Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and the Circulation of Books edited by John O. Jordan, University of California, Santa Cruz and Robert L. Patten, Rice University, Houston 6. Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex 7. Charlotte Bront¨e and Victorian Psychology Sally Shuttleworth, University of Sheffield 8. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Si`ecle Kelly Hurley, University of Colorado at Boulder 9. Rereading Walter Pater William F. Shuter, Eastern Michigan University 10. Remaking Queen Victoria edited by Margaret Homans, Yale University

and Adrienne Munich, State University of New York, Stony Brook 11. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels Pamela K. Gilbert, University of Florida 12. Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature Alison Byerly, Middlebury College, Vermont 13. Literary Culture and the Pacific Vanessa Smith, University of Sydney 14. Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel Women, Work and Home Monica F. Cohen 15. Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation Suzanne Keen, Washington and Lee University, Virginia 16. Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth Gail Marshall, University of Leeds 17. Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origin Carolyn Dever, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee 18. Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy Sophie Gilmartin, Royal Holloway, University of London 19. Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre Deborah Vlock 20. After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance John Glavin, Georgetown University, Washington DC 21. Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question edited by Nicola Diane Thompson, Kingston University, London

22. Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry Matthew Campbell, University of Sheffield 23. Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War Paula M. Krebs, Wheaton College, Massachusetts 24. Ruskin’s God Michael Wheeler, University of Southampton 25. Dickens and the Daughter of the House Hilary M. Schor, University of Southern California 26. Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science Ronald R. Thomas, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut 27. Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology Jan-Melissa Schramm, Trinity Hall, Cambridge 28. Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World Elaine Freedgood, University of Pennsylvania 29. Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture Lucy Hartley, University of Southampton 30. The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study Thad Logan, Rice University, Houston 31. Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840–1940 Dennis Denisoff, Ryerson University, Toronto 32. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 Pamela Thurschwell, University College London 33. Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature Nicola Bown, Birkbeck, University of London 34. George Eliot and the British Empire Nancy Henry, The State University of New York, Binghamton 35. Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture Cynthia Scheinberg, Mills College, California

36. Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body Anna Krugovoy Silver, Mercer University, Georgia 37. Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust Ann Gaylin, Yale University 38. Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 Anna Johnston, University of Tasmania 39. London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 Matt Cook, Keele University 40. Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland Gordon Bigelow, Rhodes College, Tennessee 41. Gender and the Victorian Periodical Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck, University of London Judith Johnston and Stephanie Green, University of Western Australia 42. The Victorian Supernatural edited by Nicola Bown, Birkbeck College, London Carolyn Burdett, London Metropolitan University and Pamela Thurschwell, University College London 43. The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination Gautam Chakravarty, University of Delhi 44. The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People Ian Haywood, Roehampton University of Surrey 45. Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature Geoffrey Cantor, University of Leeds Gowan Dawson, University of Leicester Graeme Gooday, University of Leeds Richard Noakes, University of Cambridge Sally Shuttleworth, University of Sheffield and Jonathan R. Topham, University of Leeds 46. Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain from Mary Shelley to George Eliot Janis McLarren Caldwell, Wake Forest University

47. The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf edited by Christine Alexander, University of New South Wales and Juliet McMaster, University of Alberta 48. From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction Gail Turley Houston, University of New Mexico 49. Voice and the Victorian Storyteller Ivan Kreilkamp, University of Indiana 50. Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture Jonathan Smith, University of Michigan-Dearborn 51. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture Patrick R. O’Malley, Georgetown University 52. Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain Simon Dentith, University of Gloucestershire 53. Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal Helena Michie, Rice University 54. The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture Nadia Valman, University of Southampton 55. Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature Julia Wright, Dalhousie University 56. Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination Sally Ledger, Birkbeck, University of London 57. Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability Gowan Dawson, University of Leicester 58. ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Si`ecle Marion Thain, University of Birmingham 59. Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Writing David Amigoni, Keele University

60. Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction Daniel A. Novak, Lousiana State University 61. Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870 Tim Watson, University of Miami 62. The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History Michael Sanders, University of Manchester 63. Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Jane Austen to the New Woman Cheryl Wilson, Indiana University 64. Shakespeare and Victorian Women Gail Marshall, Oxford Brookes University 65. The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood Valerie Sanders, University of Hull 66. Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages, and South America Cannon Schmitt, University of Toronto 67. From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction Amanpal Garcha, Ohio State University 68. The Crimean War and the British Imagination Stefanie Markovits, Yale University 69. Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction Jill L. Matus, University of Toronto 70. Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s Nicholas Daly, University College Dublin 71. Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science Srdjan Smaji´c, Furman University 72. Satire in an Age of Realism Aaron Matz, Scripps College, California 73. Thinking About Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing Adela Pinch, University of Michigan

74. Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination Katherine Byrne, University of Ulster, Coleraine 75. Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World Tanya Agathocleous, Hunter College, City University of New York 76. Women, Literature, and the English Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870 Judith W. Page, University of Florida Elise L. Smith, Millsaps College, Mississippi 77. Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society Sue Zemka, University of Colorado 78. Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century Anne Stiles, Washington State University 79. Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain Janice Carlisle, Yale University 80. Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative Jan-Melissa Schramm, University of Cambridge 81. The Silver Fork Novel: Fashionable Fiction in the Age of Reform Edward Copeland, Pomona College, California 82. Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece Iain Ross, Colchester Royal Grammar School 83. The Poetry of Victorian Scientists Daniel Brown, University of Southampton 84. Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel Anne DeWitt, Princeton Writing Program 85. China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined Ross G. Forman, University of Warwick

86. Dickens’s Style Daniel Tyler, University of Oxford 87. The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession Richard Salmon, University of Leeds